Book View, September 2000

By PT Editors
September 1, 2000
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PEOPLE


Rosanna Hansen has been named SVP, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Weekly Reader Corp. She left Reader’s Digest Children’s last month. . . Liz Maguire is leaving Free Press for Basic, where she will be Associate Publisher, Editorial Director. . . Since Abrams bought STC and Smithmark, there have been several casualties, including SVP Director of Sales & Marketing Steve Tager (still reachable through STC), and Rights Director Christian Red, with others to come. . . Nicholas Callaway’s (re)transition back to publishing from packaging includes moving to S&S for distribution, hiring Michael Murphy (ex-Publisher of Morrow) as Director of Sales and Marketing and Audrey Barr (formerly of Larousse Kingfisher Chambers) as Trade Sales and Marketing Manager, and retaining the services of Rosemarie Morse for publicity. Associate Publisher Paula Litzky is leaving to pursue other interests. . . Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich, most recently AD of HarperInformation, has been promoted to VP, Senior Art Director for Adult Trade, reporting to Laurie Rippon. Joseph Montebello, 32-year veteran at Harper where he was most recently VP, Creative Director, has left the company. He will announce his plans shortly, but meanwhile is reachable at 212 242-3073.

Geoff Shandler has been named executive editor at Little, Brown (filling Bill Phillips’s slot). The New York Observer calls him “one of the hottest young names in New York book publishing.”. . . Geoffrey Burn has been named MD for Stanford U. Press. He previously ran a division of Thomson. Jill Cohen, Vice President of QVC Publishing, has announced that Karen Murgolo has joined the company as its Acquisitions and Rights Director. In this newly created position, Murgolo is responsible for acquiring new books and authors for a variety of nonfiction lifestyle titles, including cooking, decorating, beauty and fashion. She was Senior Editor at BookSpan’s The Literary Guild and GuildAmerica Books. . . Pam Art was named President and CEO of Storey Communications. . . As reported elsewhere, Lisa Queen steps down and Avon executive Jennifer Hershey is rumored to be in line for the job (but you know what those Harper rumors are like) . . . As noted elsewhere, Maria Guarnaschelli is going to Norton as VP, Senior Editor. She was previously at Scribner. . . Kathryn Court, who started there in 1977, has been named President of Penguin and Publisher of Plume. Clare Ferraro remains President of Plume.

VIRTUAL PEOPLE


Jessica Carter has been appointed New Media and Online Marketing Director, Knopf Publishing Group, reporting to Tony Chirico, who was himself recently promoted to EVP and COO. She was previously Promotion and New Media Manager, Vintage and Anchor. Jason Zuzga will be working with Carter as Knopf’s “New Media Coordinator.”

DEALS


HarperCollins’ Susan Friedland bought Marcella Hazan’s ‘valedictory,’ tentatively titled Master Classes and, Friedland say, “Marcella wants to tell the world everything she knows.” Susan Lescher is the agent on this “big figure” world rights deal. . . .

MEDIA


We’re so inundated with must-read stuff, that grok, The Industry Standard’s new magazine, was sitting on our desks for a full week before it got noticed. Or picked up. When we finally got around to it, there was a page headlined “Five Myths about E-Books” by Steve Zeitchik, with the winning opening lines: “Graduation ceremonies come close. Political campaigns, perhaps. But in their ability to generate gaseous conjecture at a complete remove from reality, it’s hard to beat e-books.” A booster himself, he goes on to bash the standard (death of literature, etc.) myths about them. The freshness of this launch issue loses a little credibility with the pic of Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche together, smiling for the camera.

By the way, some people, including Celia McGee, were confused by our wording last month when we said she was leaving her Daily News book beat for general assignment. She’s not leaving the paper; she remains as a features writer.

EVENTS


Word is that Bertelsmann CEO Thomas Middelhoff has sent around a memo to all of his NY employees informing them that he has rented out Radio City Music Hall on September 15, from 10–12 for all of his employees to gather together and hear him speak on the state of the company.

The repackaging and repromoting of Penguin’s The Pelican Shakespeare included corporate sponsorship of this year’s Shakespeare in Central Park, which led them to organize a celebration for friends and press: catered dinner at the open-air Delacorte theatre followed by a performance of Julius Caesar. (As anyone who has ever queued for the free tickets will tell you, being handed a ticket as you arrive is a rare treat.) Joining in the festivities were amongst others St. Marks Bookshop’s Bob Contant, BOMC’s Victoria Skurnick, B&N’s Karen Patterson, Borders’ Christine Cody and the Drama Bookshop’s Rozanne Seelan, widow of legendary owner Arthur Seelan, who died recently. The rest of the promotion involves a sweepstakes for $200 of Shakespeare publications from across Penguin Putnam imprints.

CYBER


Posted all around Barnes & Noble stores, right by the cash register, are brochures featuring happy looking people, and the line “Discover the Successful Author in You.” Yes, it’s iUniverse.com, coming to a store near you! Inside the brochure, we learn that “iUniverse is a new kind of publisher. . . . We have changed the publishing world by harnessing technology and the power of the Internet to give everyone the opportunity to get published. Moving beyond traditional publishing, iUniverse works with industry leaders to be faster and more efficient.” One industry leader, Steve Riggio (remember B&N’s 49% stake in the company) knows that this move won’t be welcomed by those very traditionalists. As he said in a recent Industry Standard interview, “Traditional publishers and editors have basically taken a very negative approach to this, believing a company like iUniverse is largely bringing works to the marketplace that are not worthy of being published by a traditional publishing house. And that’s really myopic, shortsighted and dumb.”

