Pardon a bit of navel-gazing, but I am tickled that Nemo, a Finnish publisher, wants to take a gamble on translating In the Wind for a Finnish audience. This is thanks to a Finnish reader somehow getting a copy of it, enjoying it, and bringing it to the publisher’s attention. Thanks to him, to Ann-Christine Danielsson, and to Nina Karjalainen, the publisher for taking a leap of faith. I’m extra happy because -

• Finland rocks. Helsinki is a wonderful liveable city with neo-classical, art nouveau, and very modern architecture. They have a gorgeous public library in Tampere that amazed me many years ago because they served delicious ice cream. Back then, that would have been heresy in the US. Now we’re catching on to the idea that food and books do go together. They now have a Moomin museum in the basement. Moomins are another reason I love Finland.

• The Finnish language is amazing. I love the way it looks and sounds. (That’s why I gave my main character a Finnish name; it sounded good. Shallow, I know.) I think it would difficult to learn, though. Here’s how Nemo presents one of their translated authors: “Marcia Muller on syntynyt Detroitissa Michiganissa vuonna 1944. Opiskeltuaan kirjallisuutta ja tiedotusoppia Muller muutti San Franciscoon. Hän työskenteli lehtimiehenä ja haastattelijana kirjoittaen yksityiskohtaisia kuvauksia ihmisistä ja heidän elinympäristöistään. Romaanihenkilönsä McConen tapaan Muller harrastaa lentämistä. Hän on kirjoittanut 27 rikosromaania ja toimittanut miehensä, rikoskirjailija Bill Pronzinin, kanssa rikosnovelliantologioita.” Isn’t that fabulous?
  
• Finns read a lot. I told a friend, a professor of Scandinavian Studies, about this and he said, “that’s great! Finns read more than anyone.” Gotta love a country where reading is so popular.
• Scandinavian crime fiction is the best in the world. The. Best. Just look at who’s up for the CWA International Dagger this year. I rest my case. So incredibly cool to be able to share a bit of shelf space with the best of the best.

Now, back to our usual ranting and raving . . .

Shelf Awareness has been profiling interesting tidbits from BEA and one of them was a presentation about a New England independent bookstore, Northshire, that offers print on demand services with a rented Espresso machine. People enjoy watching it make books, and the store sells 150 to 200 Espresso-printed books per month. Given the machine costs a thousand dollars a month to rent, requires a full time staff person, plus takes up a 5′ x 15′ plus clearance chunk of floor space (and apparently a fair amount of under-the-breath cursing because it is finicky) the bookseller thinks it still has the potential to provide a comfortable profit, particularly if it could quickly fulfill orders for frontlist books that aren’t in stock.

But what is their Espresso serving now? Mostly self-published titles, which run $10-$15 for a 200-page book and involve staff time providing layout and other services. Lulu is cheaper, but Northshire is high-touch and has local appeal. They’ve essentially become a small publisher, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say a printer who provides some publishing services. They also print copies of public domain books through Espresso’s arrangement with the Open Content Alliance . There’s a theoretical arrangement with Lightning Source to provide mainstream publications, but very few in-copyright back- or front-list titles are currently available, which the bookseller thinks may be related to the  lack of the Espresso’s system to integrate with publisher’s inventory systems. Or maybe it’s one more technical hassle the publishing industry doesn’t want to undertake until it has blockbuster potential.

The new Espresso 2.0 was rolled out recently. (Northshire has the 1.5 veriosn.) You can see it at work in this promotional video printing a copy of Jason Epstein’s book in which he predicted an ATM-like machine that would print books from an electronic catalog on demand. He partnered with the inventor of the machine to founded the company that makes Espressos.

I can’t figure out the math. The machine costs a lot – far more than a $1,000 / month rental would support. It’s available in a handful of independent bookstores – one each in Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia; some university bookstores and libraries also have the machines. Are these demos just to get the word out? Though there is a market to produce nicely printed copies of things like reports and conference proceedings, as well as self-published cookbooks, memoirs, local histories, novels, and poetry, the lack of integration with publishers’ lists mean it won’t change mainstream book distribution, not unless things really change dramatically. That means there is no “greener” or more financially efficient book market as a result – just bookstores becoming print shops and adding an entirely new set of services to their business.

