AWASH IN AWARDS

I write this as we will be departing for the Frankfurt Book Fair on October 7th, to share our wares with editors and agents from around the world. And to give you a taste of what a banner year this has been for so many of our writers.

In the last three years, Permanent Press titles have either won or been shortlisted for six of the major mystery prizes. Leonard Rosen’s All Cry Chaos (2011) was a finalist for the Edgar and Anthony Awards and won the 2012 Macavity Award for Best First Novel. This year Chris Knopf’s Dead Anyway won the Nero Award, Howard Owen’s Oregon Hill won the Hammett Prize, and Jaden Terrell’s Racing the Devil was a finalist for the Shamus Award.

Needless to say, Judy and I were dancing on the ceiling when informed about the most recent Hammett announcement which completed this Trifecta, and sent an email out to many people—reviewers, agents, scouts, editors here in the States and abroad, and to 100 other authors we’ve published. The entire letter was picked up by Ivan Goldman, another of our novelists who has his own blog and headed it boldly while, in his introduction, wrote an unforgettable, accurate, and funny line describing how our books are overlooked by the Five Families of the Literature Mafia that dictate which books are or are not "important."

YET ANOTHER AUTHOR PUBLISHED BY (LITTLE) PERMANENT PRESS WINS PRESTIGIOUS AWARD, THIS TIME THE HAMMETT PRIZE
Blog Post by Ivan G. Goldman - Oct.01.2013 - 8:38 pm
Ivan G. Goldman’s Blog on Red Room and elsewhere

Below is an email I just received from Martin Shepard of the Permanent Press, a small publisher whose books win award after award. Yet its catalog is almost completely overlooked by the Five Families of the Literature Mafia that dictate which books are or are not "important."

If you want to read that email in its entirely, check out Ivan’s blog. But the fact of the matter is that our mystery writers are kicking-ass, award-wise, despite the scant attention paid by the largest newspapers and so called-literary magazines. Judged by a jury of mystery-writing peers, this surely carries more weight and credibility than having a book review editor deciding what book to assign to his reviewers.

I say this without rancor, for it is just the way the system works. In fact, I think it has been a blessing, since so many of our best writers had been rejected for a year or longer by the biggies, then found a home with us. So we raise our glasses to toast the selection practices of the conglomerates that have left some of the most outstanding mystery writers in America—including Connie Dial, David Freed, Gwen Florio, and Baron Birtcher—to us.

And as good a year has been (with a host of sub-rights sales here and abroad), next year could well be better, with an incredible mix of mysteries, literary fiction, many returning writers, and some hybrids of sorts. To that end we’ve now put our 2014 catalog online. To see it all you need do is go our website and download it. Goodies galore for discerning readers. 

Marty

HOW SMALL PUBLISHERS CAN STILL SELL GOOD BOOKS

What follows is what we’ve learned over the past 35 years when it comes to promoting and selling books. This may or may not be helpful, many of the things I’d suggest seem self-evident, but I think they are worth thinking about. I should also add that the vast majority of the books we publish are fiction, and we try to select artfully written titles, be they mysteries or general fiction: books that are character driven and outside the realm of what the conglomerates generally select. The Big Five Conglomerates who, with 250 or more imprints, produce 85% of the books sold in America. By and large they tend to go for the lowest common denominator—for the widest audience—while our target audience is for the more thoughtful and sophisticated reader. The Big Guys publish name-brand writers. We don’t. We simply pick from among the 5,000 queries and submission we receive each year and publish the best 12 to 16 manuscripts we read.  So I offer this information to one and all—but particularly to small presses not associated with the Big Five—and if it is helpful to any of you, that is reward enough.

Selling books depends on reaching potential readers, and that starts with review coverage. Since my wife and I began The Permanent Press in 1978, there have been many changes in the way one finds an audience. Once upon a time there were newspapers who covered books and had book editors who respected and helped get-the-word-out for quality writing that came from small independent presses written by relatively unknown writers. That marketing strategy hardly works anymore, as so many newspapers have down-sized, closed, or use wire-service reviews. In these hard times the biggest newspapers still standing tend to cover books from large publishers who take out ads that a smaller house can ill afford.  So one has to look for alternatives: people and reviewers who aren’t swayed by where a book comes from, or who wrote it, or who advertises, but by the quality of the work itself. 

