Cheaper from Amazon: really?

Above: on the left, books by Julian Stannard and D. Nurkse selling from the CBe website at £8.99 each (free UK postage); on the right, the same books selling from Amazon (the Nurkse apparently published in 1838) at £37.87 and £46.38.

Students on Creative Writing courses, and other writers too, are sometimes invited to events at which they will meet ‘industry experts’ – literary agents advising on how to pitch your work, and editors advising on what kind of writing they are looking for, and marketing people advising on how to use social media to promote your work. This is helpful and good. But few literary agents, in my experience, know anything about how books are actually sold, and few editors in mainstream publishing: that's for the guys down the corridor or the IT crowd in the basement. Few editors of literary magazines, few reviewers, few authors, few journalists covering the 'arts'. Books simply appear – by magic – in bookshops or on online retail platforms. I don’t claim expertise here myself; I know a little more than I used to, but am a lot more confused.

I blame the public schools. Going back a bit, I blame the Greeks and the Romans, whose celebration of the life of the mind and disdain for manual labour – plenty of busts of emperors and philosophers, none of the engineers who designed the aqueducts (300 in the province of Gaul alone) or those that built them, mostly slaves – was incorporated into the English public schools. While claiming to instil self-reliance these schools turned out generations of men who couldn’t boil an egg or wash their own clothes (cooking and washing were work for their slaves: women), including a succession of prime ministers whose ability to quote a Latin tag was perceived as intelligence. The class division enshrined here still prevails in much of UK life, publishing included. The media run interviews with authors and sometimes editors, people from the sexy side of publishing, but not with sales managers and printers.

The above is prompted by CBe’s problems with the listing of its titles on Amazon. Some CBe titles are not listed at all on Amazon; some are listed but don’t appear when you type the author’s name in the search box; some are listed inaccurately (the Francis Ponge book is not a ‘French edition’); some are listed but only available from third-party sellers (though the books are available to Amazon if it chooses); some are listed but also not (search the author's name and a book with the same title as their CBe book appears but it's some other author's, some other publisher's, book); and some are listed but at vastly inflated prices: the Amazon mark-up on the cover price for 10 CBe titles is between 300 and 500%.

Most readers of this newsletter probably don’t buy CBe books from Amazon, but other potential buyers might. The authors would like to reach these people, as would I. I’ve been told that my problem is that I don’t have ‘control of the metadata’, and this is true. But even if I did have that control – transmitting data in a specific program standard to the various listing and selling parties – I’ve been told by ‘industry experts’ (them again, but here I do mean experts: people who know how this works or doesn’t) that there are interface problems between the several parties sending and taking the data (Nielsen, Gardners, distributors, Amazon and holders of vendor accounts with Amazon). If you are a bestselling author published by Penguin Random House then Amazon will probably work for you, because they will make it work; if neither, not. You are cannon fodder.

Please buy from your local bookshop, or ask them to order in. Or from the CBe website. If you buy, for example, Dan O’Brien, War Reporter; D. Nurkse, Voices over Water; JO Morgan, Long Cuts; Julian Stannard, What were you thinking of?; Beverley Bie Brahic, Hunting the Boar; Andrew Elliott, Mortality Rate, from the CBe website, you’ll be paying £54.96, or £45 if you order them as a bundled Season Ticket; free UK postage. If you buy the same books from Amazon, famous for its discounts, you’ll be paying £241.02.

Below, the next books: Will Eaves, Invasion of the Polyhedrons, and Charles Boyle, Invisible Dogs. Publication dates in October and November (same date as the US election), but available now from the website. There’ll be a launch event for both on 8 October; if you’d like to come, please email me.

Amazon Idiocy

Jean Follain, Paris 1935, trans. Kathleen Shields, had an excellent half-page review in the TLS last month. On Amazon, the text accompanying the cover image reads as follows:

Immerse in captivating narratives and enrich mind with our latest book collection. Explore diverse genres, from thrilling mysterles to heartwarming romances, ensuring there's something for every reader. With engaging plots and vivid characters, these books promise to transport to new worlds and inspire imagination.

Similar bot-generated nonsense appears on pages for some other CBe titles.

Some CBe titles are not listed on Amazon at all. Some are listed in the wrong category (not Books). When a CBe title is listed, it can be hard to find: when I type an author’s name into the Amazon search box, their CBe titles often do not appear (but their titles from other publishers do); but when I type in the author’s name plus book title, a listing does sometimes appear. And here’s an odd one: I type in a CBe author’s name and a book with the same title as the one they have written appears but it is a completely different book, by another author; the book by the CBe author is not listed at all.

