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.