I think there’s a significant market that will endure for printed books. I think readers want to have high-quality books that have been carefully chosen, professionally edited and well-designed; hand-crafted, but not home-made. I would like to think there’s a less wasteful means of delivering them to readers that could be nearly as instant as it is with Kindle. (Don’t you think the reason they use a “whisper-net” is so that you can’t quite hear the price tag of that book you just bought on a whim?)  I’d like to think this efficient and fast delivery could be done without some vertically-integrated Wal-Mart of books becoming our one and only bookstore, self-publisher, and e-book vendor. But for every innovation that shows promise for the development of a healthy book culture that isn’t a wholly-owned subsidiary of big business, there are seemingly impossible barriers for making those innovations deliver books from traditional publishers.

It amazes me that publishers rush to do business with Amazon even while fuming that they have artificially depressed the cost of e-books to sell their proprietary hardware and reset the retail price point. Why can’t publishers do more to maximize the potential that independent booksellers have to create a healthy and innovative book culture? There has to be way.

This snack from Publisher’s Lunch reported from BEA caught my eye:

Macmillan’s John Sargent underscored that “you shouldn’t focus on Google as the danger point; the danger is what Google enables in making a copy and giving it to libraries,” whose mission to is disseminate information for free. “It becomes a very dangerous world when piracy exists, most importantly,” Sargent said, “to get control of the digital copies that libraries are going to have.”

On noes! Free copies!! Agghhh, run for your lives!!!

But, uh . . . the books being digitized belong to the libraries. And they can’t share the digital versions without getting their asses sued. So what are you so worried about, exactly? That pirates will hack Hathi Trust?

Why aren’t you all freaked out about that search inside full text at Amazon? Oh, right! [smacks head] They sell books, so they’re okay. None of that scary free stuff. Whew.

Wired weighs in on U Mich’s renegotiation with the Google Books library project, and the title pretty well sums up their interpretation “UMich gets Better Deal in Google’s Library of the Future Project.” (Is that what’s called now? Cripes. All your book are belong to us.)

What cracks me up is the final, puzzled line.

Google will sell full-text access to all the books in its index to libraries and institutions, but critics say the price of that will be set very high . . .

That’s why giving UM (and possibly the other scanning libraries) some method to contest the price matters. But it’s not clear why UM would protest the pricing of such institutional subscriptions, because the changes also mean Google will subsidize the entire cost of UM’s institutional subscriptions.

Man, these guys truly do not get libraries!

Mayo Clinic researchers recently presented a study that compared the incidence and type of crime depicted on popular CSI television shows and CDC data. The results are not all that surprising, but they point out that there are real public health issues related to how we conceptualize risk.

When researchers compared the shows to the CDC data, they discovered the strongest misrepresentations were related to alcohol use, relationships, and race among perpetrators and victims. Previous studies of actual statistics have shown that both perpetrator and victim were often under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs when the crime occurred, differing from what the shows portrayed. Also, CSI and CSI: Miami were more likely to have described the victim and the attacker as Caucasian, which is misrepresentative. Finally, according to the CDC data, homicide victims typically knew their assailant; however, the television series were more likely to have portrayed the perpetrator as a stranger. All of these findings were significantly different when compared to the data.

There are, of course, social justice issues involved as well as public health ones. If the only crime victims who we sympathize with are white, if we build up a fear of stranger violence and neglect intimate partner violence, if we forget that mastermind criminals are rare and drunks behaving stupidly are not, it influences what interventions and punishments we fund and how we conduct criminal justice in this country, which is often criminal but not always justice.

I’ve borrowed from the research of Joel Best, Philip Jenkins, and others to think about how anxiety is used in the formation of social issues (it’s something we also talk about in a course I teach) and how crime fiction reflects the manipulation of anxiety involved in claims-making in some interesting ways.

More about the study can be found here and on YouTube.

Hat tip to Free Range Kids.

