It’s all kicking off at Goodreads.

And Paul Mason was a northern soul boy.

After we added TIF to our sidebar 18 months or so ago, Mark made contact to see if we were interested in turning the blog into a book and – after umming and ahhing for a while – we decided against.

The main reason, in our defence, was that it needed to be done beautifully, beautiful costs money, and money seemed like it might be in extremely short supply across the country at the time. It still does, of course, but that hasn’t stopped Mark’s excellent book selling hand over fist for Icon Books. Ah well. You live and (you hope) learn.

Coming in the New Year: among other things, an updated and re-edited version of Nick Faith’s Black Box, and a new edition of Roger Graeff’s Talking Blues.

Black Box is the seminal work on air crashes. Apparently, a third of people are scared of flying and I’m ashamed to admit that I’m among them. (In fact, I’m scared of crashing.) Some years ago, ahead of a flight to Australia, I underwent hypnosis to try to cure me. This consisted of three sessions in which I lay there with my eyes closed while the hypnotist (a renowned ladies’ man who admitted to having slept with a number of Miss Coventrys) told me that my fear was like ‘heavy dark liquid’ that would pour out of my body when I opened the taps on the ends of my fingers. I never discovered the taps, and the whole thing was a waste of time; this may have been because I had rather stupidly booked the final session for the day of the flight, specifically about two hours after my flight departed.

The republished Black Box – which may also be retitled – will be available on Kindle, iTunes and as a traditional paperback in the summer.

Talking Blues is also a famous work which sold well on its original publication. Graeff, a well-known and respected documentary maker, interviewed hundreds of serving police officers in the UK, the relatively verbatim interviews forming the text for the book. It’s a fascinating picture of a bygone Britain. Currently, we’re planning to republish it as an eBook initially and then later as a paperback. The eBook should be out in January, I hope.

Finally, a piece of northern soul magic. If you find a copy of this lying around in a junk shop, it’s worth £3,000.

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)

In a real sliding doors moment, it’s highly likely that, without that drop goal in 2003, Monday Books would never have happened. You may have mixed feelings as to whether that very minor side-effect was a good or a bad thing, but I bet you remember the moment.

In the days after the final, we were inundated with requests for Jonny stuff. Just as a for instance, OK magazine offered him a million pounds to do an ‘at home’ with Jonny at his spacious Northern pad. He turned it down – a decision which cost me a share of £200,000. Ah well! Money never motivated him.

Was he the best fly-half ever, as the papers have often suggested?  He was one of them, though from players I’ve seen, albeit mostly on screen, I’d go for Barry John, Mark Ella, Hugo Porta or maybe Daniel Carter. Larkham was a better runner, but Jonny had great distribution and his place-kicking and defence redefined the No10 position

I also worked with Martin Johnson, another great who recently left rugby. The current parlous state of the English game wasn’t Johnno’s fault, and it won’t be solved quickly by sacking Rob Andrew or bringing in Nick Mallett. The problem is, we have compared all post-2003 England sides to the RWC winners, and that side contained six true greats: Johnson, Back, Hill, Dallaglio, Wilkinson and Robinson. The front row, Ben Kay, Matt Dawson, Will Greenwood, Josh Lewsey, the younger Mike Tindall and Ben Cohen weren’t too shabby, either.

Here are three seminal, unforgettable moments from the Wilko era: a young Jonny on Ntamack, Dan Luger’s 2000 try (or non-try?) at Twickenham which gave us all the belief that England could beat the southern hemisphere, and Lewsey on Rogers (a tackle which ended Rogers’ surfing career):

He needs some runs, no doubt. But he’s not the only one though.

Some wickets wouldn’t go amiss, either, Pup.

Steve Jobs on the death of newspapers:

I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers. We need editorial more than ever right now.

Philip Jones in the Bookseller:

Over the past week I’ve spoken to many people in and around the book business, and no-one has a good word to say about the e-tailer, even though some admit that as a business it is peerless.

Unsurprisingly, he didn’t speak to us, but we love Amazon. They are providing the best and simplest way to get our books to readers, albeit electronically.

Mark Steyn on bankers and politicians:

On Thursday, John Corzine, former U.S. senator, former governor of New Jersey, former Goldman Sachs golden boy and the man who embodies the malign nexus between Big Government and a financial services sector tap-dancing on derivatives of derivatives, came to Congress to try to explain how the now-bankrupt entity he ran, MF Global, had managed to misplace $1.2 billion. The man once tipped to be Obama’s Treasury secretary and whom Vice President Joe Biden described as the fellow who’s always “the smartest guy in the room,” explained his affairs thus: ‘I simply do not know where the money is.’

The general tenor of the abuse varies, and its meaning is actually sometimes hard to discern, but a recent line of attack concerned the suggestion that Bloggs is ‘corrupt’. A less corrupt person than Ms E E Bloggs you would go a long way to meet, but there it is.

Anyway, on her behalf, we have recently sent a sizeable four figure cheque to Rape Crisis, and a second, smaller one to the Police Roll of Honour Trust. She does this with all her royalty cheques, and because she won’t mention it herself I thought we should. Over the years, she has sent a lot of money to these and other charities; Gadget also has charities he (or she) supports.

I saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy recently. I don’t remember the 1970s being that depressing. Perhaps modern kids won’t remembers to 2008-20?? period as being as grim as it looks to adults? This is an interesting review of that film, from the moral equivalence angle. I recommend Paul Hollander’s From the Killing Fields to the Gulag if you don’t get the point.

