This is now towering above my head every day at the office.
A pink tinsel tree with an Obama portrait print-out top. I should point out that much of it, including the smiling President-Elect looming 10 feet over our desks, is pretty accidental.
The back story: my boss has used this tree in years past, but her nephew told her, being the 5-year-old boy he is, that she’d better have a green tree this year.
Add a pink feather boa, a perpetually-present pink sweater thing, and our Secret Santa gifts, and poof! The most awesome, ridiculous office tree in New York. Well, maybe I shouldn’t make the latter claim. Still, it’s visible up and down the office, and people stop by to stare.
Lawrence Osbornwrites for Forbes.com on the impending “death” of publishing (supposedly, it’s been dying for the last 20 years). According to an editor, “Very little of the recent cutbacks and consolidation are the product of the economic meltdown. They are the result of several years of bad decisions.”
The decisions (according to the industry itself):
a failure to acquire the kind of franchise authors now topping the bestseller lists
a lack of editorial insight and supervision (resulting in longer, sloppier books that bore readers stupid)
extravagant author advances
agents all too happy to sacrifice the long-term interest of authors for short-term profit
incompetent management at the top
a lack of books that have commercial impact
Osborn questions (rightly) whether this blockbuster mentality can really sustain an industry which produces, as he puts it, “intimate, unpredictable agents of delicious rebellion.” His argument hovers above the oft-invoked disparagement of a vapid consumer culture, especially because this time, it’s true. Critics may lament our shortened attention spans, and new media competing for attention previously held by books. But if you’re like Osborn (and like me), you read both. His only fear is that publishing house cutbacks (rather than drilling deeper into strengths) will strangle the whole enterprise.
Something that Osborn doesn’t touch on, but that I suspect, is that as for a new generation with access to previously obscure information and communities, mass-market books just won’t do. I’m curious about what kinds of niche books will thrive in the near future.
A group of experts, picked to deal within their specific area of expertise
A group of smart people, working on deals with which they are unfamiliar, bombarded with data, and forced to rely on others to succeed
According to Cambridge author A. Alexandra Michel, the second model consistently performs better, and the hard proof can be seen in the recent financial crisis. She’s followed two groups of new bankers in her new book, Bullish on Uncertainty, and has seen these forces at work. Here’s a cool clip of some of her ideas.
Wisconsin Public Radio produces some of the best programming in the country, and I was delighted to hear from producer Jim Packard (also of Whad’ Ya Know? announcer fame) that Paul Kinzer would be a guest on Conversations with Larry Meiller.
Kinzer is a Wisconsin astronomer and educator; author of Stargazing Basics, one of the most elegantly useful introductions to buying equipment and stargazing we’ve seen. That’s why we published it!
Ruth Wajnryb writes on something that concerns us all in the publishing world: book titles. We don’t agonize and argue over them for nothing: her essay from You Know What I Mean? shows the length to which titles influence her and the neighborhood around her favorite local bookstore. A linguist as well as a columnist, Ruth is always happy to dissect the words at work in a good title.
My local second-hand bookstore, Books On Bronte (referring to the Sydney suburb not the writers), takes full advantage of its large front window. A rapid turnaround of titles makes for pleasant gazing on my morning or evening walks with the dog. Indeed, she has learned to stop and sit patiently while I peer at the display. A recent example – there one morning, gone that evening – was How to Succeed in Business Without a Penis. The owner of the bookstore told me later that it was in the window barely a nanosecond before it was spied and snapped up.
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