#david wilk

[jeffreylependorf]

I'm interviewed by David Wilk on his "Publishing Talks" podcast series (part of his Writers Cast website). We had a swell time chatting about SPD, CLMP and small press publishing, and David also threw in some nice shout-outs to me as a musician and composer as well!

[writerscast]

My interview with Joe Regal, Founder of Zola Books

My latest Publishing Talks interview - at www.writerscast.com - with Joe Regal, co-founder of Zola Books.

Zola Books is a new and exciting online book selling venture, co-founded by Joe Regal and Michael Strong, both formerly with Regal’s previous venture, literary agency Regal Literary.  It’s exciting for many of us in the book business, and hopefully for readers as well, because Zola attempts to solve a wide range of problems that have beset writers and publishers (and often readers as well) in the online book ecosystem.  Despite its manifold advantages over the “real world,” there are many things that work well in person don’t work well or at all online.

As Regal says about Zola on the newly launched site:

“There are sites where you can buy books, sites where you can talk about books, and sites where you can read what professional reviewers or bloggers have to say about books. You can hunt down your favorite author’s blog or Twitter feed. But there is no single site where readers, writers, booksellers, reviewers, bloggers and publishers can gather in one place to connect naturally around the books they love. These social connections form in the real world at bookstores, book clubs, and more. Why can’t they happen online?”

Some have called Zola the “anti-Amazon” and so it may be, but it’s as much simply a different idea altogether, as an opposition to Amazon or other online retailers.  Zola is simple because it is a book-centric online community, and complex because there are so many elements involved in making a community around ebooks, including the necessity for Zola to build and deploy its own proprietary HTML5-based e-reader.

And there are many ways that Zola can operate in relation to existing entities in the online book environment.  There is a strong commitment to independent booksellers and publishers baked into the company’s DNA. Curation and transparency are at the heart of the Zola model.  And because Zola is essentially a portable e-bookstore, it can be used as an add-on by existing bricks and mortar bookstores as well as authors and publishers themselves, but Zola also allows them to have their own page on the Zola site, so mutuality is built into the structure from the beginning.

I talked to Joe Regal (at his office in New York City, so you will occasionally hear the sounds of the city in the background) in August, about a month before Zola’s mid-September soft-launch.  Now live, we can expect the site to grow and change as users and participants begin to understand how to work within its structure, and provide feedback to the founders and staff to make it work better for them.  During a season when major players like Apple, Amazon, Google, and Barnes & Noble are focusing on new devices and display features, Zola aims to create and sustain relationships between readers and writers through the mediation of a powerful and supportive ecosystem that focuses on the book over devices.  Here’s hoping for a giant success for a venture that looks and feels right for the publishing community.

While pursuing a career as the lead singer of the rock band RAMA, Joseph Regal got his first job in publishing at the Russell & Volkening Literary Agency in 1991. There he worked with Pulitzer Prize-winning bestselling authors Anne Tyler, Eudora Welty, Annie Dillard, Howell Raines, and Peter Taylor, as well as Tony Award-winner Ntozake Shange, Nobel Prize-winner Nadine Gordimer, and TV anchorman and novelist Jim Lehrer.  After leaving music for publishing, he founded Regal Literary Inc. in 2002, and now ten years later, Zola Books (take a look at the About Zola page here.)

I am very interested in seeing how Zola develops and am looking forward to participating as a publisher, writer and reader.  Alert to listeners, this interview is 40 minutes long, slightly longer than our usual podcast.

[jasonashlock]

You Have Been Disconnected

Overheard in the reception area of a publishing house Monday:

RECEPTIONIST: (into phone, anxiously) Oh, oh, um, yes, um, please hold... (presses hold, exhales)

STAFF MEMBER: (passing by) What's going on?

RECEPTIONIST: (whispering) There's an angry consumer on the phone!

STAFF MEMBER: A what?

RECEPTIONIST: A consumer!

STAFF MEMBER: (blinks)

RECEPTIONIST: A reader!