Random other idiocies: for example, the CBe edition of Leila Berg’s Flickerbook is not listed at all, but the cover image of the CBe book is being used to sell a Kindle edition of the book not published by CBe. And if you thought buying from Amazon means you get a book cheap, that is often not true: a CBe title with a cover price of £12 is selling from Amazon at £35.51; another with a cover price of £8.99 is selling from Amazon at £46.38, and another at £33.17.

If you do manage to find a CBe title on Amazon, the information is often inadequate or misleading. One reason for this is that I have only a basic account with Nielsen, the UK central book data place from which Amazon takes its info. But even if I upgrade my account with Nielsen, the formatting limitations on the way I can input information (e.g., review quotes) make the text barely readable when fed through to Amazon.

Many other small presses are treated by Amazon in the same way and CBe is far from alone in having these problems. Today I was told that “if you don’t have your own vendor account and are distributed by Gardners (and therefore operating through theirs), there is currently a known technical issue whereby the two systems aren’t aligned and it’s causing issues to certain publishers’ feeds, despite those feeds coming from third party Nielsen.”

A vendor account! That might give me (some) control of the contents of the listings! But that’s not going to happen because (a) you have to be invited, you can’t simply apply; and (b) even if they did invite me they wouldn’t let me in through the door because CBe is not a registered company and I couldn’t give them the legal and financial details they require.

Because Amazon treats the information on CBe titles supplied to it with utter contempt, and because Amazon is not fit for (my) purpose, I want out. But cannot get out, because for a book to have an ISBN I have to register it with Nielsen, and Amazon captures that info from Nielsen. Solutions … De-couple Nielsen and Amazon? Nationalise Amazon? Or should I simply not bother with ISBNs and not register with Nielsen? (Thereby making the books available only from the website.)

Polyhedrons and Dogs

Will Eaves, Invasion of the Polyhedrons (poems plus essays), and me, Invisible Dogs (fiction) – the two autumn CBe titles, with official publication dates in October and November but they are available now for pre-order from the website. Will Eaves has another new book, The Point of Distraction, from TLS Books.

These two new books complete a shelf, below. An flexible unit. Or a collective noun. Begun on the left with four books published in 2007, without any plan to do more, they have now reached the limit of space on the right, so a line break will be needed before next year’s titles. (The books on the shelf are ‘file copies’, in some cases the only ones I have. Some titles are now out of print, some are now with other publishers, some have been reprinted or re-issued with new covers. I could count them but no, let’s just say a shelf.)

Below, London Mole reading glasses. I ordered +3 lens power and they sent +1.5; I now have my +3 and they said not to bother returning the ones I can’t use, so if anyone wants those (just the one pair going) simply buy one of the Season Tickets (6 books of your own choice for £45, or 12 for £80) available from the website home page and tell me if you need +1.5 glasses to read the books and I’ll send them.

It has been a slow summer and this is fine but I do need to sell more books. Thank you.

Dora Maar in (not yet) her own right

The same woman looking from the same window on the cover of (left) Paris 1935 by Jean Follain, translated by Kathleen Shields, published by CBe last April, and (right) The Paris Muse by Louisa Treger, published by Bloomsbury on 4 July.

The woman is Dora Maar and the photograph is a self-portrait. Dora Maar is currently receiving attention: as well as the book by Louisa Treger (‘a novel’), an exhibition of her photographs opens this week at the Amar Gallery in London, and a play titled Maar, Dora will be performed at the Camden Fringe in August.

Good. But let’s look how our attention is sought, and the language used. The headline to a piece in the Observer yesterday describes Maar as ‘Picasso’s tormented muse’; the first paragraph begins: ‘Dora Maar is renowned as Pablo Picasso’s “weeping woman”, the anguished lover who inspired him to repeatedly portray her in tears. Now a London gallery is seeking to re-establish her as a pioneering surrealist artist in her own right.’ (The italics are mine.) The blurb for the Bloomsbury book begins: ‘“Living with him was like living at the centre of the universe. It was electrifying and humbling, blissful and destructive, all at the same time!!??”' (The exclam and query punctuation marks are my own.) And continues: 'Paris, 1936. When Dora Maar, a talented French photographer, painter and poet, is introduced to Pablo Picasso, she is mesmerized by his dark and intense stare. Drawn to his volcanic creativity, it isn’t long before she embarks on a passionate relationship with the Spanish artist that ultimately pushes her to the edge.’ The blurb for the play on the Camden Fringe website does better: ‘Dora Maar (1907–1997) was a prolific photographer and artist, developing her career in fashion photography, before hailing as one of the first women in the surrealist movement. She used her creations as a social commentary on beauty, gender and war. However in today’s conversations, her name only appears after a man’s: the infamous Pablo Picasso. He needs no introduction (and we are not inclined to give one, he'll do it for us anyway).’