This appetizer cited in Publisher’s Lunch is a bit mind-blowing: the number of self-published (or “on demand” books) is outpacing the number of books published by . . . um, publishers.

“Our statistics for 2008 benchmark an historic development in the U.S. book publishing industry as we crossed a point last year in which On Demand and short-run books exceeded the number of traditional books entering the marketplace,” said Kelly Gallagher, vice president of publisher services for New Providence, N.J.-based Bowker. “It remains to be seen how this trend will unfold in the coming years before we know if we just experienced a watershed year in the book publishing industry, fueled by the changing dynamics of the marketplace and the proliferation of sophisticated publishing technologies, or an anomaly that caused the major industry trade publishers to retrench.”

I don’t think you can chalk this up to retrenchment. A lot of people want to have their name on a book, and the technology is there to make it happen. So much for those who say the book is dead.  I think we’re setting a record with over a half million new books entering the market.

I’ve been neglecting this blog – with a great many writing projects all coming due, and other blogs that I contribute to clamoring more loudly, I’ve simply had no time – but Kerrie pointed me to this meme, started at State of Denmark (not a Scandinavian crime fiction reference, well unless you count all those murders in Hamlet) and it seems a chance to catch up and reflect a bit. Besides, it reminds me of the why I teach meme (inspired by the brilliant Dr. Crazy’s Why I Teach Literature) which was a nice chance for a lot of people to step back and reflect.

1.  How long have you been blogging?

Since before I started using proper blog software. I created a blog-like page for my library’s website years ago. The html was criminally bad. It’s much easier now to share information with the community. In fact, I’m reminded that a student showed me Blogger many years ago; he’s now a seasoned faculty member at another academic library. He’s still teaching me things.

2.  Why did you start blogging?

The first foray was to replace an irregular library newsletter with a nimbler, more responsive means of providing information (and avoiding the huge headache of layout and creating content for a newsletter that was, frankly, one newsletter too many for most of its potential audience). Later I started  my personal blog for a similar reason: to replace another static web page that was tricky to update, one containing book reviews. THEN LibraryThing came along, so I started posting most of my reviews there, except for ones that I write for Mystery Scene and Reviewing the Evidence, so the blog morphed, as they do. (I had to look this up, because I couldn’t actually remember why I started my blog.)

3.  What have you found to be the benefits of blogging?

Since using it for quick easily-illustrated news from the library, I started blogging for ACRLog and began my own blog, then went slightly blog-mad. I now use blogs for all of my courses, very occasionally contribute to Free Exchange on Campus, try to contribute to a blog I started for students interested in the field of librarianship, and am using a blog to supplement a  faculty development program on my campus. Oh, and I have a fairly active Scandinavian Crime Fiction blog, a way of updating a website on the topic that was a summer research project last year.  My own blog has evolved into a place where I can integrate the various strands of my life – librarian, academic, novelist, citizen. Another thing about blogging: since discovering FriendFeed I am finding it a wonderfully communal activity. (They also have a kicking widget that I just added to my professional CV. It so much less busy and frantic than most widgets.)

4.  How many times a week do you post an entry?

In my various blogs, probably two or three times.

5.  How many different blogs do you read on a regular basis?

Probably 20 or so daily. Maybe more. I know, it’s an addiction.

6.  Do you comment on other people’s blogs?

Just try and stop me.

7.  Do you keep track of how many visitors you have?  Is so, are you satisfied with your numbers?

No, I try not to pay attention. At my personal blog I’m mainly working things out that are bugging me. I’m not doing it for marketing purposes. The conflation of self-reflection and self-fashioning-as-self-promotion is one thing that I find both fascinating and disturbing abut blogs. Just because we can count visitors doesn’t mean we should. It’s a bit like equating your real social capital by how many “friends” you have at Facebook.

8.  Do you ever regret a post that you wrote?

Not so far.

9.  Do you think your audience has a true sense of who you are based on your blog?

Usually as a writer, I’m very concerned about audience, but in my personal blog, I mostly say what’s on my mind, for me as much as for anyone else. It’s a space for me to nibble away at things that I’m thinking about. That probably does give people a good idea of who I am – someone with strong political beliefs, a visceral aversion to mingling marketing with identity, a person who loves books and reading and is curious about the publishing world, a librarian with an anarchist streak – but I’m not doing it to tell the world who I am. I’m just putzing around.

