Not at Random: Fatcat Press

Prospective authors should be aware that there are numerous tools that will help them locate everything from agents to illustrators, very often in the comfort of their own public library, or sometimes in the reference section of college or university libraries nearby (often schools will let you make some use of their reference facilities even if they won't let you check items out).

One of the all-time great resources for investigating aspects of the publishing industry is the reference work called Literary Market Place. If you have some bucks you can buy your own full subscription for US$399. If that's too steep, you can get a week's access for $19.95, or in many, many locations you can get free access through your library. Also, the web interface listed above offers free access (basic name/password registration required) to the Small Press section of the work, which is probably enough right there for many new authors.

There are US and "international" versions of LMP. They include information on publishers, translators, illustrators, book packagers, you name it. The Publishers section is divided in various ways -- by region, by topic, format, etc. Contact information is provided, as well as details on the kinds of works they are looking for, how to approach them (via agent or not), etc.

If you're thinking of publishing a work, or working with a new author, I would strongly suggest starting with LMP before investing money (sometimes very serious money) with online agencies that promise to submit your work to numerous presses. There may be occasions to buy information on possible presses from an author service, but see how far you can go on your own first.

From time to time I hear prospective authors venting about being rejected by a publisher, or more than one publisher. And sometimes prospective authors express puzzlement that their work was rejected while someone else's has succeeded. Here are some of the reasons why publishers pick one work over another. This is not an exhaustive list, and there's some variation according to the kind of work in question. But it should be seen as a starting point for people who are dissecting their work's success or lack of same.

1. The publisher believes the author's work will either break even or make some money. Publishers are, after all, in the business of staying in business. It's crass, depressing, and about fifty other things to think that money runs the publishing business but, well, it does. Same for pizzerias, car washes, drug companies, farms.

2. The publisher believes money can be made because, drumroll please: the work's topic is salable. Often this means the work is unique, always it means the house feels the work can be marketed. The work has an audience, and an audience that can be reached through sane marketing efforts.

3. The proposed manuscript arrives in legible condition. Publishers, Fatcat Press included, normally tell prospective authors how to format and submit their manuscript. Why authors don't follow these instructions is one of the great mysteries of publishing. People at publishing houses read all day long. Sending a work in a hard-to-read or inappropriate condition is just asking for trouble. Don't give your target publisher a reason to rocket the ms. back at you.

4. The manuscript is well written. The editing process costs money, quite a lot of money actually. The less money a publisher has to spend either reorganizing a work top to toe, or switching nouns used as adjectives back to nouns, the sooner the book will begin to make money for author and publisher. Successful authors have acquainted themselves with English fundamentals: they have explored Strunk & White, read widely in English lit to experience many styles and ideas, or got their hands on a copy of Fowler's Modern English Usage or other such style guides.

5. The manuscript is well written. There are authors who have successfully written in dialect, or idiosyncratic fashion, or other such challenging styles. These authors were also able to convince their publisher(s) that they had mastered the fundamentals before having people talk like Yoda.

6. The manuscript is well written. The authors have something to say. If they're writing in an established genre, then they're probably using unusual or compelling characters.

7. This one is tricky. Publishers want feel comfortable that the author will be reasonably flexible about the work, including probably its title and possibly its content, in order to create the work that is both true to the author's vision and also comprehensible by and attractive to a market. Once I overheard two potters discussing the work of two colleagues. One colleague liked to make 4-foot-tall bronze-colored vases that were wonderfully creative and abstract. They must have weighed about 80 pounds apiece, and cost hundreds of dollars. The second colleague made a line of fairly inexpensive plates and teapots in standard colors with standard decoration. The two potters were lamenting that the gigantic bronze vases didn't sell while the less creative pots/plates did. Well, probably most of us can use a spare plate or teapot, whereas fewer of us have room for an 80-pound bronze-painted vase the size of a third-grader.

Authors should not sell the farm in order to get published, but a lively spirit of cooperation in a joint enterprise is very welcome. It might help authors to think of themselves as startup companies, and the publishers as the providers of venture capital. In such a relationship nobody goes anywhere except together.