Ever been on Switchouse.com? It’s a service that allows users to buy, sell and swap products, including books, music, movies, and electronics. Though it claims to have only 1.8 million products available (as opposed to Ebay’s multiple millions), many bestselling books are being offered for swap. Tuesdays with Morrie, currently back at the top of the NYT hardcover bestseller list, is available, as are books by Grisham, Crichton, and Rowling. What did we get? Nothing. Alas, we read the terms of agreement, which make Ebay’s attempts to rein in its users look like the beginning of a police state.

FROM THE ANNALS


On the theory that the adage about the more things change, the more they stay the same is the ultimate truism, we present the following:

This is a conversation recorded by Robert Sterling Yard. He was a well-known figure in American publishing in the era between the turn of the 20th century and the end of WWI, and headed the imprint of Moffat, Yard, & Co. From his book The Publisher, written in 1913:

“The trouble with this business,” said a celebrated publisher, “is that you’re always between the devil and the deep sea. There’s harbor nowhere.”

“Explain yourself,” I cried. “Who is the devil and who the deep sea?”

“The public and the author, of course,” he replied.

“Ah!” said I; “but where does the literary agent come in?”

“You’re right,” he returned with a grin. “I’ll have to revise my simile and add a third monster, for the literary agent is surely the devil.”

And now for something completely different:

Woody Allen on reading: “I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”

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How Business Books Can Be Dirty Business

By PT Editors
August 1, 2000
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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT INSIDE.COM (8/8/00)

As publishers clucked over General Electric CEO Jack Welch‘s vertigo-inducing $7.1 million advance — right on the heels of former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin‘s $3.3 million one– it was only too obvious that business books have become, well, big business.

In fact, business book sales in the professional category rocketed to $852 million in 1998 from $490 million in 1992, growing more than twice as fast as the overall market for trade books, according to the most recent figures available from the American Association of Publishers.

But beyond those white-hot numbers is what some publishing executives call a vast ”gray area” in the way business books are sold and ranked. More than any other category, perhaps, the business book market is rife with unusual — some would say unethical — methods used by authors and their corporate sponsors to pump up sales and propel titles onto influential bestseller lists.

Five years ago, Business Week rattled the industry with an expose about the alleged ”dirty tricks” that helped a couple of ethically challenged authors get their book, The Discipline of Market Leaders (Perseus Books) on the New York Times and Business Week bestseller lists. The article revealed that management consultants Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema spent at least $250,000 to have a ring of buyers purchase 10,000 or more copies of their book from key retailers around the country. In addition, they funneled bulk purchases of another 30,000 to 40,000 copies through a web of bookstores. That way, sales would be counted in the retail tallies without arousing any single retailer’s suspicions that the overall purpose was to pad the numbers of reporting stores, and thereby — as Business Week writer Willy Stern put it — ”breach the integrity” of the bestseller list.

Treacy and Wiersema’s goal? Not to sell gazillions of books, though some business bestsellers do. (Discipline continues to be a bestseller.) More important for these consultants was to appear to have written a ”national bestseller.” Along with such a designation would come speaking engagements — at $30,000 a pop — and lucrative consulting assignments, which would increase the fortunes of CSC Index, the firm they worked for and with which they shared the copyright. CSC, after all, knew the power of brand-name authors. Two years earlier,  Reengineering the Corporation, a book written by CSC consultants Michael Hammer and James Champy, sold 2 million copies — and business at the consultancy boomed.

But it’s unclear whether Treacy and Wiersema’s 1995 public dressing down did anything to clean up the business book marketing process.

David Goehring, who was then sales director at Addison Wesley (which is now part of Perseus, where he is currently publisher) thinks that much of the problem back then was not the way books were sold, but rather, how their sales were reported: ”It’s important to recognize where an order comes from, and to note that.” He says that The New York Times now puts a dagger next to business books that have bulk sales to indicate that ”some bookstores report receiving bulk orders.” Robert Hughes, who compiles the Wall Street Journal‘s business book list, states via e-mail, ”Our suppliers of data let us know when books are bought in bulk, so we can take that into account when calculating our weekly lists.”

But some publishers admit there are still some practices that are best not divulged: ”It’s like running a spa, and you’re providing a discreet service,” says one business book publisher, referring to the delicate task of coordinating the needs of a small number of elite clients — CEOs, consultants and others with corporate brawn behind them — all of whom want to reap the rewards of bestsellerdom. To that end, the arrangements among author, company and publisher vary widely, executives say. A company might commit to outright sponsorship (paying a fee to get the book published), or agree to a contractual obligation to buy a minimum number of books, or even commit to buy unsold books.

And there’s where things begin to go gray. Whether those books are bought in bulk at a negotiated price, or through a bookstore (sometimes brought in to sell books at the end of an author’s speaking engagement), depends on how determined author and employer are to get the book on the lists. Corporate purchases alone can’t make a book a bestseller, but they’re proof of a company’s commitment to its author, which demands the ongoing attention of both the publisher and (if bulk sales go through bookstores) retailers. According to a rival publisher, there’s good evidence that corporate purchases accounted for only 5 percent of the total sale of one business book that may have benefited from questionable tactics, though the book went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies and topped the bestseller lists for months.

Factor in that there is not exactly a shortage of such lists. Like the Wall Street Journal, Business Week now publishes a weekly ranking of business titles (in 1995 it was a monthly). And Amazon and bn.com have endlessly refreshed lists that start with the top 50 titles, but splinter into myriad subcategories. Online retailers, in fact, have become by far the largest retailers of business books. One publisher said that Amazon and bn.com — which together usually account for 10 to 12 percent of retail sales — can outsell Barnes & Noble stores, and on specialized books, will outsell traditional retailers by a factor of 2 to 1. The Cluetrain Manifesto, a recent Perseus Books title, sold around 20 percent of its 100,000 copies through online retailers, though Goehring is quick to point out that this book began its life as a Web site, and therefore had an online following.