Tops for open hearted and open minded print coverage are the four pre-publication journals, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist, and Library Journal. Make sure you print and send out advance galleys to them—and anyone else on your review lists—at least four months before publication date, and try to hold your output to one or two titles a month at best. Given the huge numbers of books Random House or the other giants publish, only a small percent will gain any serious review coverage. By limiting submissions, if the editors at these journals feel your titles have merit and you don’t overwhelm them, your review percentage will be higher. The point here is: don’t publish more books than that annually, just keep upgrading those titles you do select. And pick your target audience. Libraries are still the repository of good writing, another reason to value these four pre-publication journals.

For all the talk of publishing “electronic” books only, this is a mistake in our opinion. Few electronic-only publishers will get reviews, and those that do publish works by famous writers of yesteryears whose works are no longer in copyright. This will hardly do if you are searching for original voices by contemporary writers.

Resources should be spent to make the galleys you publish attractive. Don’t use the generic colored paper cover with the title printed on the top, but use the art that you will use on your finished books, including flap copy. An artful cover has much greater appeal than a dull one, since reviewers have so many titles to choose from. Should you get coverage in one or more of these journals, save excerpts and put them on the back cover or dustjacket of your finished copy. Here is also where it makes sense to advertise, depending on your budget. You can take as little as a sixth of a page out in any of these publications, and print out the excerpts from the other early reviews for their readers. You’ll also be helping to support the most influential and non-corruptible people in the business.

Another strategy is considering producing 200 to 300 extra galleys that Library Journal and Booklist will send out four or five times a year to key librarians, a perfect target audience for interesting titles: more non-corruptible people. And send these out at the same time as you send your advance galleys out elsewhere else.

You should also collect the best bloggers you can find for on-line reviewing. One way to get started with this is to join Library Thing or Good Reads and offer 20 or 30 galleys to the first 20 or 30 people who request copies, and see how many reviews of your books are posted there, and then contact those reviewers who write well and also have their own blogsites for future submissions. We’ve collected and value about two dozen such reviewers. It’s easy to see how they write for an audience of serious readers. Getting coverage in these places, if each one only results in 20 sales, is more important than  spending to much time soliciting newspapers, for these bloggers are the sort of people who are respected and help spread the word. I won’t share our lists with you because you’ve got to do the work and find your own compatible bloggers. But I can tell you that if your books are well written, some blog sites that are particularly influential are Small Press Reviews, New York Journal of Books, and San Francisco Book Reviews (not only that, but we were so impressed by the writing of some of these reviewers that we’ve signed on novels written by two authors from the New York Journal of Books, and one author from Small Press Reviews).  And when you place ads in any of the pre-pub journals, feel free to use excerpts from these sources as well.

The final uncorruptibles for spreading-the-word are book awards, as their judges have no vested interest in picking anything but good books from whatever quarter, and being selected as a finalist or winner can pay very big dividends. In 2012 we published seven mystery writers, and three of them are among the five finalists for three important mystery awards this year: Howard Owen’s Oregon Hill for the Hammett Prize, Jaden Terrell’s Racing the Devil for the Shamus Award, and Chris Knopf’s Dead Anyway for the Nero Award. This will attract readers and sales far more than reviews in the most widely read newspapers. Advertising these titles in the pre-pub journals and in the best mystery magazine, Mystery Scene, is relatively inexpensive and most worthwhile. At the very least, even without becoming a finalist, you will have introduced your books to good writers and critics who will be more aware of what you do.

Advertising expenses incurred for doing the sort of ads we do 18 or 20 times a year are far more effective than spending the same amount for one full book ad in the New York Times, The Washington Post, or The Los Angeles Times combined, and will help out those publications who support you.