8. The author sent his/her manuscript to a likely publishing house. Publishers specialize. Some of them specialize a lot. The press at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology does not publish romance novels. Harlequin does not publish Canadian history. Successful authors have either read shelves at bookstores or libraries, or looked at Literary Market Place, or done other such market research before sending their work out.

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Most of this seems relatively obvious, but each day's tide of mail has examples of things that might have been saved with some judicious research and attention on the part of the author. In most cases it's the author who makes the first move, not the publisher, so it might as well be a good move.

When the world knows your mailing address, some pretty interesting stuff crawls into the mailbox. A while back it was the promotional Stephen King hat. Last week it was a demo CD from a couple of former English majors at Providence College, who go by the name of Moes Haven.

We're guessing they've mistaken us for British music company Fat Cat Records, which we're not, of course. Not too clear how we'd make an ebook out of a music cd, at least not with current technology.

However, we're all for giving a leg up to struggling artists in another genre, so here you go, boys. We've listened to their new CD Explorations in Madness through our Ramones-inclined speakers, and hey, they're pretty good. So head on out, everyone, and pick yourselves up a copy.

How often do you get to support musicians who know who James Boswell was, after all?

Publishers Weekly has a few more details about the Digital Textbooks project in their 8 August issue. MBS Textbook Exchange turns out to be owned by Len Riggio, chair of Barnes & Noble -- so the project contains an interesting synergy between trade publishing and textbook publishing.

Some 275 titles are involved, from 5 publishers, including Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill, and Thomson. Each bookstore will have perhaps 25 titles in their inventory.

Publishers Weekly's report says the titles will remain available on a student's computer for the average length of a college course, about 4 months. This is the shortest estimate given in any of the news accounts of this project. If this outside limit is correct, students had better make sure they don't need an incomplete in any class with a digital text.

These experimental texts are intended to be sold at roughly 33% off list price, a larger discount than the more typical 25% on textbooks.

MBS says a larger digital text program will roll out in January, after they have received feedback from students on the beta.

Textbooks are being delivered in PDF format. While the audio read-aloud functionality will be enabled, PDFs are not currently usable in iPods. No doubt future versions of the project will have books that can be heard on iPods -- which will bring us nicely back to the oral culture that gave rise to Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

The Intercosmos Media Group, in downtown New Orleans, is struggling to stay live. They host nearly a million websites, ranging from the small to the large, such as online backup.

Their sysadmin has a running journal on current events in NO. Please take a look.

Like much information out of the area Katrina hit, it's both heartbreaking and encouraging.

Digital textbooks have arrived. MBS Textbook Exchange is the project leader; they've signed 10 schools to a pilot program. Their spokesperson says: "We're the first program of its kind to bring multiple publishers to physical bookstores to sell electronic products."

Well, for now, maybe: requiring wired students to schlep to a physical location to pick up a virtual product sounds like a temporary fix.

One of the participating schools is Bowling Green State University

Kids log in, provide typical information and are invited to participate in a study, then are passed on to a screen with the important stuff.

To activate a book, students must have in hand a Digital Textbook Card (from the bookstore), a bookstore receipt with the activation code, a high-speed connection to download what seems to be a file in pdf format, and a computer no earlier than Win98 for PC folks and Mac 10.2.8 or above. Linux is also supported.

Students are also warned that textbooks are not returnable, texts can only be used on the computer to which they are downloaded, and texts are likely to be valid for 12 months and then some, depending on the choices of their publisher. Not clear when you find out how long your book is good for.

So -- download to a laptop and hope it isn't stolen? Download to a desktop and have to read in that one place all semester (hope your roommate isn't a troll)?

File size may range from 5MB to as much as 100MB. Apparently some books work with Adobe's Read-Out-Loud, but the site warns that if your MP3 player isn't compatible with that software, you're stuck. So much for the iPod crowd...

Digital books can't be sold back, and -- wow -- if you drop the class, you can't return the book.

Schools participating, besides Bowling Green: the universities of West Virginia, Oregon, and Utah, Portland Community College, Georgetown College, Princeton, California State University-Fullerton, Morehead State University, and Louisiana State University.

