So Misguided

New Think for Old Publishers panel at SXSW drew a lot of frustration from the crowd of book lovers and supporters.

The official description of the session was:

This is not a discussion of whether ebooks are killing treebooks, or whether it’s possible to get cozy with an Amazon Kindle. It’s about how participatory culture and the online world interact with good olde book publishing.Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, Deborah Schultz, and fellow panelists will share with the audience a variety of perspectives on what’s going right and what’s going wrong in publishing, assess success of recent forays into marketing digitally, digital publishing, and what books and blogs have to gain from one another. Penguin Group (USA), which houses some 40 plus imprints and publishes an extremely broad variety of physical and digital products everything from William Gibson’s first ebook in the 90’s to Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food to Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels (the source for HBO’s True Blood) is deeply involved in exploring ways that old and new media might better collaborate. Audience members are invited to speak up about what they think book publishers could/should be doing to better provide relevant information and content to blogs, websites, and online communities. Come tell old media what you want and how you want it.

Clay Shirky ITP
John Fagan   Mktg Dir,  Penguin Group (USA)
Deborah Schultz   Founder/Chief Catalyst,  deborahschultz.com
Peter Miller   Dir of Publicity,  Bloomsbury USA
Ivan Held   Pres GP Putnam’s Sons,  Penguin Group (USA)

They certainly told publishers what they think. The summation was “you suck at this is the biggest way possible.”

I think it’s unfair to attack the folks on that panel but as representatives of the industry they do have to go back to their houses and understand that they need to convey, not that bloggers are an unruly bunch, but that publishers need to get off their asses and get involved with social media. Enough is enough.

BookSquare says
If you’re going to hold a session called “New Think for Old Publishers”, you gotta come with some new thinking. Either that or tell the audience that it’s a research session…and the audience is supposed to bring the new thinking. Good idea, needed better execution. Nobody read the panel description to mean “we want the audience to tell us what we’re doing wrong and how we can fix it”.

...

The publishing people on stage said, essentially, tell us what we’re doing wrong and how we can fix it. You have 300 people who give up an hour of their lives to hear the cool things the traditional publishing business is doing…and you can ask them to consult on your business?

Watch a video of the panel here.

Other links to conversation about this panel:
Medialoper has a fairly neutral assessment of what unfolded.

Twitter stream of comments on this panel #sxswbp

Monique’s summary
What went wrong is this:
* Publishers have not listened to the crowd for a long time.
* The crowd is restless.
* Publishers wring their hands about the web.
* The crowd offers options publishers don’t like.
* Publishers weep into their hands.
* The crowd wants to help and offers other suggestions.
* Publishers act like deer in headlights.
* The crowd plows down publishers and reinvents the industry without them.

What this panel really came down to is that the wisdom of the crowds is not being tapped. The crowd is now sick and tired of trying to help people who won’t help themselves.

Hold me to this: I’m going to organize a panel in Vancouver. We’re going to create a model for publishing and marketing books. We’re going to move forward as an industry. Leaders will be identified. Roles will be assigned. If you’re not open to totally change everything you’re doing, then you are not ready for this revolution. Don’t come.

Who’s in?

UPDATES

Peter Miller Glibness. “Do As I Say, Not As I Do: Tips from a panelist who barely survived” in Publishers Weekly.
Read the article.

Michael Tamblyn of BookNet Canada on 6 Things That Revolutionize Publishing

Posted by Monique at 10:42 AM. Filed under: Book Publisher • AMACOM • Annick Press • Arsenal Pulp Press • Bantam • Bloomsbury • Chronicle Books • Coteau Books • Douglas & McIntyre • Drawn & Quarterly • ECW Press • Egmont • Frontenac House • Grove Press • Harcourt Books • Harper Collins Canada • House of Anansi • McClelland & Stewart • Penguin Canada • Raincoast Books • Random House Canada • Scribner • Seven Stories • Simon & Schuster • Turnstone Press • Vintage Canada • Books • Marketing • News • Technology •

(23) Comments • Permalink

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky was recommended to me in 2006 when the hardcover was released. The book was on all the major bestseller lists. It was picked up by countless bookclubs. It was a Heather’s Pick at Indigo. For these very reasons, I avoided reading it.

Books to me are not like movies. I don’t want to read what everyone else is reading. I do like bestsellers, but I like to read them before they become bestsellers. That’s why I love getting advance review copies from publishers. I like to determine before the book hits the market whether it’s great or not. Stuck up, I know.

But I also like to read books that are never going to make a bestseller list but should. The small, quiet books that find a place in the market because someone recognized their greatness.

Suite Francaise was one of those books that I missed reading at an early stage, and once it became big, I wanted to wait until the hype died down.

In many ways, I think Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky became such a hit because of the back story.

When I teach online book marketing, I always talk about publishers and booksellers being storytellers. We have to go beyond the book. The book itself is not the product we’re selling. We’re selling entertainment, education, storytelling.

Here’s the story.

Irene Nemirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903. In 1918, her family fled the Russian Revolution and ended up in France, where she later became a bestselling novelist. When Germans occupied France in 1940, Irene was in the precarious position of being Jewish and Russian. It did not matter that her children were born in France, that they were baptized as Catholic, that Irene had no sentiments towards her Jewish heritage or the Bolshevics. No matter. She was arrested on 13 July 1942, deported to Auschwitz and sent to the gas chamber.

What remained of Irene’s last novel was carried across France and eventually to North America by her two surviving daughters. What they thought was the personal diary of their mother ended up being the notations for a novel in 5 parts.

Irene intended for the novel to be composed much like a piece of music, hence the name Suite Francaise. She wanted the experience of reading about the occupation of France to be like music “when you sometimes hear the whole orchestra, sometimes just the violin.”

Irene was writing about the history of the world, in particular the relationship between charity and greed that befalls even the best of us in dire times. The 2 parts of the novel that exist portray the mass exodus of refugees from Paris. The mass invasion of France by the German army, and the tyranny that followed. That tyranny was, for the most part in the novel, amongst the French. The betrayals in the war that interest Irene are of the government to the people, the army officers to the soldiers, the greedy boss to the impoverished servant, the wealthy landowner to the tenant farmer, the mother-in-law to the daughter-in-law, the pious neighbour to the anti-German neighbour.

Suite Francaise is the beginnings of a masterpiece. It is unfinished. There are chapters that Irene, no doubt, would have continued to modify, and there are 3 sections missing. What makes it a masterpiece are the appendices that fill in the missing sections, that show the parallels in the novel to Irene’s life, and that give us an insight into Irene as a character in this great epic novel.

The appendices by far are what make this book feel whole.

I will likely read Suite Francaise again in a couple of years. It’s almost too much to think about after only one reading.

Posted by Monique at 10:10 AM. Filed under: Book Publisher • Vintage Canada • Book Reviews • Books • News •

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The Good Husband of Zebra Drive by Alexandre McCall Smith is book 8 in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series.

This is a series I particularly love. The characters are incredibly charming, the adventures and mysteries are secondary to the human-behaviour stories being told, and at the end of a long day I can depend on Mma Ramotswe to give me a good laugh.

These are just fun, well-written books.

Often with a series there is the risk of the author running out of steam or of the plots losing their shine, not so with this series. Thank you Alexandre McCall Smith.

Posted by Monique at 10:03 PM. Filed under: Book Publisher • Random House Canada • Vintage Canada • Book Reviews •

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