Just one anecdote worth mentioning here: Back in 1991 we published Sandra Scofield’s Beyond Deserving—a time when newspapers were more accepting of covering good fiction from small presses. The novel had a fine review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, but no review at all appeared in their daily paper, which is subsumed by their Culture Desk. Then, big surprise, it became a finalist for The National Book Award. We informed the book editor of the Culture Desk about this a couple of months before the winner was to be chosen, without any response. After the winner was announced at a gala setting, the Culture Desk justified non-coverage because Beyond Deserving didn’t win the award. Just being judged as one of the five best novels was not enough. (In fact, we’ve never had a full review in the daily Times except one in our first year—35 years ago). Still, we send one review copy to their desk without any expectations and at minimum expense (via Media Mail, not UPS) in case God wants to make a miracle happen. Sorry to say, in today’s world that’s the case with most newspaper and magazine coverage. But here again, being a finalist for this award sold more copies of the book than all the newspaper reviews combined.

Another resource we’ve been making use of is sharing new books with our old authors—well over 100 of them—by sending them electronic files to read and pass on to their friends. It’s had an excellent effect, not only furthering a communal effort, but has resulted in a fuller awareness of one another’s talents which have increased sales.

My final suggestion is this: pay reasonable entrance fees for all sorts of awards. Many, like the PEN Awards and The National Book Critics Circle Awards, and the Chautauqua Prize, require no entrance fee at all. ForeWord Magazine, which covers small presses and posts well written reviews, also has their own awards at the end of every year. There is a steep price to pay for entering, and you might need to limit what you submit, for entrance fees for their prizes are steep. Yet coming in first, second or third in any of the dozen or more “categories” they cover is another worthwhile investment. We’ve had a couple of finalists for the categories prizes, a runner-up for their Grand Prize, and a winner for their Grand Prize last year—Leonard Rosen’s All Cry Chaos—which made all those investments worth it.

I look forward to hearing your feedback or your own experiences in selling good books. I also hope you will click on The Permanent Press’ August Newsletter to see what’s been happening with our titles since our last posting.

Marty

 

E-BOOK PRICING: THE SOUND AND THE FURY? OR MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING?

It’s been three months since my last posting, and lately I’ve been going nuts reading about the governments prosecution—or is it persecution—of publishers and a distributor of e-books, and felt impelled to get some things off my chest, clarify my mind, and rid myself of this fruitless and confusing issue.

The longer the government’s lawsuit against Apple and the five of the Big Six corporate publishers (who, through their various imprints account for 85% of book sales) continues, the more absurd it becomes. “Collusion,” the U.S. attorneys say. “We must protect the public from those conspiring to control prices of e-books.”

To my mind, I would say that “Authors need more protection than the public.” In the end, any book is an author’s creation and the writer deserves the fairest shake they can get. No two books are alike, all are individual creations, and the idea that e-book prices would uniformly rise if “Apple and the publishing conglomerates got their way” is hard to accept.

I don’t know how the Big Six divvy up e-book sales, but I know what we do: treating electronic sales the same way we do all subright sales and dividing the income on a 50:50 basis. I also believe that publishers have the right to set a price on the e-books they publish—just as they have a right to set prices on books they publish. If Apple allows the publisher to set their own prices, that’s a good thing. If wholesalers wish to give greater discounts, that’s up to them. But if Apple only takes 30% of the e-book selling price—then a $10 sale nets the publisher $7, and the author—with our system—earns $3.50 per sale. On the other hand, if Amazon takes 50%, and overrules the publisher’s asking price by deciding to sell the same book for $8, the publisher nets $4 and the author $2.00. Big difference, wouldn’t you say?


The very idea that the public needs protection in these instances seems even more absurd, for a book is not a necessity like food or fuel or electricity. Books and e-books are, in the end, entertainment: entertainment the public can purchase or take from any public library at no cost whatsoever. Would the government go after movie theater chains—like the United Artist Theaters who set ever higher prices for watching their films? They shouldn’t. But if we start with books, who knows what other forms of entertainment might come next.

Frankly, we adore Kindle sales, though Amazon often lowers prices to less than what we request. But they pay on time (unlike many bookstores and wholesalers) and account for over 80% of our e-book sales. If anything, it would benefit authors if publishers could list what return they would like on a price they set for any individual book. Amazon would have a choice of lowering their discount or not, in order to compete with Apple or others, though right now there is no competition, with Kindle sales blowing away all competitors.

To me, this lawsuit is an glaring example of government excess, providing big headlines concerning “Conspiracy” and “Protecting the Public,” while wasting taxpayer’s money and going after the wrong people, for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Faulkner have said it best: It’s “Much Ado about Nothing” and “The Sound and the Fury”— quite dramatic but empty of substance other than brandishing prosecutors reputations and defense lawyers incomes.