An interesting first start: some bad, some good.

Embedded in a NYT article by Randall Stross on the hostile reaction by Google's CEO Eric Schmidt to being investigated by a CNET reporter using Google's own search engine is quite a bit on Google's plan to digitize the University of Michigan's library.

On one point the anxiety of Peter Givler (director of the AAUP) is somewhat misplaced: he unhappily anticipates a day when a single copy of a monograph would be shared electronically by a consortium of research libraries. That day, much dreaded by university presses in the late 1990s, is in a manner of speaking already here: there are already library consortia that buy one copy of a book and share it, when ten years or so earlier they would have each bought their own copies.

Just for instance, take a look at OhioLINK. A blog entry there from three days ago announces the acquisition of eleven new research titles in electronic format, bringing the total number of such titles available to 440.

Here's a list of the more than 80 schools that belong to OhioLINK (sorry, long list):

* Antioch College
* Ashland University
* Athenaeum of Ohio
* Baldwin-Wallace College
* Belmont Technical College
* Bluffton University
* Bowling Green State University
* Capital University
* Case Western Reserve University
* Cedarville University
* Center for Research Libraries
* Central State University
* Cincinnati Christian University
* Cincinnati State Technical and Community College
* Clark State Community College
* Cleveland Clinic
* Cleveland State University
* College of Mount Saint Joseph
* College of Wooster
* Columbus College of Art and Design
* Columbus State Community College
* Consort Libraries
* Cuyahoga Community College
* Defiance College
* Denison University
* Edison Community College
* Franciscan University of Steubenville
* Franklin University
* Heidelberg College
* Hiram College
* Hocking College
* Jefferson Community College
* John Carroll University
* Kent State University
* Kenyon College
* Lakeland Community College
* Lorain County Community College
* Lourdes College
* Malone College
* Marietta College
* Medical University of Ohio
* Mercy College
* Miami University
* Mount Carmel College of Nursing
* Mount Union College
* Mount Vernon Nazarene University
* Muskingum College
* Myers University
* Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine
* Northwest State Community College
* Notre Dame College of Ohio
* OPAL Libraries
* Oberlin College
* Ohio Dominican University
* Ohio Northern University
* Ohio State University
* Ohio University
* Ohio Wesleyan University
* Otterbein College
* Owens Community College
* Rio Grande Community College
* Shawnee State University
* Sinclair Community College
* Southern State Community College
* State Library of Ohio
* Terra Community College
* Tiffin University
* University of Akron
* University of Cincinnati
* University of Dayton
* University of Findlay
* University of Toledo
* Urbana University
* Ursuline College
* Walsh University
* Washington State Community College
* Wilberforce University
* Wilmington College
* Wittenberg University
* Wright State University
* Xavier University
* Youngstown State University

Now, lots of these are very small, and many have quite modest endowments, so university presses are unlikely to have been able to sell copies of a book or a database to every single library involved. Yet, this consortium -- this kind of consortium -- clearly is enabling universities to save bales of cash by making joint purchases. Unfortunately for the university presses, those bales of cash represent huge swinging cuts in the presses' sales revenue.

So the question is not so much what will the presses do if the camel gets is nose in the tent. The question would better be what shall we feed the camel standing in front of us, to keep it from devouring our porridge, sitting in our chair, and sleeping in our bed. However, while Goldilocks ran away after trying her experiment, the consortial camel is clearly here to stay. A better step would be to get out the camel chow, and figure out how to accommodate university desires to mitigate library acquisitions budgets, while also keeping their university presses from going bust, or turning to books likely better published by trade presses that can handle the marketing.

A press release from the UK claims that 1 of every 300 books read in the US is now in digital format. In the European Union, the number is supposedly 1 in 450 books. This statement claims to be based on a Gartner report but doesn't otherwise cite its source.

The announcement seems to have been posted by an ebook publisher, and should perhaps be taken with some salt; while that percentage is attractive, it frankly also seems remarkably high. Maybe they're including audiobooks as "digital books" -- though other book industry groups tend to separate those from "digital books" that are read on a screen of some sort.