In 2019 Dora Maar’s work was shown at the Tate in an exhibition jointly organised with the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Guardian review was headlined: ‘Dora Maar: how Picasso’s weeping woman had the last laugh’. In 2022 an exhibition of her contact prints was shown at the Huxley Parlour gallery in London, trailed by a Guardian article headlined ‘Dora Maar: Hidden photos by the artist include intimate portraits of Picasso’. If a woman artist takes a lover who is, or becomes, more famous than she is, how many times does she need to be ‘rediscovered’ before she allowed to exist in her own right?

I understand the mechanism. Praise to the curators who do the rediscovering, but they do so within a cultural context (art history, journalism) that is still deeply sexist. (I don’t doubt that some people who go to the shows still believe that Maar’s work is being shown because of her connection with Picasso.) I am not immune. On the copyright page of Paris 1935 I describe Dora Maar as ‘photographer, painter, Surrealist, activist, and teacher and lover of Picasso’ – dragging in the big name when, I now think, I should have left him out. But it is a good photo, and please buy Paris 1935.

Newsletter June 2024: a balancing act

In 1631 an edition of the Bible was printed with a word missing from one of the Ten Commandments: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ The printer was fined and his license to print was revoked. It’s easily done. The most recent CBe book – Joshua Segun-Lean, Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers – was printed with a word missing (not ‘not’, in this case) from the title on the title page. My fault entirely. A short second print run has the title right but, annoyingly, the images printed not so well, and there are a lot of images: see the book’s page on the website. The first print run now has stickers on the title page.

My own license to publish has not (yet) been revoked but CBe’s continuing to publish depends entirely on readers buying the books. Putting out books with a niche appeal and that may sell only a hundred or so copies – Do Not Send Me Out is a case in point – carries the risk of not attracting enough readers. But there’s little point in publishing titles with a (perhaps) wider appeal, even if I liked them, if I’m bad at marketing and distribution. To become better I’d need to invest in outside help and even if I had the money to do that I’d be playing catch-up, having to sell a lot more to recoup the investment, a model to which I’m not suited. (I’m not going to the Arts Council. There’s an arrogance in my saying that, I know, but the point of the Arts Council is not to service old white geezers.)

The figures for the last financial year (and the year before, and before) show a net loss. A tolerable loss, for now; probably less than what my neighbours spend on their summer holidays. It’s a balancing act, and for 16 years CBe has kept its balance, but in this phoney summer CBe does need to sell some books.

Five new titles so far this year: Lara Pawson, Spent Light; Katy Evans-Bush, Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle; Jean Follain, Paris 1935; Tadeusz Bradecki, The End of Ends; Joshua Segun-Lean, Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers. Two more will follow in October/November: Will Eaves, Invasion of the Polyhedrons; Charles Boyle, Invisible Dogs. (I don’t have to pay an advance on that one.) There is also the backlist of around 70 titles (there have been more but some original CBe titles are now with other, bigger publishers). Pick and choose: 12 books for £80, 6 for £45 – see the Season Tickets on the website home page.

Robert Barker, the printer of the Bible with the abbreviated Commandment, died in 1643 in a debtors’ prison.

Newsletter May 2024: voters, book-buying and stickers

In the elections this month more than half of the eligible voters in London, where I live, didn’t bother to vote. In the council elections across the UK, which so puffs itself as a model of democracy, the turn-out was even smaller. Even in General Elections around a third of eligible voters simply do not care. The lowest turn-outs are in places that would benefit most from political change.

Roughly the same proportion of the population who don’t vote also don’t buy books. Both mainstream politics and publishing appear to take that level of apathy as a given and devote all their resources to chasing returns from those who have signed up. Chasing their tails? (An academic paper on ‘Environmental Effects on Compulsive Tail Chasing in Dogs’ is here.) Media coverage doubles down on this, crunching numbers and ingrown toenails while not bothering to let me know that many other European countries have higher voter participation (Poland, last October) and book-buying numbers than the UK.

