Books to break your heart

We all know that every year – and probably any day now – book lists begin to appear. Christmas is book list central; ideas for Mum, Dad, the cat, the babysitter, that friend you don’t really like anymore but still feel compelled to buy for…

A while back on Twitter someone posted one of those “100 books you should have read if you’ve got any part of a brain” lists. So I decided (along with some online friends) to create our own lists. With titles that we liked. (We mainly decided this because we hadn’t read many books on THE LIST).

My plan is make the final lists available in the lead-up to Christmas as a more conceptually tangential guide to buying books*.  Add your own contributions to this and all the lists.

Here’s our books to break your heart list … 

• The Last of the Just, Andre Schwarz-Bart
• A Grief Observed, CS Lewis
• The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
• Unless, Carol Shields
• How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff
• Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves
• The Border Trilogy, Cormac McCarthy
• Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey
• Paula, Isabel Allende

*We recommend that if you want a really good recommendation that is suitable to the person you want to buy for then you get in-store and talk to bookshop staff.

by Emma McCleary, web editor at Booksellers NZ

Publisher’s Promise – Does anyone ever really return the book?

Hachette runs a scheme called Publisher’s Promise, which stickers certain books with the guarantee, “Love this book or your money back.” We asked them if anyone ever takes them up on that promise…  

We regularly receive responses from readers about our Publisher’s Promise titles, and I always look forward to reading the good and the bad. People often feel deeply about the books they read, one way or another, and they like to share these opinions. The feedback we’ve received over the years has varied greatly from letters of praise to hate, and sometimes disappointment.

It’s never possible to please every reader out there, but we try to choose books we believe will appeal to a large audience of readers. So when a letter that comes in from a reader who didn’t enjoy the title, we take their feedback under consideration and refund their money. Oddly enough, several letters have been written over the years about the apathy people have felt toward the book they read. How they thought the book was fine, but not as fantastic as they thought it should be. Just as people feel strongly about the books they love or hate, they feel equally disappointed when a book doesn’t make them feel strongly at all. However, we always refund the purchase price of the book if a reader is unsatisfied.

The letters that tell us how much they love our books are my favourite because I get to take the feedback about why they loved it and send them another book I think they’ll love just as much. As you can imagine, at Hachette NZ we’re very enthusiastic about books, and getting to share the books we love the most with others is incredibly rewarding. The positive letters are also great because they help us hone in on what appealed to the reader. Was the appeal what we thought it would be? Do we have something else coming up that has these shared elements? This promotion is created with the reader in mind, and we want to help them sort through the books out there on the shelves and help them find something they will truly enjoy.

I would say if you’re unsure of what to read next, the Publisher’s Promise promotion really gives you a risk-free situation. Whether you love it or hate it, you will either have a new book to read that you will most likely also enjoy, or your money back. What could be better?

By Candice Vallimont, Hachette NZ

‘Sniff the book’ – some field notes from the analogue appreciation society #writersandreadersnz

Blogging about Writers & Readers: Are we the last real book readers? 
Monday 12 March 12.30pm, Downstage Theatre

Well, shame on me for thinking the audience might be a little scant for a debate about whether ‘we are the last generation of real readers.’ Quite the opposite. The Downstage theatre was packed with ‘real readers,’ perhaps drawn by the credibility of the panellists as much as the topic.

Fergus Barrowman, Tilly Lloyd and Denise Mina were there to represent the holy trinity of the publisher, bookseller and (last but not least) author.

Kathryn Ryan, the lively and amusing chair of this session, began by listing a few of her favourite things about the physical book, including texture, tactility and of course odour! Kathryn appealed to the ‘book sniffers’ among the audience, saying the first thing she does is ‘sniff the book.’  I don’t know if a nod to ‘Smell the Glove’ from Spinal Tap was intentional here, but I’d love to see a mockumentary on bookselling in these troubled times as ‘a mighty wind’ blows through our sector…

Tilly Lloyd was first to speak, acknowledging the familiar faces in the audience from the ‘analogue appreciation society.’  Tilly went over the highlights from Unity’s own list (compiled over a few chardonnays) on the stellar qualities of the book: surveillance free, shareable, memory evoking, bendable, rippable and Lydia Wevers term ‘heft’ all featured. She concluded that we don’t look at bookshelves with disinterest, before addressing that gnarly word ‘real’ and the arrogance of the analogue assumption. What makes a real reader anyway?