10.  Do you blog under your real name?

Yes.  And under my real self, as well.

11.  Are there topics that you would never blog about?

I doubt I’d ever say anything personal about my family. If they have things they want to share with the world, that’s their option, but it’s not something I feel is my option. (This is why I would never write a memoir – too intrusive into the lives of people close to me. Also incredibly boring.) I also don’t blog about how to write or my path to publication or how to market books. There are plenty of other people who blog about that, and I have really nothing useful to say. My path to publication was sheer luck; I don’t really get marketing, and I’ve never taken a course on how to write fiction and wouldn’t presume that I know anything useful about it.

12.  What is the theme/topic of your blog?

My personal blog is, for me, a place to work out things that I’m thinking about. There’s something about the medium that is nicely informal and immediate, which is a change from the more academic or polished writing that I do elsewhere. I like the bracing logic of an academic argument, and I like writing fiction in someone else’s first person voice, but blogging is like having a conversation with a friend.

13.  Do you have more than one blog?  If so, why?

Mine are all for different purposes. Students seem to like the course blogs, at least being able to find the readings and syllabus in one place and not having to find that packet of paper handed out on the first day – and it’s kind of  neat way to create an open course. That’s why mine are licensed under Creative Commons. Sharing is good.

That running man really gets around! Curtesy of Karen Meek’s Euro Crime blog – here he is running from Switch – after much other running around . . .

switcheroo

And there’s more! How far would you go to protect the ones you love? Only one man can unearth the heretic’s treasure – and he’s the last defense against the world’s deadliest threat. I’d run too. I mean, jeez – look at all the other times he’s been the only man on earth to save us all from bones, dust, sins, and God.

Funny thing is – everyone is so up in arms about copyright. Oh noes! what if things are copied? why, why, we’ll have the end of culture as we know it! Replication! Our creative life blood will drain into the valley of bones and turn to dust. Because God tells us it’s a sin. Piracy!

So instead we settle for what money can buy – the same freakin’ images over and over and over and over . . . because you see locking it up means you can sell it over and over and over, and that’s all good, right? Don’t look at any of those Creative Commons-licensed images! Those aren’t for sale, so they must not be worth anything. Besides, everyone knows a running man is the right image for every thriller.

Yup. I feel so much better about our culture now.

As I was just saying . . .

There’s a blurred line in social networks between communicating and selling.  And Leonie Margaret Rutherford has that borderland nicely nailed in a new article in First Monday, “Industries, Artists, Friends and Fans: Marketing Young Adult Fictions Online.” The abstract:

The Internet has facilitated the coming together of formerly more separated youth taste cultures, such that literary, screen and graphic fandoms now more readily overlap. Media industries have invested in online strategies which create an ongoing relationship between producers and consumers of entertainment media texts. Using the Internet marketing campaign for Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga as a case study, the paper examines the role of the publishing industry in marketing popular teen literary fiction through online channels in ways that often disguise promotional intent.

Fan culture and Web 2.0 are often described as being places where cultural hierarchies are disrupted and tastes are actively shaped by diverse audiences who gravitate to niches. Anita Elberse has challenged Chris Anderson’s claim that the “long tail” of niche items will win out in a world where audiences can make their own choices among a myriad of options. Elberse’s research suggests that digital buzz actually compounds the blockbuster effect. And Rutherford’s research shows how this works. As she puts it,”[o]stensibly democratic networks of online youth sociability exist in a complex and complicit relationship with the processes of global media industries.”

She quotes  from a Publisher’s Weekly story in which a publicist at Scholastic said, baldly, “part of the trick to marketing books to teens online is that the most effective results seem to come from the coverage that appears most organic, viral and uncommercial in nature.” Appears. In other words, when you sell something, do your best to make it look as if you’re just another fan, raving about a positive experience.