Let me know your thoughts about these issues. And I’d welcome learning about how electronic rights are divided by the Conglomerates.

And do check out the latest newsletter on The Permanent Press website (www.thepermanentpress.com)

Marty

A MYSTERY

This August, Judy and I were invited to attend and participate at the Killer Nashville Convention (August 22 to 25), which brings together Southeastern mystery aficionados. It’s one of the three largest regional mystery conventions, the other two being Left Coast Crime (covering west of the Rockies and the West Coast) and the New England Crime Bake. The super daddy, of course, is the Bouchercon Conference, bringing together mystery people from around the country at differing locations each year.

I was first invited to Killer Nashville back in 2011, but this year it will be an even more special event for us as we’ll get to finally meet and spend time with Connie Dial (DEAD WRONG), David Freed (FANGS OUT), Gwen Florio (MONTANA), and Baron Birtcher (RAIN DOGS). Chris Knopf, (a good friend since we first started publishing him eight years ago, and whose consistency and inventiveness have elevated him to the top tier of mystery writers) will also be attending with CRIES OF THE LOST. All are masterful story-tellers and each of their latest mysteries are represented on our 2013 list.

Our pleasure is somewhat akin to on-line dating: one corresponds with a host of people, winnows some out and then begins to know those writers we take on through emails to start, then phone conversations, eventually leading to kinship and falling in love. Finally, we go out on a date together. How grand is that? As good as the last episode of The Bachelor!

Two other authors we’re publishing this year are Len Rosen (THE TENTH WITNESS) and Howard Owen (THE PHILADELPHIA QUARRY). Each had other commitments, but both will be attending Bouchercon along with several of the folks joining us at Killer Nashville.

We’ve never discriminated against mysteries. Judy and I are just looking to find excellent novelists, regardless of category. From a handful of mysteries every year, 2012 changed the balance: eight of our 16 releases were mysteries, and in 2013, eight of our 14 releases are mysteries. These were simply among the best of the 5,000 queries and submissions we received in those years. I can only speculate how this came about, attributing it to the collective impact our mystery writers have had. As each of them have gathered readers, reviews, and honors, new mystery writers, and their agents, submit more quality fiction to us.

Among the seven Chris Knopf mysteries we’ve published two were finalists for the Connecticut Book Award, and his 2012 release, DEAD ANYWAY, was cited by Publishers Weekly as one of the 12 Best Mystery/Thrillers of 2012 . It was also listed as one of the Top 100 Novels by Kirkus (along with Connie Dial’s FALLEN ANGELS). David Freed, working as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times, was an Individual Pulitzer Finalist and shared a Pulitzer Prize with the Times itself for coverage of the Rodney King riots. He also received excellent reviews for FLAT SPIN in 2012 and FANGS OUT this year. Howard Owen’s OREGON HILL, published last year, is a finalist for the Hammett Award this year, as well as a finalist for the Library of Virginia’s 16th Annual Award for Virginia writers. Like David Freed, Howard is also a journalist.

Then there is Gwen Florio and MONTANA. Gwen is another journalist who has been nominated for three Pulitzer Prizes, from the Missoulian this year (investigating an alleged rape of two young women by the University of Montana’s football team), and from the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1997, and the Denver Post in 2001 for feature stories from locations as various as the American West, the Navajo Nation and Afghanistan. In 2012 Len Rosen won the Macavity Award for ALL CRY CHAOS, was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel and also for the Anthony Award, and was a Chautauqua Prize finalist as well.

Journalists who work hard at their craft seem to make extraordinary mystery writers, as they get a first-hand look at life in all its down and dirty places. Connie Dial, was never a journalist, but having been the Commander of the Hollywood Division of the LAPD she shared that same first-hand familiarity. Mix in Pulitzer prizes and awards by ones peers and it’s easy to see why we take great pride in our writers and believe we have as good a cadre of mystery writers as any publisher, large or small, in America. Most mysteries are like most movies—they are published and filmed for the widest audience, which means lots of action, car chases, thrills, skin-deep characters, and over the top violence. Are there other good mystery writers who are published elsewhere? Of course there are. There are also many overly praised ones from “name brand” authors well covered in the national media. But when you have a core group like Len Rosen, David Freed, Connie Dial, Howard Owen, and Jaden Terrell, who wrote two outstanding mysteries last year (RACING THE DEVIL and A CUP FULL OF MIDNIGHT)—along with newcomers—it’s my contention that 100% of our mystery writers are exceptional.