I don’t claim that CBe has any strategy for reaching out; I speak to the converted, because these are the channels. But because I don’t have to win an election or keep shareholders in clover I can publish, for example, this: Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers, by Joshua Segun-Lean. Sparse text, plenty pictures. As with a number of other CBe titles, there is no established readership for this kind of book. It will find its way, or it won’t; either way, the book is now here and I’m proud to have published it.

Some of the mistakes I make are plain stupid. The first print run of Do Not Send Me Out Among Strangers was fine except for a word missing in the title on the title page, my fault entirely. And a bad typo. A corrected run is in train, but some of the books sent out will have stickers on the title page. Let me know if you’d prefer everything to be unstickered and perfect.

This coming Sunday, the 12th, I and Kathleen Shields, the translator, will be talking about Jean Follain’s Paris 1935 on a Zoom event hosted by the indefatigable David Collard. If you’d like to attend, please see here.

Tadeusz Bradecki’s The End of Ends, also published this month, arrives alongside a new annual prize which ‘crosses the borders between artistic disciplines, genres, subject matter and cultures. Put simply, it celebrates books in which story-telling fiction and non-fiction writing combine in an original way.’ Nothing tricky here; this is regular CBe territory. The website for the prize is now live.

Two reprints this month, at present available exclusively from the website: Fergus Allen, New and Selected Poems, which was first published by CBe in 2013, and Carmel Doohan, Seesaw, first published in 2021. I wrote about these and the practice of reprinting – and remaindering – more generally in a blog post last month.

The new CBe titles published so far this year are Lara Pawson, Spent Light; Katy-Evans-Bush, Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle; Jean Follain, Paris 1935 (trans. Kathleen Shields); Tadeusz Bradecki, The End of Ends (trans. author and Kate Sinclair); and the Joshua Segun-Lean book. Total cover prices, £55.96. Or: the Season Tickets (UK only) on the website home page, those five plus another of your own choice for £45; or 12 books for £80, free UK postage. Have a look at the previous books. Here, for example, is a new review - online today – of Philip Hancock's House on the A34. You don’t even have to choose, you can let me do that, in which case Leila Berg’s Flickerbook is always going to be one of them. Please do vote, and do buy books.

On print runs and reprints

The number of copies I order when I send a book to print largely depends on which side of the bed I got out of in the morning. Sometimes I guess about right. Sometimes not: of certain titles whose print runs I ordered in buoyant, optimistic mood on a sunny day, I have many more copies than I realistically expect to sell.

When a book sells out, to reprint or not to reprint? This is hard. A number of titles first published by CBe are now with bigger publishers so this is their problem, not mine. Some titles, very few, I’ve let go out of print. Some titles sell only a handful of copies a year but feel core to the list, so I keep them in print. Each book is a special case.

Above, new reprints of Fergus Allen, New and Selected Poems (first published by CBe in 2013) and Carmel Doohan, Seesaw (first published in 2021). The original editions had brown card covers and endsheets; the reprints don’t, because the prices of the printer who offers the brown-card option have risen steeply. And the cover prices of these reprints are higher than for the original editions – because printing costs have increased generally, and because when I order a very short run (as for these reprints) the unit price goes up.(There are still some copies of Seesaw available from the website at the original price.)

Conversely, of course, the bigger the print run, the lower the unit cost. It’s tempting. And money being money, the risk of having to pay storage for unsold stock can be covered … The water gets murky here, but let’s say you are a poet who is published by Faber, who expect your book to sell well because they are Faber, but if it doesn’t here’s the get-out: remainder merchants. To whom, when a title stops selling, they will off-load copies, while still keeping some in stock. See, for example, the website of Pumpkin Wholesale, who currently offer 36 Faber poetry titles (including five by Christopher Reid and four by David Harsent, plus others by Muldoon and Hofmann and Paterson and Ishion Hutchinson et al) at knock-down prices.

Nothing illegal is going on here, but regular booksellers who want to stock those titles have to pay more to Faber to order them in than, for example, I can buy them for at second-hand shops who also stock remainders (such as the excellent Judd Books). Faber contracts used to promise, maybe still do, that if they remainder stock they will offer the books first to the author; but I’m pretty sure Reid and Harsent and Muldoon et al have no idea this is happening. When I last queried this practice with Faber they avoided the word remaindering altogether, talking instead of ‘modest stock reductions in order to control inventory’ and assuring me that this is ‘standard practice in the industry’.

Asking about stock levels takes you into Wild West territory. I’ve heard talk of boxes of books that have fallen off the back of a lorry. Sometimes it’s cheaper to pulp books rather than keep them on the warehouse shelves. Publishers are not known for being sentimental.