Howdy Brownsville, New York Calling, Have We Got a Great Bio of Spinoza for Y'all!

If you're a sales rep for a publishing company, you can be replaced by a telemarketer. At least that seems to be the message communicated by Simon & Schuster.

Michael Cader reports in Publishers Lunch that S&S has cut nine field representatives, leaving but seven to service the book buying needs of a nation. An adjunct to this action is the establishment of a telemarketing group that will presumably service the needs of far-flung independent bookstores around the country.

S&S justifies its decision on "the changing nature of the market place." That phrase should be nominated for the Understatement of the Year Award. The marketplace served by publisher field reps twenty or even ten years ago is all but unrecognizable, and what's left of it is melting away like an ice cube in a teapot.

Up until the mid-1990s rural bookshops and paperback outlets like drugstores were serviced by traveling sales reps or independent distributors. These people not only understood the reading tastes of the communities on their routes but knew many of the readers personally. They knew that this bookshop catered to lovers of western fiction and that one to historical romance.

The system worked wonderfully well, but it suffered a major hammer blow in 1996 when several influential paperback distribution agencies let go of most of the independent driver/rack jobbers that covered all those rural bookstores. The reason was that the growing power of computers enabled these agencies to stock stores by remote control instead of employing human beings driving vans and station wagons. It wasn't long before stores in Tuscaloosa or Paducah were being stocked from agencies in Chicago or Toronto who knew little if anything about what they liked to read. And actually it didn't matter, because Chicago and Toronto simply shipped those stores the top fifteen or twenty New York Times bestselling titles anyway. (I've detailed this crucial moment in publishing history in The Rise and Fall of the Mass Market Paperback, Part 1 and Part 2.)

So much for mass market paperbacks. But there were still hardcover books being sold in mall bookstores, right? Wrong. As the 1990s progressed, closing of mall stores reached epidemic proportions as the major chains, especially Barnes & Noble, realized that store traffic simply didn't justify keeping them open. At the same time the rise of Amazon shifted book buying patterns from the car to the armchair. Why drive into town when you could handle the transaction at home?

Given the withering of the rural bookstore market, why should we be surprised to hear S&S declare that "new field sales team will focus on the geographic regions where our sales are strongest--urban areas with a large base of key independent retail, wholesale, and educational accounts"?

The fact that it makes perfect economic sense doesn't palliate the pain that independent bookshop owners and their customers feel to have one more tie to the publishing community severed. One store owner said it all in a tweet: "SO pissed to see my rep go. My one link to you is now someone who has NO idea about my store."

In fairness to Simon & Schuster, this erosion of bookstore culture outside of the big cities is reflected in strategies pursued by every trade publisher. But that will not mitigate the sense among our country cousins that they're having a lot of undesirable and inappropriate books shoved down their throats by (to use Dave Barry's phrase) a bunch of "godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving left-wing communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts."

Richard Curtis

Losing Bidder in Cheney Book Auction Offers Advice to Winner Matalin

Ms. Mary Matalin
Threshold Editions
c/o Simon & Schuster

Dear Mary Matalin:

Richard Curtis here, CEO of E-Reads, the publishing company that made what we thought was an irresistible offer to Dick Cheney to publish his book. In case you missed our proposal you may read it here.

But I don't want to sound like a sore loser. If I had to lose a bidding war, I'm relieved it's to you. I was terrified it might end up with Harper, who would probably do the same kind of trashy treatment they did for Peggy Noonan's The Case Against Hillary Clinton, with those made-up internal monologues and transcriptions of speeches Hillary never made. At least I can be confident that your approach to the Cheney book will be utterly responsible, something along the lines of your superb editorial job on Jerome Corsi's The Obama Nation.

You described that book as "a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that," and I could not agree more. Your impeccable vetting of Barack Obama's extensive connections with Islam and radical politics, his Communist and socialist mentors, his close associations with members of the Weather Underground, his involvement in the slum-landlord empire of a notorious Chicago political fixer - well, Mary (if I may), reading that meticulously documented work was an inspiring reminder of why I went into the publishing business.

Nevertheless, I hope you will not be afraid to be stern in your dealings with Cheney. If there's one thing I know about him, it's that he has the utmost respect for those who hold people's feet to the fire.

I realize that my role as underbidder for the Cheney book does not entitle me to any special consideration. Nevertheless, I am happy to share with you some of the suggestions I made to Mr. Cheney in my original pitch to him, and I hope you'll adopt them. For what it's worth, here's what I think Cheney needs to discuss to make this book a blockbuster international bestseller:

• How he helped President Bush to deceive Congress and the American people into buying into a connection between Al Qaeda and the Iraq government under Saddam Hussein
• How he misrepresented available intelligence
• How he outed covert intelligence officer Valerie Plame and got his Chief of Staff Scooter Libby to take the fall
• How he steered no-bid government contracts to Halliburton, a company in which he has a multimillion dollar interest that has appreciated by thousands of percent since the war began
• How he undermined the Constitution
• How he suspended the right of Habeas Corpus
• How he subverted the rule of law
• How he instituted secret wiretapping and email monitoring of American citizens
• How he scammed America's allies with Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction"
• How he created a secret cabal of oil and other energy lobbyists
• How he sent thousands of young men and women to death and maiming in the prosecution of a "phony" war whose real goal was to exploit Middle East oil
• How he leveraged his office to create a policy of torture and brutality
  

Do these correspond to your own ideas? Have I missed anything?

Also, since it's no longer of any use to us, I might as well give you the title that we'd planned to put on the book had we won the auction:

GO FUCK YOURSELF
My Life in High Crimes and Misdemeanors
by Dick Cheney

What do you think, Mary? Is that a winning title or what?

I invite you to reply to this open letter and I promise to promote your response in the widest public forum.

Yours truly,

Richard Curtis
President and CEO
E-Reads

If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em: S&S to Retail 5,000 Titles on Scribd

One way to conquer pirates is to co-opt their territory. To chase would-be pirates off Scribd.com, Simon & Schuster has announced it will deploy some 5,000 e-book editions on the website, reports Brad Stone in the New York Times. Though still in startup, Scribd has mushroomed into a hugely popular locus for writers to upload documents, including books.

Unfortunately, despite heroic efforts, Scribd has not been able to bar its doors to those passing off as their own the work of others. But, like a policeman giving a sample garment to a dog to sniff, once the website's filtering software recognizes a legitimate copyrighted text it will instantly identify and reject imposters. Call it pre-emptive piracy management.

But there's a far less subtle motivation for publishers to cast their lot with Scribd: its irresistibly low commission on sales. In the first decade of the E-Book Revolution, retailers charged the same 50% discount for the sale of digital content that brick and mortar bookstores charged for print. Foremost among the fifty percenters is Amazon and its Kindle. But of late publishers have begun to question the 50%-off shiboleth. Guru Mike Shatzkin gave sharp voice to this restive group. Pronouncing high discounts "daft," he declared "There is no comparison between the retailers’ costs and risks associated with physical books and those associated with ebooks. There is no economic justification to providing the same level of discounts."

"Now," said Shatzkin, "is the time to change this." You can read about it in detail here.

Picking up on these populist sentiments, Scribd came out of the chute charging 20% off the list price to its content provider customers, and that includes publishers. Stone quotes Scribd chief executive Trip Adler as declaring that S&S "is the first public endorsement by a major force in publishing that the social Web will play a major role in the future of book sales.”

Other standard bearers of Big Publishing may well join the rush to Scribd. The anti-piracy features are certainly attractive, but the telling factor may well be a desperate need to push Amazon and other etailers back to a commission structure that is, well, not quite so daft.

RC