So how we got to where we are is, perhaps, not such a mystery after all: it’s a result of fine writers coming to us and carrying the weight of  our overall success as publishers.

Judy and I are indebted to one and all.

I invite your comments and also hope you will check out the latest Newsletter on The Permanent Press website.

Marty

GRATEFUL FOR A GREAT YEAR

On January 4th, Publishers Weekly, in their daily electronic issue, ran the following headline: Print Units Fell 9 Percent in 2012, followed by this story which began thusly: "Unit sales of print books fell just over 9 percent in 2012 at outlets tracked by Nielsen BookScan, roughly the same percentage decline posted between 2010 and 2011."

This gloomy news is not shared by us, as Our Print Units Rose 37% last year, which was a spectacular record breaker, going back to our inception 35 years ago, when we started publishing an average of 12 to 14 books yearly (mostly fiction), keeping nearly all of them in print, which has provided us with a backlist of over 400 titles. I have some thoughts about what might account for this contrast between our figures and those of the five biggest conglomerate publishers, but first let me list our differences.

The Permanent Press figures for 2012:
1) Print book sales increased by 37%
2) eBook sales increased by 94%
3) Subrights sales increased by 427%
4) Total income from all sources increased by 58%

These sales increases were also marked by increasing honors and awards:
1) Kirkus listed Chris Knopf's Dead Anyway and Connie Dial's Fallen Angels among their 100 Top Novels of 2012.

2) Publishers Weekly listed Dead Anyway among the 12 Best Mysteries for 2012.

3) Hallie Ephron listed Dead Anyway in a recent column in The Boston Globe as one of the year’s 10 Best Mysteries.

4) Entertainment Realm listed both Victoria Jenkins' An Unattended Death and Joan Franks’ Make It Stay among their list of the Best 20 Novels for 2012.

5) Jenny Shanks' The Ringer won the High Plains Book Award.

6) Leonard Rosen's novel All Cry Chaos—an Edgar Award and Anthony Award finalist—won the Macavity Book Award and also ForeWord Magazine’s $1,500 Best Novel Prize. Earlier it was also a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize for Best Novel. It was also selected as one of Amazon's Kindle’s “Book of the Day,” selling nearly 6,000 copies the day after Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeast.


Still a further success: After years of working with Haila Williams at Blackstone Audio, who has taken several of our titles each year, we now have a full partnership in which every one of our 14 novels will be simultaneously produced and released by Blackstone in 2013.


How to account for this? Beyond thanking those unknown forces in the universe who work in inexplicable ways, enabling us to survive and prosper while choosing to publish only books that Judy and I love, first credit goes to our authors for writing intelligent and unique fiction that extends beyond genre, aimed at readers who want something more than genre, and more thoughtful fiction than the formulaic James Patterson collaborations have proved to be. And we’ve been helped by the failure of corporate publishers to appreciate the quality of largely unknown and off the beaten track novelists. More and more literary agents over the years have told me that they can’t place fine writing of this sort with corporate publishers: as witness the fact that, among many other titles we put out, Leonard Rosen’s and Chris Knopf’s first mysteries had two years of turn-downs before they came to us. So high praise for our authors.

Secondly, I think we’ve developed a much better way of marketing our titles than the corporate publishers, but as of this writing I don’t want to share these details in a blog, as I shed no tears for these giants unless they want to bolster our coffers by paying large consulting fees (most of our writers know what we do anyway). Besides, I’ve blogged a lot over the years about these very issues (including the skewed sales figures reported by Nielsen BookScan, which are treated like Holy Writ in the industry, but are far from it…as I discovered several years ago when one of our mysteries that immediately sold over 4,000 hardcovers was turned down by a reprinter who said that while she liked the book a lot, BookScan reported less than 750 sales).

