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This week on Litopia After Dark we examine the role of the world’s mega-publishing houses and try to predict their future.   We contemplate the often-tenuous position of being a Big Publishing Boss.   If the price of signing with Big Publishing is being contracted to grind out a book every year - could you cope?  And why - when indie film and music publishers are so widely respected - does the indie publishing scene get such little media attention and respect?

On the panel this week are Donna Ballman, Dave Bartram and Editorial Director of Behler Publications, Lynn Price. The Ustream chatroom (7.30pm GMT) was small and perfectly formed - join us next week as we go global.

Links mentioned in the show…

Peter Osnos on The Century Foundation…

Ten years ago, the venerable publisher HarperCollins was a demoralized mess. NewsCorp’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, wanted to sell it, but when that proved impossible at an acceptable price, he took a whopping write-down of its value and hired Jane Friedman of Random House to run it.

And run it, she did. Friedman’s HarperCollins was an excellent publishing company. It made good money by book standards, with everything from serious non-fiction (Seymour Hersh on Abu Ghraib, Ted Sorensen’s Counselor) and literature to down-market pulp, some of which came from the notorious Judith Regan. The consensus is that it was the sloppy and ultimately expensive firing of Regan in the uproar over her plans to publish O. J. Simpson’s If I Did It that turned Murdoch against Ms. Friedman. The litigious Ms. Regan sued for $100 million on wrongful dismissal grounds. The case was settled for a reported eight-figure sum. In her years working for Murdoch but reporting to Friedman, Regan made her bosses vast amounts, but drove most people at HarperCollins nuts, including, it is said, Friedman. In the end, as so often happens in corporate tussles, both Friedman and Regan lost.

In the Boston Globe, David Mehegan…

In an age when reading for pleasure is declining, book publishers increasingly are counting on their biggest moneymaking writers to crank out books at a rate of at least one a year, right on schedule, and sometimes faster than that.

Many top-selling writers, such as John Grisham and Mary Higgins Clark, have turned out at least one book annually for years. Now some writers are beginning to grumble about the pressure, and some are refusing to comply.

Not that writers are being explicitly harassed, but costly advance marketing plans are increasingly tied into the expectation that the most profitable authors will have a new book out at roughly the same time each year. In today’s intensely competitive marketplace, readers will turn to another author if a writer fails to come through at the usual time, which could cost a publisher big bucks.

Betsy Schiffman for Wired.com…

What sort of no-goodness are Amazon.com and eBay up to? Look no further than the news from overseas.
The two companies seem to have a nifty little trick: If they can’t get away with a slightly questionable strategy here in the U.S., they test it out somewhere else.
Case in point: Amazon.com pulled the one-click buy feature on its British web site for books published by Hachette Livre, the second-largest English language trade publisher after Random House. Amazon reportedly yanked the feature in response to sort of revenue dispute with Hachette Livre. (Amazon.com declined to comment.) The publisher also claims that Amazon pulled its books from promotions.

Doreen Carvajal in the New York Times…

In Britain, where Amazon opened a digital store in 1998 and where it now commands about 16 percent of the overall book market, publishers participate in tough annual negotiation sessions with Amazon about their cut. In markets where it does not have such a commanding position, like France or Germany, negotiations are much less demanding, according to publishers.

The first to spar with Amazon this year in Britain was Bloomsbury, the British publisher of the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling. Before they reached a compromise on undisclosed terms, hundreds of Bloomsbury’s older, back-list titles lost buy buttons on the Amazon site in Britain.

Bloomsbury best sellers like “A Thousand Splendid Suns” and “The Kite Runner,” which are big earners for Amazon, were spared the same treatment.

David Barnett on the Guardian blog…

Flying the flag of independence is a mark of respect in most areas of popular culture … apart, it seems, from literature. Can you imagine any serious film reviewer refusing to watch anything other than the major Hollywood blockbusters?

Can you imagine New Musical Express (in its heyday, at least), only focusing on artists and records from the big corporate music labels, and ignoring the independent record company explosion of the late 70s, the ferment of hugely influential musical experimentation still audible in bands like Franz Ferdinand, the Arctic Monkeys and Bloc Party.

Doing it yourself is to be much admired in music and cinema. That mainstay of Hollywood, Robert Redford, was so enamoured by the growing movement of indie cinema in the United States that he set up the Sundance Festival to give the film-makers an outlet and an audience.

Without indie music, there would be no Smiths, no Happy Mondays, no Kylie, even (she was on Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s own indie label, PWL). Without indie cinema, there would be no Reservoir Dogs, no Ghost World, no Night of the Living Dead. Without indie publishing there would be no … who? Who are the big indie writers, those who refuse to compromise by not allowing The Man to dictate what and how they should write, and earn massive respect because of it?

The panel recommends the following links…

Donna :- MyHeritage.com celebrity face recognition. Upload a photo of yourself to see which sleb you most closely resemble.

Lynn :- Mysterious Matters: Mystery Publishing Demystified and Query Shark

Tags: getting published, harry potter, publishers