BookBrunch

This author makes the dubious assertion that the rise of self-publishing is unstoppable, and that Amazon's presence in the market through Kindle and CreateSpace gives it an opportunity to "rise to own the industry". So publishers should beat Amazon at its own game. But they are already exploring low-cost publishing models: HC's Authonomy is an example, as is the HC-owned Friday Project, which does not give authors conventional royalty deals. Macmillan has Macmillan New Writing.

The announcement of MNW, you may remember, was controversial ("The Ryanair of publishing"), and Harlequin has drawn a good deal of flak for announcing a self-publishing division. This is an area that conventional publishers have to treat cautiously.

Publishers are increasingly reluctant to take on interesting new talents, we often hear. Is Cape an exception, or an exception that disproves the rule? Cape author Adam Foulds won a Somerset Maugham Award, for writers under 35, and was shortlisted for the Booker; Cape author Samantha Harvey won a Betty Trask, also for writers under 35; and now a third under-35s award, the John Llewellyn Rhys, has gone to Cape author Evie Wyld (BookBrunch story).

You might counter that the big publishers like young authors, but are less welcoming to the middle-aged. Well, Cape's stablement Chatto published this year's McKitterick Prize (first novel by a writer over 40) winner, Chris Hannan.

There is much talk about whether leading publishers are becoming more conservative in their commissioning. The Literary Review (see also Massie on the 'literary' debate), which has excellent coverage of history publishing, is able to speak on this genre with some authority, and offers a sobering assessment in its current issue. Reviewing Ian Mortimer's 1415: Henry V's Year of Glory, Richard Barber says that "Historians seem to be undergoing some kind of crisis of confidence at the moment", because "As to bestsellers, only big subjects and popular writers are seen as viable . . . The middle ground, where so much excellent work used to appear, has vanished."

A well-balanced assessment of the literary v commercial debate prompted by the BBC's coverage of the Man Booker Prize (see earlier blog) comes from Allan Massie in the Literary Review. (The piece is not available online.) As Massie writes, the coverage gave the impression "that only a snobbish elite think the literary novel better or more important than the popular novels that far more people buy and read".

The expression "literary novel", which has an exclusive ring, may be what raises hackles. Many novels with literary ambitions may be no more valuable than are purely commercial potboilers. But some, once regarded in as of minority interest, endure: the works of Joseph Conrad, Henry James and Ford Madox Ford, for examples. Most of the bestsellers of their day have sunk into obscurity.

Massie points out that the economics of contemporary publishing are making it harder for the largest publishers to support literary fiction. Perhaps before long it will become a speciality of smaller presses.

The Daily Beast, Tina Brown's news website, is joining forces with Perseus for Beast Books, the New York Times reports. The imprint will include "timely titles by Daily Beast writers".

It's the Penguin Specials brief resurrected. You may remember that Chatto under Carmen Callil introduced a series of topical pamphlets called Counterblasts; Private Eye occasionally brings out an investigative title, and Granta published Ian Jack's The Crash That Stopped Britain. But, at a time when every news event of significance receives exhaustive media coverage, it is extraordinarily difficult to produce such titles on a regular basis.

BookBrunch has been slow to link to this article about the editor's lot by Daniel Menaker, formerly of Random House and author of an entertaining novel entitled The Treatment. He does not make it sound much fun - although he insists that, mostly, it is.

He says that three-quarters - "or four out of five or six out of seven, depending on what source you consult" - of books fail to make profits, and that many of the profitable ones are in the black only marginally. "It's my strong impression that most of the really profitable books for most publishers still come from the mid-list," he reports.

The problem is that there are many unprofitable books on mid-lists too, and publishers are trying to reduce their exposure to them. The successes Menaker is talking about are ones that publishers did not expect to do so well, and that now are more likely to be rejected.

The Media Guardian 100 is as absurd as ever. Gail Rebuck is one of this year's top fallers, despite her DBE, slipping 19 places to 55 - two places below actor and writer David Mitchell. Marjorie Scardino, another Dame, is also down, to 49 - although Pearson has just been named by the Bookseller as the world's biggest publisher. John Makinson of Penguin does not appear, perhaps because Scardino, his boss, is already there. Neither does Tim Hely Hutchinson of Hachette. Neither does Victoria Barnsley or her boss at HarperCollins, Brian Murray. And of course there's no sign of Ian Smith, Chief Executive of the world's second biggest publisher, Reed Elsevier.

You could not imagine, say, Tim Hely Hutchinson doing this: at a new Penguin US website, The Publisher's Office, you can find a video of CEO David Shanks singing: "Wouldn't you like to write a story?/Don't you wish that you knew how?/You could be a famous author/Listen up and find out how." The AP reports:

Shanks, 62, said Tuesday that he has a background of singing and performing, whether in amateur folk groups or coming up with industry parodies for sales conferences. When Penguin president Susan Petersen Kennedy suggested he try some music for the new Internet project, Shanks was game.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Arcade, the US independent, has filed for bankrupty. The firm's President, Richard Seaver, died earlier this year (BookBrunch obituary). The news will concern UK publishers, many of whom have done business - buying or selling - with Arcade over the years.

Chris Hamilton-Emery of Salt Publishing is to appear on Newsnight this Friday, 29 May, following his appeal for support on the Salt website and on Facebook.

Our three year funding ends this year: we've £4,000 due from Arts Council England in a final payment, but cannot apply through Grants for the Arts for further funding for Salt's operations. Spring sales were down nearly 80% on the previous year, and despite April's much improved trading, the past twelve months has left us with a budget deficit of over £55,000. It's proving to be a very big hole and we're having to take some drastic measures to save our business.

Following his appeal for readers to buy Salt books, orders flooded in to the company:

We’re overwhelmed, astonished, humbled. Humbled. How often do we use that word in business?

When I wrote a column called Footnotes for the Guardian, I reviewed several Salt titles, and might have reviewed more had I not felt obliged to offer some variety. It's a good list.