And lastly to the communal nature of how we publish, aided by so many friends, authors, supporters, wonderful online bloggers, literary agents who know what we like and are not afraid to take smaller advances, the agents representing us overseas, our staff who work alongside Judy and me here (Cathy Suter, Felix Gonzalez, Sarah Flood, and Brian Skulnik), and those working off-campus (including the best cover artist I’ve ever seen, Lon Kirschner, Joslyn Pine, as good a copy editor as one can find, and Susan Ahlquist our brilliant typesetter, designer, self proclaimed “Queen of Squeeze”…and then some.


I look forward to your comments and hope you will also check out our current newsletter.


Marty

CAN THE ENDLESS WAR BE ENDED?

The timing is remarkable but not planned, in that our publication of The Inbetween People by Emma McEvoy (January 2013 in the USA and November 2012 by Ashgrove Press in London), coincides with the recent vote by the U.N. to give Palestine non-member observer status. Just weeks earlier , Israel assassinated leaders of Hamas in Gaza and Hamas responded by launching rockets into Israel. Israel retaliated with airstrikes causing more than10 times as many Palestinians killed and vast property destroyed (Gaza is about twice as large as Manhattan with a population not unlike that of Manhattan’s one million six-hundred thousand). A cease fire was then followed by Netanyahu’s plan to build new settlements separating Jerusalem from the West Bank, in violation of a previous U. N. resolution. World-wide attention was now refocused on one of the most explosive areas of today’s world, with media largely content to describe these events by reporting the conflicting statements coming from Arab and Israeli leadership (“he said/she said”), speculating on what might follow, showing pictures of the dead and dying and of buildings aflame. It all pointed toward the likelihood of a worsening stalemate between Israel and the Palestinians, one which seems certain to bring on ever higher, and bloodier, casualties on both sides.

In short, the decades long news reports about Palestinians and Israelis accusing one another of deceptions and intransigence, the ups and downs of the Intifadas and of the Occupation, of killings and counter-killings have not abated and continue to worsen. But rarely does one read about the effects this has on the silent majority of people caught up in this world of toil and trouble. And it is this group that Emma McEvoy gives voice to.

Her novel chronicles the friendship between Avi Goldberg, the son of a Jewish pioneer, and Saleem, an Israeli Arab. When I first read the manuscript I was haunted by it—and still am; by the setting and the language, appreciating the vise so many reasonable and innocent people—Jews and Arabs alike—are caught in, living in this land of troubles. This beautiful and touching first novel (from a 39-year-old Irish writer) depicts the anguish, individual acts of bravery, and small hopes amidst despair, while getting to the crux of the real story—the emotional story and price paid by those “inbetween” —without political argument.

That the “Land of Milk and Honey” God promised the Israelites has turned bitterly sour is beyond dispute. And my belief is that things will never get better until people world-wide can consider what life is like for most people living in this land. The image that comes to mind is of ordinary people squeezed between two radicalized forces, compassion replaced by the growing Talibanization of both Jewish and Palestinian leaders alike.

Some of the things these warring factions say or do are both laughable and despairing at the same time. Two years ago I read about a young settler from Brooklyn, New York who, after bringing his family to live in a contested settlement on the West Bank, supported his anti-Palestinian bias by saying “God promised this land to the Jews, so of course it should be ours.” Or, when one thinks about it, how many Jews in both America and abroad can be against Morsi’s proposed new constitution for Egypt where Mullahs are to have some influence in the government and readily side with Egypt’s secular protesters; yet have no quarrel with the notion of Israel being a Jewish state with Palestinians having second class citizenship? Again, where did compassion and reason go.

Yet there are signs of things possibly changing.

To begin with several groups started by Jews have been calling for reconciliation for some time and gathering more strength and numbers as time goes on, like J Street or Peace Now, both based in Washington DC. Or Jews for Justice in Palestine based in London

In a bold move on Friday, December 5, three rabbis of the B’nai Jeshurun synagogue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan sent an email to their congregation enthusiastically supporting the U.N./Palestine  vote. The next day The New York Times reported that the email stated, “The vote at the U.N. yesterday is a great moment for us as citizens of the world. This is an opportunity to celebrate the process that allows a nation to come forward and ask for recognition.” Immediately criticism rained down from members of their congregation, who were shocked that they had taken such a positive stance, likening it to a “warm embrace” of the PLO. Notwithstanding this resistance, as well as opposition towards the vote from both the US and Israel, this is perhaps the beginning of some real movement toward autonomy for Palestine, opening the possibility of a two-state solution.

