Publishing

Bookmarks

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Today I received a gift that any booklover would delight in. Sara, a woman in my church who is quite accomplished in woodburning mentioned that she wanted to give us some bookmarks. This Sunday she brought them and I thought they were so nice, I thought I’d share them with you by way of a post on bookmarks.

Sara's Bookmarks

Sara’s Bookmarks

One of the nice things about e-readers is that they keep your place for you, and even allow you to electronically “bookmark” places you want to go back to. I’m glad for this since it would have been far more tedious to electronically flip through pages from the beginning to get back to the place I last read–especially when I fall asleep reading my Kindle and it turns itself off!

But I still read lots of old fashion print books, and usually have multiple books going at one time. Some way of keeping track of where I’ve left off reading is crucial–my memory is not always that good. Folding over the corner, or dog-earing is one way to do this. But it is tough on the pages, makes the book look messy, and isn’t great if you give or re-sell the book. I think dog ears belong on dogs!

You can just leave the book open face down at your page. Hard on the spine and those you live with might not like you leaving books lying around and will close the book and put it away. Place lost. And it especially doesn’t work well if you carry your books around.

Some other gift bookmarks

Some other gift bookmarks

Sometimes I’ve used the flaps of dust jackets on books that have them. That works well at the beginning and end of the book, not so well in the middle and takes the nice clean crease out of the dust jacket.

So most of the time I’m left with the humble or not so humble bookmark. Sometimes we’ve received some very nice ones (and if you can’t think of a book your bibliophile friend doesn’t have, then a bookmark is a good alternative gift).

From the Wikipedia article “Bookmark” it seems we’ve had bookmarks nearly as long as we’ve had printed books. Early printed books were rare and bookmarks, either a ribbon bound into the book or a parchment strip on the edge of the folio. Better made books often still come with a ribbon bound into them for marking your place, which I always like because the ribbon doesn’t fall out–although I once had a ribbon ripped out of a Bible by a friend’s child. The first detached bookmarks seem to have been made in the 1850s and with this came a new market in collectibles.

A bookmark sampler

A bookmark sampler

As you can see, bookmarks can be made out of a number of materials from wood, to leather, to cloth to metal to plastic. Most of the ones I use are made of cardboard. Bookstores are a great source of these but lots of other people from publishers to organizations to holiday cards use bookmarks to publicize themselves or give one a memento of the occasion. If I use these, I usually end up either losing them or eventually throwing them away because the ends tend to get curled up and bookmark itself worn out from repeated use. Usually I stretch a bookmark over ten or more books though.

What are your bookmark stories? Do you have bookmarks that are special to you? How do you like to mark your place in books? And what bookstore, in your experience gives away the best bookmarks?

Waterfall Press: Amazon’s Venture into Religious Publishing

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Just saw this story in Publisher’s Weekly daily email:  Amazon Publishing Launches Christian Imprint.  According to the story, they will publish both fiction and non-fiction under the “Waterfall Press” imprint. It sounds like some of their publishing will be in collaboration with Christianity Today.  This, and the selection of Tammy Faxel, who has been associated with Tyndale House and Oasis Audio, to give editorial oversight suggest an evangelical editorial bent for this imprint.

Waterfall Press

A thought and a couple questions:

The thought: creating this imprint marks a recognition by the behemoth of Amazon that evangelical publishing is a significant market segment. Joining forces with Christianity Today gives them instant “street cred” in a broad segment of the evangelical community.

One question: what will this mean for other evangelical publishers, particular those not backed by larger corporate resources (as is the case for example of Zondervan with Harper)?

The other question: given Amazon’s financial heft, what will be the long-term editorial shape and theological bent of this imprint?

What do others think about Amazon’s movement into this new venture in the world of Christian publishing?

Publishing Trends: Platform and Publishing

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We talked yesterday about the role of editors in acquiring good writing and identifying writers with talent. Actually, according to a recent blog on Platform and Publishing by Scot McKnight, at least in the Christian publishing world, it is increasingly not the quality of your writing and your ideas, but how many people “follow” you on Twitter, Facebook, your blog and the like, as well as how many people go to your church if you are a pastor.

I should mention that this blog is not an effort to enhance my “platform”. If it was, I’ve got a long, long way to go. However it is interesting that one source from which I’ve received some free e-galleys of new books encourages you to create a profile with much the same criteria–your blog, numbers of friends on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. I actually get this. You don’t want to give stuff away unless it will actually be reviewed and the reviews will be seen by a reasonable number of people with similar interests to the reviewer.

The problem with this platform thing in self-publishing is that the people who self-promote well are probably not the same people who produce the great works. In fact, I wonder if they might be more or less mutually exclusive categories. It would seem to me that many great writers are those who really give themselves to their craft, and building platform is a distraction of time and energy from what they are truly great at. Consequently, a book proposal from such a writer without platform may never get looked at.

The reality behind this is that book promotion is no longer the work of publishers by and large but by authors and those who will post reviews for them on Amazon. By the way, I don’t review on Amazon for this reason. I guess I would prefer to remain “independent”, write for my friends and those who are interested, and not do Amazon’s or the publisher’s work.