As the quote from Scholastic’s publicist illustrates, the lines between user–generated fan sociability, and industry–generated social marketing are blurred. Such overlaps demonstrate the informational circuit of what Nigel Thrift calls “knowing capitalism”. Audiences/users gain information about narrative remediations and consumer opportunities related to their interests, while publishers and media industries garner data about their audience base. Through user feedback, publishing and media industry stakeholders are able to make projections about the viability of merchandising or cross–platform products associated with their literary or screen media properties.

Rutherford points out that genre fiction, particularly women’s romance fiction, has traditionally built on a strong connection between fans and producers of fiction. But the marketing aimed at youth also is intended as recruitment for a future market by going after the youth demographic and building the kinds of loyal relationships previously developed between women readers and romance publishers. But there’s also another key element: “The marketing of young adult fictions has also increasingly been aligned with the cult of celebrity.” Meyers built her own website so she could align her image with fans and identify as a storyteller, a geek, one of them. But the feedback loop between the author and the fans and the fictional world builds a committed customer base. “The author, the series and its characters have become celebrity commodities, fuelled by Internet communities of interest, an intersecting, cross–media stardom.”

Which is all very thought-provoking. This research does seem to describe the mechanisms by which audiences cooperate with and are coopted by marketers in making blockbusters, which in turn gives audiences a sense that they are participating in something really, really big. Which, of course, means niches are all very well but it’s not where the cool kids want to be seen.

The attention economy, like our economy, apparently has a widening gap between the rich and the rest. And on the Internet, nobody knows you’re an advertisement.

Alternate titles for Denis Lehane’s books if they were chapters in an autobiography:

• No Blog Before the War
• Celebrity, Don’t Take My Hand
• Sacred: My Privacy
• Write, Baby, Write
• Prayers for Time to Do it Right

I’m not sure which item in Ali Karim’s interview with Dennis Lehane made me happier: that bringing Angie and Patrick back wasn’t a hangover-induced rash promise made to fans at the Muskego Public Library, or that Denis Lehane has no website, no blog, no Facebook page, no presence on Twitter, and no desire to spend his time promoting himself. He wants to write. That’s his job. Being Denis Lehane the Famous Author is neither his job nor his ambition. All that focus on creating and maintaining a public persona gets in the way of what he wants to, which is write.

Thank god for a breath of sanity.

I was thinking about this the other day after watching a documentary on a punk record store in London that began to distribute DIY albums that nobody else would have produced or distributed, then became a label, and ultimately another corporation. But in the beginning there was the idea of a DIY alternative, one that spoke truth to power and created radical music totally, radically outside the power structure of commercial entertainment.

While some small publishers are doing that, I haven’t seen a similar motive behind most of the self-publishing wave. Most people who self-publish are doing so in the hopes that they will make it just like the celebrity authors – that they will skirt around the barriers and go straight to readers who will find these books just as good or better than books from major houses and then, if things really go well, they’ll get a huge advance from one of the big houses. DIY is everywhere these days – but most of it’s not alternative the way zines were/are – because there’s still near-total buy-in to the commercial fever-dream that corporate entertainment hath wrought. In fact, most of social networking is essentially a form of self-advertising. Marketing, identity, and creativity have morphed into creative self-advertising.

What is up with this?

People build stuff on Second Life so that they can get into real estate that isn’t real. Real money, totally unreal goods. It’s weirdly inverse to the DIY punk ethos and yet a perfect metaphor for our times. Can’t afford all the shit you’re supposed to want because other people have it and you’re told you should have it to be a real, live person? Let’s pretend with credit cards. Can’t be a famous author? Make you sure you have the website, the blog, the book trailer, the twitter account, and it’s just like being famous. Cut out the middleman and become your own corporate shill.

I think it’s terrific that people have such an urge to be creative that they write, they make films, they make music, and they share it. But there’s a strange unwillingness to examine the consumerist definition of success and all the unhealthy self-fashioning that surrounds our current wave of creativity. And somehow our alternative channels that enable sharing of creative work are all designed around the same exhausted idea that marketing is ultimately what human communication is for.  And if we have nothing to sell, we can always sell ourselves.