Alison Weir is a freelance journalist and scholar who has lectured at Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard Law School, Yale, The Naval Postgraduate School and elsewhere. She has also given briefings on Capital Hill. On her website “If Americans Knew” http://www.ifamericansknew.org/history/realstory.html, you can find articles based on her research and extensive travel during the height of the 2nd intifada, to flash points in the West Bank and Gaza rarely visited by American journalists. Investigating the origin of the Palestine-Israel conflict she reminds us that “What really happened was that the Zionist movement, from the beginning, looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the indigenous Arab population so that Israel could be a wholly Jewish state, or as much as was possible. Land bought by the Jewish National Fund was held in the name of the Jewish people and could never be sold or even leased back to Arabs (a situation which continues to the present).The vast majority of the population of Palestine, by the way, had been Arabic since the seventh century A.D. (Over 1200 years.)” She goes on to add “One further point: being Jewish ourselves, the position we present here is critical of Zionism but is in no way anti-Semitic. We do not believe that the Jews acted worse than any other group might have acted in their situation. The Zionists (who were a distinct minority of the Jewish people until after WWII) had an understandable desire to establish a place where Jews could be masters of their own fate, given the bleak history of Jewish oppression. Especially as the danger to European Jewry crystallized in the late 1930’s and after, the actions of the Zionists were propelled by real desperation. But so were the actions of the Arabs. The mythic “land without people for a people without land” was already home to 700,000 Palestinians in 1919. This is the root of the problem, as we shall see.”

Can the Endless War be Ended? Read The Inbetween People and share your thoughts with me.



Marty

EMAILS

Since so much of every day in this publisher’s life is spent sending and receiving emails, it occurred to me that these three, being of particular interest to me, might be of interest to you as well, for they all provide insights into the business of books.


The first came from Ivan Goldman, whose last novel. ISAAC: A Modern Fable, has to do with the trials of a writer. You must read his blog, below, before you continue reading my response.

The second email, from me to Charles McGrath, Greg Cowles, and Scott Heller, was a way of clearing my mind of disputatious attitudes. McGrath was a wonderful and much appreciated editor of the Book Review who I had met on several occasions before he was replaced by Sam Tanenhaus, but who still writes occasional reviews and columns. Greg Cowles is one of the assistant editors there now, a friendly, literate and interesting guy. I used to meet with him twice a year to present advance galley copies and occasionally have lunch with him. Scott Heller, in charge of the weekly Culture Desk, assigns reviews to the two daily reviewers who cover fiction, Janet Maslin and Michiko Kakutani, plus an occasional guest reviewer. That we’ve never had a second review there for the past 32 years cannot be attributed to him, as he’s only been at the Culture Desk since moving from the Boston Globe a couple of years ago.

Enough said. May you find what follows worth your investment of time. And your feedback is always welcome.

Marty Shepard


----- Original Message -----

From: Ivan G.
To: Martin Shepard
Cc: Judith Shepard
Sent: Friday, September 28, 2012 11:56 AM
Subject: Sorry

Marty, Judy–

My piece about the author’s naked pitch left out the fact that you did some expensive advertising for Isaac. I meant no offense, was writing generically, but it was thoughtless – the result of writing fast. I corrected the column.

Best,    Ivan

http://redroom.com/member/ivan-g-goldman/blog/authors-and-the-naked-sell


From: Martin Shepard
To: Ivan G.

Wonderful blog, funny and true. No need to apologize, but your thoughtfulness is still appreciated. Happens to us all the time as well: spectacular reviews are rarely followed by spectacular sales.

As far as promotion goes, much of it is silent, at least here. But I tell you this: We’ve been printing about 500 galley copies at considerable expense for each release and paying Baker & Taylor, then Library Journal and Booklist to do special mailings to a hand picked list of librarians. They send out 300 copies to librarians (it costs us over $1,000 for these 300 extra galley copies. We used to print about 150 copies before we started this project) and about $700 more to ship them to these folks who in turn charge fees for getting them out to the librarians. All this to increase orders and readers, hopefully. Frankly I don’t know if this is profitable or not, for only sales will determine that. The other 200 copies go out to reviewers and bloggers, agents, scouts etc. All this stuff costs a fair amount: fair to say–what with the monthly PW ads, it adds up easily to a couple of grand per title.