STAFF MEMBER: Oh! (continues walking)

I'm not sure what the "consumer" was angry about, and I didn't eavesdrop long enough to find out, but it was an excellent reminder of the immense space between the producer of books (the publisher) and the distant consumers of books (the reader). That gap was widened over the long twentieth century, stretched by the mechanisms that promised greater efficiency in distribution and greater reach in sales.

Not so long ago, book publishers frequently ran their own bookshops, often printing books in the back of the store and selling them in the front. It once seemed so intuitive for publishers to also be retailers that George Bernard Shaw once lectured Cass Canfield, former head of Harper, for not having a bookstore in the Harper building. Even after Scribner was bought and sold a couple of times, the Scribner book store remained in its landmarked building, until the cruel economics of Manhattan rent forced it to close in 1988. Doubleday ran its own bookshops until as late as 1990, when Bertelsmann sold them off to Barnes and Noble (which promptly began shutting them down; that Prada store that gleams on Fifth Avenue during the holidays? Used to be a Doubleday shop.) 

But that's hardly the point. Few dream of publishers running their own bookshops again (though I've heard stories of tourists popping into Random House mistakenly thinking you can buy those books behind the glass...). The question is not about publishers becoming retailers, but about what publishers may have lost by placing so much distance between themselves and readers. The bucket brigade that passes content from the maker to the user is a long one, and the man on one end cannot shake the hand of the man on the other. Today, Publishers have precious little direct contact with readers. 

There are exceptions, most notably among genre publishers or imprints: Tor publishes books and manages a thriving online community of readers; Harlequin does the same, of course; more recently, Mulholland Books, the new crime/thriller imprint at Little, Brown, has built an online gathering place for readers. There are others as well. But these are exceptions. For most who work in publishing, "the reader" easily becomes an abstraction, a concept like "public" or "middle class," that sounds as though it should signify, but, untethered from any context, becomes meaningless. Many of our terms--"community," "niche," "vertical"--meant to belie our lack of connection with readers, actually reveal it.

At the beginning of each year, as the holidays conclude, I hear many friends and colleagues in publishing returning to New York from their time with family in California or Chicago or Texas or, in my case, Arkansas and Tennessee. Inevitably, there's a sense of wonder that we share: people elsewhere are reading! And they're reading the strangest things! Like Sarah Palin's latest! These trips outside Manhattan are for many the only brush against the rare reading creature in the wild.

David Wilk put it well, as he often does, in his short piece "A Focus Group of One":

                  "We don’t talk to readers aside from our friends at dinner, we don’t research

                  what people are reading, what they think about prices, formats, marketing

                  techniques, retail displays, customer service, etc.  Most publishers don’t

                  have any significant contact with readers in the first place.

                           "How about deep and meaningful research about the role of reading in

                 society, where do people buy books, how many people go to libraries every

                 week, how do professors choose books for course adoptions, how many

                 students out of a given number in a class actually buy or read assigned

                 books?  How many people give books as gifts and how do they choose what

                 to buy?"

The Cass Canfield who disagreed with Mr. Shaw about the bookshop in the lobby had a son who ran Harper for many decades. Cass, Jr, with whom I had the pleasure of dining last winter, once said of publishing, "It's an impossible business...It makes no sense at all. I mean, you have a winner one day, and you've got a loser four out of five days." Anyone who has been involved in the publication of at least five books knows how Cass, Jr. felt the day he said that.**

But I wonder how better we might all be at our work if we worked to rescue the "reader" from those unfortunate, conceptual quotation marks: would we publish differently, and perhaps more successfully, if we were better connected to the individuals we hope will buy what we publish? Last fall I somewhat jokingly suggested on Twitter that the heads of the big houses should go on a listening tour, stopping at libraries and bookshops across America, meeting with their constituents. Imagine what we'd learn about tastes and desires, about pet peeves and preferences. Imagine what intangibles we'd discern that aren't legible on a Bowker report. It would be good to hear from those "consumers"--especially the ones angry enough to call.

Or maybe I didn't mean it as a joke. I can't remember. But why not? I say we take the train.

** Silverman, Al. The Time of Their Lives, 231 (St. Martin's, 2007).