B&N insiders, meanwhile, report that business books are among the company’s top five categories, even though corporate and bulk discounted sales (which are not reported to bestseller lists) are now handled by its own B2B Business Solutions division. Sales through the division have become ”quite substantial,” says a B&N source. The business market has managed to create its own ”virtuous circle of promotion and sales,” says Adrian Zackheim, editor in chief of HarperInformation. Zackheim adds that the Internet and the news media contribute to the buildup of self-promotion, which is presumably not lost on the corporate world, where good publicity is a priceless commodity.

There are those in publishing who dispute the notion that large corporations are unfairly fueling the bestseller fires, though there’s no disputing that most other categories of books don’t benefit from the kind of largesse that, for example, Hewlett Packard exhibited when it gave each employee a copy of the story of the company by its revered co-founder, David Packard. Still, says one publishing veteran, ”It’s just not true that every company in the U.S. will buy copies.” And two people involved with the Jack Welch deal confirm that there were no contractual promises from GE to buy books from the publisher.

Given the hype, however, one assumes that a sizable number of GE’s 350,000 employees will want to read their exiting leader’s bits of corporate wisdom. It must comfort Time Warner Trade Publishing to know that if each of those employees receives a copy, there will be only 1.2 million more to sell to earn out Welch’s gargantuan advance.

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Brinkmanship at Borders

By PT Editors
August 1, 2000
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Is Borders’ “go-slow” approach to the online marketplace really a stroke of brilliance after all, as the Wall Street Journal recently postulated? The argument goes like this: despite the company’s listless approach to the Internet, which drove investors so bonkers that Borders rolled out the auction block earlier this year in search of a buyout partner, the nation’s #2 book retailer is actually sitting pretty by crafting a clicks-and-mortar bid to lure consumers into stores and cement customer loyalty.

“It’s more than just the clicks and bricks,” Borders president Tami Heim told the press at a recent briefing on the company’s multimedia plans. “We are creating a convergence experience for the customer.” As she unveiled a slew of tech-driven devices geared to blur the boundaries between terra firma and cyberspace, Heim hammered home Borders’ new corporate catchphrase: “the ultimate customer service experience.”

In other words, say “convergence” three times and click your heels. First, there’s Borders Vision, the new streaming video component of borders.com that offers video clips in six different genres and will also broadcast in-store author events, all developed with media firm Centerseat. Second, kiosks slated for roll-out to stores later this year will allow customers to search for a title and pinpoint the book’s location in the store (plus offer access to reviews, title recommendations, and email newsletters). The kiosks also enable customers to order a book from the Borders database for delivery in-store or elsewhere. And third, “E-Listening” stations, currently in test phase, will allow customers to scan a CD or audiobook barcode and listen to all tracks of the CD or a selection from a spoken-word audio track. Customers can preview 90-second trailers of films in the video departments, and a wireless incarnation is also in development that would let consumers wander about the stores freely, checking out audio selections at their leisure via a hand-held scanning and listening device. Len Cosimano, Borders vice president for multimedia, even waxed optimistic about a “complete wireless environment,” with customers downloading audiobooks in-store and popping e-books onto their Palm Pilots.

As are other cross-channel retailers, Borders is striving to integrate its “enormous” cache of customer purchasing information into one database. Theoretically, customers could log onto the company’s website and check on an order they made at a brick-and-mortar store, or vice versa. More crucial for sales, Borders hopes to leverage its customer data to create what Heim called a “one-to-one digital dialogue” with customers by pitching book and music picks via email and the borders.com site.

Of course, Borders could use the customers. The top three e-commerce websites for the second quarter of this year were Amazon (with 18.7% of consumers surveyed buying from the site), eBay (15.8%), and bn.com (6%), according to a joint study by U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray and Harris Interactive. But Borders.com didn’t make the cut of the top 11 sites. Moreover, Borders isn’t the only one with a few digital tricks up its sleeve. Bn.com has rolled out BNTV (produced by media production company Rain), where streaming “bookVideos” showcase various titles and where a daily author interview series is slated to appear this fall. The UK’s BOL TV, meanwhile, broadcasts interviews with writers every weekday at bol.com.

As to how Borders’ new vision will play on Wall Street, investors have yet to don their 3-D glasses. Acquisition talks fizzled last month when Borders brass rejected a reported $16-a-share offer from Apollo Management, Bain Capital, and Blackstone Group, which amounted to about $1.28 billion but was considerably lower than the $20 to $25 per share said to be expected for the company. And it remains to be seen how much a “convergence experience” will improve Borders’ standing in the marketplace. Still, the company can congratulate itself on having grasped the primary lesson of the New Economy. As Cosimano explained, “This is content, folks. That’s what this is all about.”

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Book View, August 2000

By PT Editors
August 1, 2000
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PEOPLE


Kristina Peterson leaves Random Children’s to take over as President of S&S’s Children’s division. . . . Meanwhile Vivian Antonangeli has left Reader’s Digest Children’s, following the arrival of Harold Clarke — previously President of RH — as VP Publisher New Market Development for Global Books and Home Entertainment. Antonangeli, who had been GM and President of the division, is reachable at 917 744-2955. Rosanna Hansen, who had been Publisher, has also left the company. . . . Paul Golob will be joining Public Affairs as executive editor in September, after less than three months as an editor on the New York Times Op-Ed page. Prior to that he was at Free Press and Basic. And speaking of FP, congrats to Bill Shinker, newly named VP and Publisher. . . . Warner’s Anita Diggs has joined Ballantine’s One World imprint as Senior Editor, reporting to Maureen O’Neal, and replacing Cheryl Woodruff, who has resigned
. . . . After 20 years, Mark Magowan, VP of Abbeville, is leaving to join Abrams after Labor Day as Associate Publisher, fueling rumors that his former employer is on the block. Meanwhile, his new employer is the likely purchaser of the assets of STC, Golden Turtle, and selected Smithmark titles.