Finally, we’ve just agreed with Theodore Dalrymple that we will republish all of his old work, written as Anthony Daniels, in eBook format. This includes classics such as Monrovia Mon Amour, Zanzibar to Timbuktu and The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World.

As usual, the writing is excellent. Here he is in Liberia, enjoying a discussion of British press ethics and then meeting Prince Y Johnson, who smoked cigars while his men tortured President Samuel Doe to death in front of him:

Back in the Olympic, when we ran short of other things to talk about, we discussed the ethics of photography and the question of whether it was ever permissible, for the sake of art, for photographers to improve upon the arrangement of things (including bodies) as they were found, as it were, in nature. The British photographers argued that it was sometimes permissible, because it was equally possible to lie with the camera by means either of the selection of what was photographed in the first place or of subsequent editing. (How many people realised, for instance, that the famous picture of the Vietnamese girl running screaming along the road originally included a host of press photographers trotting alongside her taking pictures, who were later edited out Trotsky-like. in the interests of higher historical truth?)

But the Swiss photographer, Michel, argued that it was impermissible under any and all circumstances to rearrange things as they were found: indeed, he appeared shocked that his British colleague should already have slid so far down the slippery lope of amoral relativism. Needless to say, the discussion had some bearing on writing as well as photography, but I remained tactfully silent.

Scott secured our trouble-free entry into Johnson’s stronghold b the donation of two cigarettes to the guards, who received them with glee, but were not quite as ecstatic as the two Frelimo soldiers I recalled on the road from Beira to Zimbabwe, who literally danced (barefoot) for joy when I gave them a single cigarette between them. (And when I arrived in Tanzania, I discovered that cigarettes were sold in the market by neither the carton nor the pack, and not even by the whole cigarette, but by the single inhaled drag.)

We continued on our way and a mile or two further on arrived at Johnson’s house. Surrounding it was an astonishing collection of luxury cars: Mercedes, BMWs and even a Jaguar. There were stranded American monsters, too, in mourning for the expressways they had exchanged for the rough laterite roads of Africa, and tinted-windowed four-wheel drive vehicles of the type favoured by death squads in Latin America. Whatever else one might say against Johnson, his collection of cars made it clear that he was no starry-eyed egalitarian.

Johnson was just emerging from the house with his entourage. He was powerfully built, of average height, and dressed in a chic green jumpsuit. On one breast was pinned a brass scorpion, the badge of his movement; on the other, military decorations, whether self-inflicted I never asked. He wore dark glasses and in his hand, almost like a child’s comforter, he carried a sophisticated walkie-talkie. Seeing a delegation of foreigners, he at once began to bark importantly into it. His anxiety to impress with his command of technology was so transparent that it would have been endearing or comical, had one forgotten that only a couple of days beforehand he had killed seven people with a similar command of technology.

He aborted for the moment the tour of his little kingdom that he was about to make, to grant us an audience. Publicity came first. There was no doubting his charisma: in any crowd of men he would have drawn attention to himself, not by his antics but merely by his presence. There was nothing small about either his gestures or his emotions; when he smiled, his broad row of sparkling white teeth reminded me of a shark.

One of the salutary lessons involved in talking to a large number of cops about their job is listening to their descriptions of road accidents. I drive slower now.

This BBC link to every road death in the UK between 1999 and 2010 is interesting, too, albeit in a slightly macabre way.

This is a business which has always been driven very much by supply rather than demand factors. Consumer taste doesn’t actually change all that much but what does change is the availability of books in different channels. It is tougher to predict how we will be 12 months from now, as an industry, than pretty much any time that I can remember.

I imagine he’s talking about eBooks, which have been very good for us so far (though we’ve seen a tailing off in the last couple of months).

A lot of people are saying that the advance of e-publishing means there will soon be no need for publishers. This may be the case, though even small indies like Monday put in a lot of unseen and unpaid work behind the scenes to get a book to market. Unedited eBooks – will they sell? Some will, but many won’t, I suspect.

I met up with a couple of equally small publishers at the weekend, and the question that has been forming in the minds of both of them was one which hadn’t occurred to me: Do (small) publishers need authors any more?

The argument being, three or four creative bods working in an office making other people’s writing work is a decent business model when you need volume to succeed (a couple of dozen books a year generating £x = a living). Where you can market direct to readers, and the production costs are lower, maybe the way forward is to bring out your own work. Interesting.

If we moved that way – and we’ve no plans to do so at the moment – one thing we wouldn’t miss is royalties. Paying them is fine, it’s working the bloody things out which causes us pain. When 99% of our sales were UK-only and sold via our sales and distribution company, the excellent Turnaround, it wasn’t too much of an issue. Now we’re selling electronically via Amazon and iTunes all around the world; fluctuating currency rates make it very complicated and irritating. It’s taken one member of staff a week so far, and the job is not yet done.

Bloggsy’s not a big swearer herself, unlike Gadget. Talking of the good Inspector, this is an interesting post.

Finally, a nice comment sent to Tony McNally, author of the Falklands war memoir Watching Men Burn, from the wife of a fellow veteran:

Hi Tony, Just wanted to say a huge thank you for helping to bring my husband back from the edge.  He’s a former Para who served in the Falklands and your poetry and book hit a real chord.  You really are a lifesaver.

Thanks

Cxxxxxxx Bxxxxxxx