At the same time, the web and social media do provide a way that good authors can find readers. It appears that part of the trick is not so much building your own platform but rather identifying online bloggers and reviewers who have a platform of followers for the genre in which you write. This Huff Post article on The Shifting Landscape of Book Reviews chronicles the world of getting your book reviewed if you are an Indie writer. Now it seems, the challenge may be getting publishers to shift from looking at author “platforms” to looking at the reviewer response to their books. Of course, that presupposes that most new authors will publish independently and hope to get recognized.

That, I suspect is still a fairly perilous enterprise, but then I guess it always has been…

Publishing Trends: The Demise of Editing

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I’ve been struck of late with the lack of good editing in some of the newer books I’ve read. Marjorie Braman’s post on What Ever Happened to Book Editors opened my eyes to what I think is a disturbing trend–that editors in publishing houses are having to increasingly “double-down” as acquisition agents and publicists, and editing is something done on the side.

256px-Maxwell_Perkins_NYWTS

Braman highlights the work of Maxwell Perkins, who was the editor for Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  I discovered that he was also responsible for the publication of Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, one of my all time favorite works. What struck me as I read about Perkins (at least in Wikipedia), was that a critical part of his work with Scribners was acquisition. But it also seems that he played a huge editorial role with his authors, particular Thomas Wolfe, cutting 90,000 words out of Look Homeward, Angel.

It seems that part of Perkins genius was identifying skilled writing and nursing it along. This recognizes a critical truth–editors cannot make a mediocre work great. They can take good to great writers and make them better and part of the skill of a good editor must be the ability to recognize great writing “in the raw.”

One wonders where this will happen in the changing publishing world, particularly with the rise of self- and independent publishing. Publishers in the past served as a clearing house whose survival depended on editors who could identify writers. Braman argues that this might better happen these days with freelance editors working with the publishers. I wonder.

Jim Hoover

Jim Hoover

I learned recently of the retirement of Jim Hoover as an editor at InterVarsity Press, the publishing house associated with the organization I work for.  Once again, I learned that Jim was responsible for the acquisition of works by authors like Eugene Peterson (A Long Obedience in the Same Direction) and editing works by Richard Lovelace, James Sire, Ben Witherington III, and more. His last project was editing the Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity. His work was recently featured in a blog by fellow editor, Andy LePeau. While the books he edited served a far more limited audience than those edited by Perkins, they are marked as works of clarity and excellent, readable scholarship. Those whose books he worked on would describe him as both “careful” and “gracious”.

If the place of editors like Hoover and Perkins is marginalized in the publishing industry, I wonder whether the quality of books we will see in this century will measure up to the last (By the way, I don’t see this happening at InterVarsity Press!). And this is at a time when reading habits are changing and the public is turning to other forms of media.

What concerns me is the issue of quality. In an upcoming post, I will explore the issue of “platform” and how this is a substitute for quality (and no doubt, one of the things that de-values good editing).

I’d love to hear what my friends who write or publish think of all this. My vantage point is simply that of the humble, but necessary, reader.

TMI?

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TMI usually refers to the phenomenon of someone sharing far more of the intimate details of one’s love life (or child’s potty training!) than the listener wants to hear. A book I’m currently reading makes me wish there was a way I could say to a writer, “TMI!” or “give me the condensed version”. Maybe there will be a way to do that some day with digital books.

The book I’m reading explores fifty years of British history concerning their relationship with the rest of Europe through the eras of successive prime ministers. On the one hand, I can see the value of a detailed record of all the negotiations and political intrigue of various leaders, particularly because this is based upon first-person interviews. On the other hand, the author spends 500+ pages ringing the changes on a very simple theme–the approach-avoidance conflict Great Britain has with the rest of Europe.

So, the question is, how much is too much? I personally find myself getting lost at times in the parade of background political figures that troop through the pages and all their intrigues and interactions. For me, a survey of a couple hundred pages would have been sufficient–I’m not sure I will walk away any more enlightened for all the extra material. Yet I am sure there are others who study such things in greater depth (although the book is not an ‘academic’ work) who would probably find all this fascinating.

So these leaves me wondering how authors, editors, and publishers decide this question with a given book. How do you say to an author that something needs paring down? And how do you make those judgments? Is it purely financial factors of cost and projected sales? I’ve not worked in the publishing world but would love to hear from those who know more of this how such things get decided.

Where Will All The Print Books Go?

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The demise of print books came up in an after hours discussion with colleagues last night. What I sometimes wonder is where will all those books, much less National Geographics go? I suppose they could go into landfills. Print books are biodegradable objects, after all, apart from plastic coatings sometimes used on covers. I suspect some do end up there.

For now, lots either reside on shelves collecting dust and slowly yellowing and becoming more brittle, or they re-circulate via garage sales, donations to various second hand shops or sales to used book stores. The last tends to be where a number of the books I don’t want to keep go–that or donations to local library book sales.

But all of this assumes a healthy market of print book readers. What will happen when these go away? Where will all the print books go when no one is buying (or wants, even for free) print books. Will they all go to landfills or incinerators? Or will they go the way of vinyl LPs–surviving because of the small dedicated cadre of people who still love the feel, look, and even smell of a print book. Maybe there will even be bibliophiles who consider the experience of a print book superior and there may even be niche print publishers who release “virgin” print books on high quality papers and bindings. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in twenty years a new generation of people rediscover print books and become “analogue” readers?

Stranger things have happened…