I had an interesting day in London yesterday, where I met Black Box author Nick Faith, the Daily Mirror‘s Andrew Penman, Colin ‘Kidnapped‘ Freeman and a barrister who wants to write a book about her job. More details on all this in the New Year.
During the meanwhilst, this will be the last post on here before Christmas, which will save around three people the daily job of clicking the blog to see what we’re wittering on about now. Happy Christmas!
Beyond that, the first thing to say is that Wasting More Police Time will sadly not make it out this year. It will be out in January 2012 – you can take that to the bank. There are various reasons for the delay, but the most significant is that we felt it necessary to take legal advice over some of the content. The last thing we want is to publish a book which leads to our gaff being spun, and thus our sources being compromised. (To minimise this risk, all tape recordings and notes have been destroyed anyway, but you can’t be too careful.) The ‘legaling’ process is now finished, so we can go to typesetting, proofreading and printing.
I would have liked to have brought WMPT out in 2011: it would have been the icing on the cake of a pretty good year. Like lots of small publishers (and small businesses generally), we felt the effects of the credit crunch, but we started seeing a significant upturn at the start of this year and that has continued. By New Year’s Eve, we’ll have sold well over 100,000 books in 2011, electronically and in trad format; at the same time, we have stripped out as much cost as possible. It’s not Penguin or Harper Collins, obviously, but it could be worse. (Indeed, it has been.)
It’s still hard to predict what the next 12 months will bring. I hope Waterstone’s goes from strength to strength (and a big-up, as the kids say, to the staff at Waterstone’s in Leicester who were extremely polite and very helpful when I did a chunk of my Christmas shopping there on Sunday), but we have invested quite a bit of the company’s cash, and our own, in Amazon shares by way of a hedge. CBS thinks Amazon is in trouble, mind you, though they’re wrong about ‘the big costs’ in publishing; the biggest ‘cost’ is discount to retailers, which is usually around 50 percent of jacket price. (That is, if you buy a book for £10, £5 goes to the bookshop. No complaints from us, they have bills to pay.)
Talking of Amazon, Hugh Hunter sent this interesting Freakonomics link from his Florida retreat: Why Does a Caucasian Dollhouse Cost Nearly 70% More Than an African-American Dollhouse?)
This piece also caught my eye in the Daily Telegraph: The march of technological progress doesn’t create jobs: it destroys them.
It’s hardly news that publishing is undergoing a technological revolution. When you produce an eBook the following things don’t happen: you don’t use a typesetter (you may use an eBook producer, though we do it in-house); you don’t use a printer; your jacket design takes less time and therefore generates less income for the designer; you don’t use a warehouse or its staff; you don’t use delivery drivers; you don’t use people to stack bookshop shelves and operate tills.
The approach of classical liberal economics (if I understand it correctly) is to say that technological advance makes tasks easier, saving costs (and jobs are, technically, a cost) and scarce resources that can then be allocated more efficiently elsewhere. Certainly, on the other side of the equation, publishing-wise, many – or certainly some – publishers pass on these savings in cheaper prices for eBooks vs trad books, leaving more cash in consumers’ pockets to spend elsewhere. This additional spending will create demand which is then met by all the unemployed typesetters.
Yes. But. But what are the consequences if we engineer people out of virtually everything? I certainly don’t pretend to know a) whether this really is a problem or b) what the solution is. The comments below the story are interesting, as is this related piece.
Unrelatedly, this is also well worth reading if you’re planning to whack on the odd extra stone over Christmas.
Finally, the tragic Flo Ballard, worth 10 of Diana Ross any day of the week… but talent isn’t everything (luckily for those of us without much talent)
I always read your blog Dan, and so does my wife.
Classic From Rotten Boroughs in the Eye this week: kent County Council leader maintained he had paid the council back, vowing, ‘This is no blag’ (An old Kentish expression m’lud indicating that everything was proper and above board).
Stand by for more explanations of Kentish expressions at courthouses here in Alberta…m’lud.
I read you, too, but I don’t click on the blog. I’ve delegated that task to software. Why do the work when the technology can do it for me? Of course, that could mean this is also the work of software, too.
That’s two of the three, then!
Dave – will be trying, finances and wife permitting, to get out to you next year; stay warm, safe and smug in the meantime.