The past month has brought a lot of change to media coverage of books: David Kirkpatrick has begun his tenure at the NYT, Elizabeth Manus has moved out of the New York Observer offices and is now on general assignment, and Celia McGee has moved to general assignment at the Daily News. Paul Colford from Newsday has replaced her on the book beat and will also write on the electronic and virtual media.

Quick takes: Tom Spain and Jackie Farber are out at Dell/Delacorte. The former had been Maeve Binchy’s editor, but when Carole Baron went to Dutton, the author followed her there. . . . Marcy Posner and Dan Strone have both left the NY office of the William Morris Agency. . . . Natalie Chapman has left Discovery Books, where she was Publishing Director. Dorothee Grisebach, Editor in Chief of Droemer Knaur, has been let go as part of the latest Holtzbrinck re-organization. . . . Publishing News reports that HarperCollins UK Sales and Marketing Director David North has been named MD of its trade division, Pan Macmillan. He replaces Ian Chapman, who left at the end of last year to head up S&S. Meanwhile, James Kellow, Marketing Director at Fourth Estate, is leaving to take up the new position of UK Sales and Marketing Director at S&S UK.

Erin McHugh, former Executive Vice President, Executive Creative Director, and partner at Spier New York, has joined the Empire State Pride Agenda, New York’s statewide gay and lesbian political advocacy organization, as Director of Member & Institutional Support. She served on the Pride Agenda’s Board of Directors for most of the past decade. Niko Pfund, Director and Editor-in-Chief, has left for OUP to become Academic Publisher. Pfund started his publishing career at OUP, as an editorial assistant. And Chris Rogers has been appointed College Editorial Director. He was previously Director, New Business Development for Wiley.

Nina Hoffman has been named EVP of the National Geographic Society and President of the Books and School publishing group. She was formerly SVP Publishing. . . . Michael Stephenson, currently VP, Editor in Chief of Doubleday Direct’s Specialty Clubs, has been given the same titles for New Book Development at BookSpan, overseeing book development for all clubs.

Motorbooks Publishing, a piece of the recently spun off SF Chronicle publishing group, has made the following appointments: Mike Hejny, formerly VP, Merchandising at Barnes & Noble, has been named VP of Sales and Marketing; Ben Jones is VP, Direct Marketing, formerly of Heritage House, Carl Fazio is VP and CFO, formerly McGraw-Hill Medical Division, and Brad Savola is VP and CTO, formerly of Fair Isaac database marketing.

DEALS


It’s been a big book summer, with the latest million-plus deal just announced: Sun Microsystems co-founder and chief scientist Bill Joy’s book has been sold by Kathy Robbins to Penguin’s Rick Kot for $1.6 million +. . . . It is based on Joy’s April 2000 Wired magazine article, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” Robbins was already doing well in this period we used to label as the summer doldrums: she recently sold David Denby’s book to Little, Brown for $500k +.

MEDIA


What’s with this increasing interest on the part of all media — print, tv, radio and, of course, electronic — in books? It’s a barrage, with endless stories on individual authors (Rowling, Fox (Michael J.), Rubin (Robert), Welch (Jack)); new e-initiatives (iPublish, iWrite, I’m Stephen King); bestseller lists, unread bestsellers, pre-pubb’ed bestsellers (HP #5) — and on and on and on. Even the staid Economist has announced that, beginning in September, they will expand the number of pages devoted to books and will run those weekly, rather than the current ten times a year. And, the new weekly section — now called “Moreover” — will be renamed “Books and Arts.”

In an interview in Gannett’s The Review Press IMG’s Mark Reiter speculates that German and Japanese rights to Jack Welch’s book will each go for “north of $1 million,” and denies that his commission for the $7.1 million deal was a cool million. He also confides that within the decade he “hopes to find himself writing books full-time,” but wants to represent one particular client before he leaves agenting. The name? Warren Buffett.

DULY NOTED


Come Fall, publishers will have to choose between three publishing conferences, all scheduled within a week of each other. Reed’s ePub Expo will be held Oct. 31–Nov. 1 at the Millennium, while Internet World’s e-Book World takes place at the Marriott Marquis on Monday and Tuesday, Nov. 6–7. The former will focus on the management, distribution and production of digital content. (See PT page 8 for details.) Seybold is holding what purports to be a publishing show in San Francisco at the end of August. It is, however, weighted heavily in the direction of technology, though there are sessions on Digital Rights and Digital Asset Management, ebooks, etc. Click on www.seyboldseminars.com.

Word comes to us that the 25th annual University of Denver Publishing Institute opened on July 10th on the University of Denver campus with 91 students — all college graduates. The program was co-founded by Elizabeth Geiser and includes as instructors Elisabeth Scharlatt of Algonquin Books, Jane Isay of Harcourt Trade, Arnold Dolin, formerly of Penguin, and others. At a gala dinner at the Fourth Story Restaurant (atop the Tattered Cover), six graduates of the program spoke of their careers, among them Tari Warwick (vp, Perseus Books Group), Meg Ruley (Jane Rotrosen Agency), Jeanne Martinet (author of The Artful Dodge), and Reid Hester (editor with Mayfield Publishing).