But it does get our name around, and our authors names around to those people who are at the heart of the book business.

Random House does not send out 300 galley copies of every novel they do to librarians. Too expensive for them. They will take out full page ads in the NY TIMES for a “Big Book,” but most of their titles are “Little”: It’s a publishing philosophy of “throw out a lot of titles, see which swim better, and follow with ads while the rest sink.” But of course all authors would wish that their publishers would take out a full page in the NY TIMES for about six to ten grand as a symbol of their support.

When we started 35 years ago with a full page in the Times Book Review, announcing our first Second Chance Press list–with some review quotes and a coupon at the bottom to order any of these six titles, the cost was a little over $600. It pleased the authors but only $60 worth of orders came in. I realized that if we kept advertising in the Times we’d be out of business within a year.

I always thought it better to put a small ad in PW, where serious readers read (a publication that has supported us greatly–and who we wanted to support in our own small way as the Big Six conglomerates havecut their advertisements down to a trickle), and putting our books in the hands of librarians where they might place orders for a system, is a much better approach.

We’ll see.

It’s a tough world out there for authors, and for publishers like us who are happy just keeping our noses above water in sharing good writers with those few people who still like to read good novels that aren’t written by famous people (and like Romney, we’re content to forget about that 47% or more who otherwise spend their spare time on smart phones, tweeting, facebooking, or watching television exclusively: the only attitude we share with Romney).

Keep up your drumbeats. They are all readable and, essentially, true as Truth can be.

Sending this correspondence and your blog out to all our other authors who are still alive and have email addresses, to our staff and agents we know – about 300 people. Worth reading it all, I think and sharing the current situations concerning writers and publishers alike.

Marty


* * *

----- Original Message -----

From: Martin Shepard
To: scott heller ; greg cowles
Cc: Chip McGrath
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2012 9:51 PM
Subject: Making peace with the Times and more fine reviews for DEAD ANYWAY-

Dear people:

You all work at the best newspaper in the country and I've finally come to terms with why my frustration level rises so often when it comes to coverage of our titles at the Times, and it comes down to this: that we have two different agendas.

One of the sustaining things for us is discovering, amongst the 5,000 plus submissions we receive each year, some extraordinary novelists that were invariably turned down by the six major conglomerates and their myriad imprints. There is a thrill that comes from being able to start, in effect, a "book club" of sorts where we can share their gifts with the public. Most actual book clubs recommend books to other members and their choices are usually based on reviews they read in major newspapers and magazines.

I've come to realize, with no bitterness, that the leading newspaper in the country (and one I still subscribe to for daily delivery out here in Sag Harbor) has its own agenda, which does not put great emphasis on discovering gems from relatively unknown--or new writers--published by small independent presses like ours.

So be it, no more harangues. But I do want to stay in touch and let you know what you might be missing. To that extent I attach all 13 excellent reviews we've had for Chris Knopf's 10th thriller, just published two weeks ago, starting with starred reviews in Booklist, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal. Plus, not attached, a 14th recommendation from Nancy Pearl on her NPR Book Lust program.

Whether true or not, I can't help but think that if Hachette, or Random House, or St Martins, or Penguin, or Simon and Schuster published DEAD ANYWAY, it would have gotten major coverage at the Times, both at the Culture Desk and in the Book Review. Being heavy advertisers, which we are not, has to count for something, and there is no use lamenting the way the world works. It simply is what it is.

But our excitement in discovering and being able to publish people like Leonard Rosen and Chris Knopf and David Freed and other mystery writers--as well as non-mystery novelists like Daniel Klein and Charles Davis and Emma McEvoy, and Marc Shuster among many others, remains undiminished, And rather than fault the Times for having a different agenda than ours, it makes me cherish those publications and bloggers and journals that share our values.

Wishing you all well and hope you get to see what others have to say about Chris Knopf’s remarkable new novel.

Marty