Tilly’s answer was the definitive answer of the panel. ‘No, we are NOT the last generation of real readers.’ The book will make it back to the future. No-one knows exactly what it will look like. Tilly mentioned hardbacks the equivalent of ‘Crown Lynn with words.’   Comparisons to Vinyl were inevitable. Denise Mina – the author – might have been the most positive speaker of all three, saying the form will be transformed; although certainly none of the panellists were pessimists by any stretch of the imagination.

Tilly envisaged a ‘disharmonious’ but mutually inclusive future for the e-book and the p-book. Tilly herself refuses to demote the book to being called the p-book. (A qualm I noticed Fergus did not share).  Tilly had some great quotes about the ‘distributor’ of our times.

This from Amazon: ’Physical books won’t completely go away, just as horses haven’t completely gone away.’ (I have searched the internet for this quote and can’t find it. Grrr.)

And this on Amazon: ‘A heartbreaking work of Staggering Greed.’ There was much laughter from the audience at this point.  I hope they are all shopping locally. If they weren’t before the talk, they probably are now.

At one point Denise rallied the crowd: ‘Amazon really is the devil and we need to stand up to them.’

Summing up our current set of anxieties Tilly said, ‘booksellers fear the death of the street, publishers fear obsolescence and authors fear working for free.’

The matter of money was well tackled by Denise Mina who spoke last, bringing us all back down to reality – most authors aren’t making a living from their work anyway. Professional writers in the UK make an average of about 6,000 pounds a year. Only 5 authors in Scotland make over 100,000 pounds a year. (I will mention that a UK bookseller probably struggles to make between 15,000 – 18,000 pounds a year working full time.)

Denise said ‘no one would be stupid enough to do this for the money.’ She was referring to authors, but I think that statement covers bookselling too.

Halfway to being a publisher

I’m a publisher-in-training, a book-producer-in-waiting. I moved to Wellington at the beginning of the year to become a student—again.

It took a false career start (I abandoned teaching in the name of books), but I think I’ve gained that wee bit of life experience and developed a solid work ethic that means I no longer start assignments the night before they’re due or stay out late on a ‘school night’ (or any night). Plus, I’ve finally found an outlet for my OCD-like relationship with the written language.

The idea of returning to student-hood was initially less than appealing. While I have never subscribed to the living-on-two-minute-noodles stereotype of the student lifestyle, the thought of having an extremely limited income after several years of full-time work was hardly something I had aspired to. A friend suggested the publishing programme a Whitireia and, several soul searches later, I took the risk.

Interestingly, most people have absolutely no idea what publishing is. I’ve repeatedly had different versions of the following conversation:

“What are you studying?”
“Publishing.”
“Oh, cool. That’s… different. (Contemplative pause) So, what does that mean?”

To be honest, I didn’t really know what publishing meant either. I imagined publishing to be primarily—solely—editing, but in actual fact (apologies if this isn’t new to you) the role of a publisher varies depending on which stage of the book-making process they enter. From taking a manuscript, commissioned or unsolicited, to editing, designing, typesetting, proofing, marketing, distributing and all the in-betweens I’ve forgotten, publishing is a little more intensive than I first imagined.

Who knew that editing and proofreading are two different things? Not me.

Before the programme, I was merely good with words. After it started, I quickly came to the understanding that a publisher is great with words and has a whole host of other skills. My knowledge of publishing, and even the written word, was very limited. If publishing was a movie, it would be a fantasy, featuring a whole parallel universe filled with complicated characters such as commas, hyphens, dashes, nominalisations and debates about ‘their’ as a singular noun.

There would be complicated settings like book fairs, and an ultimate battle between good (quality) and evil (cost). It would have a plot line about the online book trade and the uncertain future of the industry and, depending on the filmmaker, the all-too-dominant eBook would either be the antagonist or the protagonist.

I’m halfway there—halfway to being a publisher. In the qualification sense, anyway. In reality, this career path I have chosen will demand I keep learning and keep exploring the characters and story arcs I find in the parallel universe of making books. How it will go is anyone’s guess—I’ll keep you posted.

By Keri Trim, publishing student