PARTIES


Overlook’s party for cutting edge novelist Brad Gooch was held by and at Diane von Furstenberg’s loft-cum-showroom (a family emergency called Ms. von F back to Belgium) and included Barry Diller, Jonathan Burnham, Jay McInerney, Mary McFadden, fashion photographer Carter Smith, Bret Easton Ellis (a co-host), and other trendy novelists such as Ben Neihart, Christopher Bram, and Fred Tuten.

IN MEMORIAM


We sadly note the passing of Workman‘s Sally Kovalchick on July 15th.

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Bertelsmann’s Ventures

By PT Editors
August 1, 2000
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Random House Parent Wages Global E-Commerce Turf War

There is a special place on Thomas Middelhoff’s atlas of corporate geography that he likes to call “Bertelsmann Valley.” You might think of it as Silicon Valley stretched to a global scale and populated with scenic villages of dot-com shops, a few stray Holstein cows, and a couple billion dollars in strategically seeded venture capital. Or as Middelhoff, whom everyone knows as the chief executive of the world’s third-largest media conglomerate, describes it in company literature, Bertelsmann Valley is a “global innovation factory” turning German venture capital and corporate synergies into bang-up business plans to power the next wave of e-commerce.

Whichever metaphor you prefer, Random House, Inc. is looming ever larger as a prime piece of real estate in Bertelsmann’s e-commerce portfolio. With stakes in custom e-publisher Xlibris and digital audio retailer Audible via Random House Ventures, Random’s e-investment subsidiary, it’s clear that Random’s stockpile of digitized content will prove instrumental as Bertelsmann gears up for a global digital turf war against AOL Time Warner and CBS Viacom. And with more than $10 billion in Bertelsmann coffers primed for acquisitions and other investments — cash mostly derived from the sale of Bertelsmann’s stakes in AOL Europe and AOL Australia to America Online — the strategic alliances between the company’s publishing and e-commerce holdings are being closely watched by competitors on all fronts.

“In the decentralized organization of the Bertelsmann group,” Middelhoff told a recent conference in Berlin, “the new magic words are: stronger cooperation and intensive networking between the autonomous product lines and companies.” Shortly after that statement was made, the Bertelsmann e-Commerce Group (BeCG) was rolled out, forging a unified front of Internet, mobile, and broadband properties including bn.com (in which Bertelsmann has a 40% stake) and bol.com, which operates in 14 countries (including Japan, which the company notes is the second-largest book market in the world, devouring 1.5 billion books a year) and is soon to open in China, Korea, and Italy. Headed by Andreas Schmidt, who was recruited from AOL Europe, the BeCG mandate is to drive content — from books to magazines to compact discs — to wired consumers. “In the near future, we believe all content will be digitized,” Schmidt tells PT via e-mail, “and our aim is to put the products Bertelsmann produces — music, books, movies, and television — into digital form and distribute them across the Internet.” That may be the party line, but there’s more “intensive networking” to come. Middelhoff told the Financial Times Deutschland that he expects to bundle all Bertelsmann e-commerce under a single brand in the next three months. The long-term goal, Middelhoff said, was the digital distribution of books and music to a worldwide “content community” via a single brand network that could include bn.com and the Bertelsmann joint venture GetMusic. And all that commerce can be conducted with help from Bertelsmann’s digital rights management unit, Digital World Services.

For the moment, though, books are on the Bertelsmann Valley back forty. Major hits in the US have targeted the music and magazine segments, as in the acquisition of CDNow for $117 million. Bertelsmann’s magazine and newspaper unit Gruner + Jahr, meanwhile, dumped its UK holdings last month to focus on targets in the US, including the acquisition of Inc. magazine for $200 million. G + J USA CEO Daniel Brewster is also said to be in hot pursuit of the Times Mirror magazine group, a prize that would put content from such titles as Field & Stream and Popular Science at Bertelsmann’s e-commerce disposal.

On the portal front, much ado was made in May over Bertelsmann’s participation in the Terra Lycos deal, in which Spain’s Terra Networks gobbled up the portal Lycos for $12.5 billion, with Bertelsmann planning to pitch in $1 billion in advertising over the next five years. But the deal’s rationale involves a broader strategy to combine Terra’s data lines with Lycos’s portals, and funnel Bertelsmann’s content over both of them to the 50 million people in 37 countries who visit the Terra and Lycos sites each day. In fact, thanks to strategic alliances with AOL, Terra Lycos, and other portals, Bertelsmann has direct access to 200 million customers, in addition to the 50 million people already in the Bertelsmann database, including its book clubs. And on that note, all Bertelsmann clubs have been folded under one “direct-to-customer” umbrella to consolidate cross-divisional networking. BookSpan, a joint venture with Time Warner’s Book-of-the-Month Club and Bertelsmann’s Doubleday Direct, has only heightened convergence in clubland, while company insiders suspect an imminent bid for Reader’s Digest. Then again, what media property hasn’t had a rumored Bertelsmann bid?

A spokesperson declined to discuss Bertelsmann’s publishing holdings. But the most recent figures show that those holdings derive close to 70% of their revenues in North America, while 34% of Bertelsmann’s total revenues in the last fiscal year were generated in the US. Accordingly, few were surprised when Bertelsmann made Random House ground zero for the company’s worldwide book business, with Peter Olson at the helm. And that just means more fun for Richard Sarnoff, president of Random House Ventures. Look for more deals à la Audible, which created the Random House Audible imprint to produce spoken word content for digital distribution, with titles sold on the web by Audible.com (which has an exclusive deal with Amazon).

As the titans duke it out for e-market share, don’t forget Bertelsmann Ventures, a venture capital fund with offices in Santa Barbara, New York, and Hamburg, which recently closed a $250 million round of venture-ready capital. And Bertelsmann controls a venture capital fund for e-commerce companies via its e-Commerce Group. As Middelhoff told the European press, it’s “only the beginning.” That much, at least, is certain.

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A View from the Bridge: Notes from the New-Media Database

By PT Editors
August 1, 2000
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As part of a continuing effort to chart the ripples of the industry’s sea change, PT has conducted an informal survey of more than 150 new-media companies that are staking claim to traditional publishing territory. We’ll have more to report from our research in the coming months, but first, here’s a brief snapshot of the seascape ahead.

While agents are morphing into digital rights managers almost as easily as editors become agents, editors themselves have thus far retained maximum job security. Over 50 online publishers exist (many focused on genre fiction, especially romance), but few other than Fatbrain have evolved significantly past the Cro-Magnon slush pile — due to their excruciating lack of editorial standards. Two new ventures, however, are targeting precisely this opportunity. TW Trade Publishing’s iPublish, which is scheduled to go online in January 2001, has been actively soliciting original material from both new and brand-name authors to sell on their own site and from major online retailers. With partners including Microsoft, Gemstar, Ingram, and bn.com, the iPublish program seems prepared for most distribution exigencies. The UK-based WritersRepublic, meanwhile, also promises to identify and promote new talent, distributing and exposing edited books in far less time than it would take to have them traditionally bound.

And on the subject of new talent, even those authors without the brand recognition of a Stephen King may soon have digital options, as sites such as authorsontheweb.com and authorsonline.com flirt with the idea of launching. These will act as portals to websites for individual authors, helping them market their books and, of course, themselves.

In the retailing world, print-on-demand is slowly infiltrating the market, as Sprout continues to partner aggressively with publishers, distributors, and an increasing number of booksellers. Watch for Lightning’s rollout in this space as well. And the long-anticipated BookSense.com has energized the already active independent bookselling community, even though its site has yet to fulfill a book order. More interesting has been the drama engulfing sleepy industries like textbook sales, which have been jolted by digital shock-troopers BigWords and VarsityBooks, only to have the latter switch gears and broaden its focus to the student services arena. This fall, watch out for Swotbooks.co.uk, which will attempt a similar assault on the British textbook industry.

The ironic flip-side of the education space is that with the digital revolution, there’s no longer any reason to buy an entire book. Questia Media and ebrary.com are poised to launch subscription-based searchable research libraries online (Questia for individuals, ebrary for institutions). Similar services such as Themestream aid users who are drowning under the spillgates of online information, and GetAbstract.com summarizes business books, the upshot being that nobody has to actually read them.

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Crash Course: The Ideal Radcliffe Student

By PT Editors
August 1, 2000
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This year’s 98 indefatigable Radcliffe Publishing Course graduates have done it again — succeeded in putting the rest of us to shame, that is. As in years past, we give you just a taste of publishing’s hyperachieving next generation in the composite biographical sketch below. All achievements have been taken from actual student biographies. Book, magazine, and electronic publishers interested in attending Radcliffe’s New York Career Day, on Tuesday, August 8, from 9:00 a.m. to noon at the Time Life Building, may call 617-495-8678 for more information.

Despite the thrills of Pentagon briefings, Ms. Student left her nascent career as a satellite television producer behind when she returned to run her own weekly radio show at the University of Alabama. During her busy senior year, she bartended full-time before graduating cum laude in pure mathematics and French literature, using the quiet moments of her pub shifts to look into how and why Cameroon has become divided along Francophone and Anglophone lines. The recipient of Harvard’s Sheldon Prize Fellowship, Ms. Student has spent this past year chronicling the millennial Catholic pilgrimage, leading her from Rome to Lourdes to Fátima, Portugal, and ultimately, 500 miles by foot to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. In addition to creating guidebooks for use on the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s tours to Europe and Mexico City, this karaoke star and aspiring guitarist cherishes fond memories of seeing Bill Gates tossed into a swimming pool at a summer intern party during her stint as an editor of the Microsoft Office Web site. Besides starring as the lead guitarist in three rock bands that played all over the Worcester area, Ms. Student has published feature articles in Spanish on Mickey Mouse and heavy metal music in El Mercurio newspaper in Valparaíso, Chile, all while flexing the journalistic muscles she formed working the late shift on the Washington Post sports desk. Since graduating, she has written strategy studies on global account management for the Advisory Board Company and on electronic government for KPMG Consulting, while freelancing for Office.com. Previously, she earned her “ducktorial degree” and five-star service award as intern with Disney, but still found time to be selected one of Canada’s representatives to the United Nations’ World Summit for Entrepreneurs. In her summers, she has inoculated small children, constructed latrines, and performed teeth-brushing songs in Ecuador and Paraguay. Late into the night, this dedicated insomniac reminisces about that fateful day in London, when she made her friends insanely jealous by coming within seventeen steps of Prince William.

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Loony for Laydowns

By PT Editors
August 1, 2000
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As live satellite feeds beamed Scholastic’s midnight Muggle-fest around the globe last month, the intricately choreographed release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was evidence of more than just the good fortune of Potter point-man Michael Jacobs. It was also proof that the one-day laydown — a luxury formerly reserved for embargoed bombshells and celebrity tell-alls — has become almost de rigueur for titles in all segments of the mediagenic book market.

How did the world get so loony for laydowns? Blame it all on Rick Hall, evp distribution and operations for Time Warner, who admits to creating a monster when the publisher launched Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett in 1991 — the first ever one-day laydown. From there the beast evolved into a Frankenstein-ish creature goaded by (among other factors) agents’ demands for laydowns on every 3,000-copy novel. Then Random and especially Penguin Putnam stoked the one-day flames with on-sale dates for most everything. Penguin, in fact, has been rolling out laydowns for anything over a 100,000-copy first printing for the past five years, says Dick Heffernan, president of PP’s adult hardcover sales. They ship Thursday for a Monday on-sale date (though mass merchandisers hate this schedule and are likely to put books on sale early, he says). Warner, meanwhile, has now repented and refuses laydowns for first runs of less than 250,000 copies, up from 150,000 several years ago.

While the upside is obviously a kick for sales velocity and, particularly for returning authors, a higher debut on the bestseller list, laydowns can be tricky to execute. Wholesalers need extra time to ship to their accounts — AMS’s Kevan Lyon says the wholesaler stickers for all its warehouse club and mass merch retailers, but notes that compliance has been an issue. Clerks tend to jump the gun and rip open boxes without a thought to the on-sale date affidavits their superiors have dutifully signed, or else cartons languish under stockpiles of Teletubbies. Mass market outlets are rarely included in the one-day madness anyhow, because of the logistical problems, but others note that mass merch accounts have always had a de facto one-day laydown, since their books go on sale the same day every month. Then there’s the eternal question about who pays freight (Time Warner picks up all freight costs as long as they’re going to that much trouble, says Hall, but costs can be exorbitant when shipping a single title). And we all know about the Potter tempest over Amazon, sparked by the Internet retailer’s early ship date for FedEx arrival on HP-Day, a privilege that prompted endless recriminations from brick-and-mortar stores.

In any event, as Michael Wolff pointed out in a recent column, Harry’s one-day wonder was a marketing spectacle of a magnitude not seen in the book world for some time: “It’s movie marketing. Or it’s software marketing. Microsoft marketing, momentous-cultural-event marketing.” Indeed, while many agents insist that the benefits from laydowns are tangible, others are concerned that the on-sale date has become a marketing panacea for an attention-deficit culture.

Retailers, for their part, are by now resigned to the one-day rigmarole, and many even profess to like them. Bob Wietrak, vp merchandising for B&N, says approvingly that laydowns build in-store excitement and rile up readers with advance orders and other hoopla. Of course, the first printing has to be large enough to make it worthwhile, he notes. Laydowns typically only work for major authors, and would not affect midlist writers who rely on Cold Mountain–style word of mouth. On the other hand, a few booksellers said that all things considered, even well-orchestrated hype still looks a lot like hype. “Does it make for better bookselling?” asks A Clean Well Lighted Place’s Neal Sofman. “Frankly, I believe in selling the quality of the book, not the timing of the book.”

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International Fiction Bestsellers

By PT Editors
August 1, 2000
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Crime and Punishment
King Bites the Bullet, Crime Pays in New Zealand, and Carvalho’s on the Case in Spain

In a somewhat bizarre development, Stephen King’s hotly downloaded e-novella Riding the Bullet has shot around the globe — in a bricks-and-mortar edition. Though hard-copy versions of the work were originally ruled out by the K-man, our sources say, a dire lobbying blitz on behalf of King’s foreign language publishers has resulted in its techno-retro release on paper for the international audience. Thus the Bullet rides up the Italian list, marking the book’s first foreign language appearance. In addition to Italy, contracts have been signed in France, Holland, Japan, and Germany, where the book is due out this month. We are positively assured that the translated editions will not, however, appear online. For those who are wondering, the literal translation of the title in Italy is Passage to Nowhere.

In the UK, Lee Child’s The Visitor is his fourth thriller involving maverick ex-military cop Jack Reacher, and deals with a serial killer whose modus operandi has forensics experts bamboozled — particularly when the body of Sergeant Lorraine Stanley sends the murder investigation into overdrive. The book has been a hit in Britain, Australia, and “especially New Zealand,” says editor Marianne Velmans, who refused to speculate about the Kiwis’ unnatural appetite for serial crime. Rights to the previous Reacher novels have been sold in 26 countries (and he’s also on the list this month with Killing Floor in Sweden). Child, incidentally, lives in New York. The new one has been sold to the Netherlands (Luitingh Sijthoff), Bulgaria (Obsidian), and the Czech Republic (BB Art), and just published in the US from Putnam as Running Blind. See agent Darley Anderson for rights.

Sweden’s Björn Hellberg is thankful that his eleventh crime mystery The Thanksgiving has stealthily made the list. The book continues the myriad adventures of hero Sten Wall, small-town Swedish crime inspector, who is doing his darnedest to live up to the high standards set by his counterparts in the thrillers of Henning Mankell, Liza Marklund, and other Swedish crime aficionados. See agent Bengt Nordin for rights. Mankell, by the way, is also on the list with The Son of the Wind, which is set in a remote trading station in 1850s-era Africa and follows a Swedish adventurer who “rescues” a bushman boy and brings him back to Swedish civilization. Unfortunately, a murder foils everyone’s plans for a tidy postcolonial encounter. The boy’s search for his identity is the emotional center of gravity for this grim tale, which critics say is rife with “dangerously charged accuracy.” Rights are handled by the Leonhardt & Höier agency in Copenhagen.

Colonial oppression is also on the table in South Africa this month, where Arthur Maimane’s novel Hate No More stakes out a place on the list. For reasons of censorship, we’re told, the book could not be published in South Africa in the sixties, when the story is set. It chronicles the moral complexities of life for an urban black man in Sophiatown, where protagonist Phillip Mokone’s rage against apartheid drives him to an act of violence in an all-white suburb. Author Maimane is a journalist who worked in London for a number of years and returned to South Africa in 1994. Elsewhere in South Africa, readers are donning The Jaguar Mask, a tale by Daniel Easterman about an archaeologist on a dig in the heart of the Mexican jungle, where a centuries-old Mayan city is unearthed. The story, we’re told, is a “vertiginous tale of snaring and netting, old rituals and modern codes, blood-letting and immortality.” You can’t beat that. See HarperCollins UK for rights.

Spain has welcomed back the award-winning Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and his hero Carvalho with the publication of The Man of My Life. Though not currently on the list, the book is set a few months before the end of the millennium, when detective Carvalho finds himself awash in an apocalyptic melange of love, sects, espionage, and death. Montalbán received the prestigious Grinzane-Cavour award this year for his contribution to world literature. Also in Spain, Juan Marsé’s Lizard’s Tongue licks the list with a “terrible yet tender” story that takes place in the years following the Spanish War and focuses on an adolescent boy and his milieu. See the Carmen Balcells agency for both titles. A final note on an off-beat work in Spain: Ana Rosa Quintana’s Taste of Bile explores the lives of women who suffer behind a facade of apparent respectability. The story centers on a glamorous couple whose seemingly perfect lives degenerate in a web of bilious obfuscations, and is apparently based on the real-life experiences of Quintana, who is a Spanish television personality and journalist. The work has sold 100,000 copies thus far, and rights are up for grabs from Planeta.

Italy is burbling about a nonfiction work that’s landed (go figure) on the fiction list: Strictly Confidential, written by one Geronimo, whom our source suggests is actually Bruno Cirino Pomicino, a former minister of financial affairs, who serves up plenty of dish about the last 30 years of Italian politics. The public is sufficiently aroused that they’ve powered the book through seven reprints and sales of 40,000 copies, although no foreign rights deals have yet been consummated. See Mondadori’s Emanuela Canali. And if you’re wondering whether Sandor Marai has ventured back from the grave for one more Campari and soda, well, he has. It turns out the family of the late Hungarian author struck a deal with Adelphi to handle world rights for the author’s entire oeuvre, and, lo and behold, The Performance at Bolzano becomes an Italian bestseller.

In the Netherlands, Kees van Kooten’s biographical work Annie is on the list, detailing the painful progression of the dementia afflicting the author’s mother. This “poignant, witty” account is said to be the last biographical work from the popular Netherlands TV host. Over 50,000 copies have been sold in only four weeks, and none of Van Kooten’s titles have been translated, according to De Bezige Bij, which controls rights. Also making the rounds in the Netherlands, Adam Armstrong’s The Cry of the Panther is said to be a love story set against the magnificent background of the rugged Scottish Highlands, and has been compared to The Horse Whisperer and The Loop. The book is on tap in the UK (Bantam), Germany (Bertelsmann), Italy (Rizzoli), Sweden (Bra Böcker), Finland (Otava), and Norway (Cappelens). See Stephanie Cabot at the William Morris Agency.

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Triage for Kids’ List?

By PT Editors
July 1, 2000
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The announcement that the New York Times will start publishing a children’s bestseller list on July 23 has been met with the sort of jaded, industrywide cynicism that one would expect from such a move. Timed to coincide with the mega-release of Harry Potter 4 (aka Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, as seen on eBay), the plan is a jumble of loose ends that is continuing proof to some that the Times ain’t what it used to be, and that this latest project is only hastening the decline in its importance to the book industry.

If the Times wanted to make room for adult bestsellers, said numerous industry observers, well so be it. But what about the lucrative juvenile publishing business which has been taken for granted for so long? Harry has broken so many rules since the publication of the first novel that this was almost to be expected.

Unfortunately, the Times is left with a hodge podge cobbled together from the same group of stores that already report the adult bestsellers. Harry Potter, the poky little puppy, a Disney board book movie tie-in, and even a Barney title could be cheek by jowl. Would Louis Sachar’s HOLES (which won awards for FSG and has sold over 360,000 copies since publication a year and a half ago) finally make the list? As Books of Wonder’s Peter Glassman opined, it will be a complete distortion of facts. By not using children’s-only booksellers, there is no way of knowing what authority is being appealed to.

Craig Virden, Random House children’s book president and publisher, says it’s like comparing apples and oranges, and throwing in bananas and grapes as well. As a measuring tool for bestsellers it fails miserably. Someone should have sat Joe Lelyveld down (it is reportedly entirely his project) and explained just how this very important piece of the book business works. At least a caveat should be issued to explain their sources.

And there will be star turns by Jamie Lee Curtis, Carly Simon, and Dr. Laura titles that just might hit the top of each list: who performs the triage when those authors prefer to be on the adult list? Doubleday is double-cataloguing Katie Couric’s children’s opus this fall — so we’ll see. When big orders are placed, the adult list will be presumed to affect sell through more effectively. And what happens to Dr. Seuss, Chris van Allsburg, David McCauley, and backlist as a category all its own?

Harry has undoubtedly raised the profile of juvenile publishing, most likely because it fits into the “crossover” shoe with ease. One hopes the NYT list will mean more review coverage on a weekly basis rather than the large editorial theme issues devoted several times a year to children’s books, which are not necessarily supported with advertising by major publishers, an ongoing lament. And maybe there will be a rate differential negotiated between adult and juvenile publishing — after all, most children’s books are not Harry, but in the long run will sell considerably more than adult titles. It should be noted that Barnes & Noble, which no longer promotes the NYT list in stores but continues to report sales to the Times, will report Harry 4 on the adult list. And word is that independents will rely even more strongly on their own homegrown BookSense bestseller lists under these circumstances. But check out that list for its own problems — it seems Harry has yet to find a sensible bestseller home.

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