David Thayer

Lynne Scanlon, the Wicked Witch of Publishing, offers a critique of Borders New Strategy to drive sales at her blog. No, at their website: you can see the power of the dangling modifier.

Lynne is skeptical about the changes announced by Borders CEO George Jones. She notes that Jones came from Saks with a promise to revive Waldenbooks, shake up Borders marketing, make Mr. and Mrs. America and Miss America for that matter, want to shop at Borders, or Waldenbooks if one is trapped in a mal,l and has already been to Mrs. Fields.

We all know the dreadful problems gripping the publishing industry although the silver lining is we aren’t subject to product recall, just returns and remaindering ( R&R). Product recall is about product malfunction, injury, tort claims, litigation. We don’t have that. Sure we have Madonna’s nanny and Kavya and James Frey, the composite guy from San Francisco, stuff like that. Problems, certainly, but with rare exception, books perform well as products not like the soda cans on airplanes that become miniature Old Faithfuls.

Marty the Mogul can solve the industry’s problems. You may remember that Marty ruined the book business by acquiring dozens of publishers after a bitter divorce. All he wanted was his Lazy Boy: instead, he got Henry Holt. Marty proposes the following split on advances and royalties:

15% to the Literary Agent.

85% to the Publisher.

Foreign sales and dramatic rights: 20% Literary Agent, 80% to the Publisher.

What do authors receive under Marty’s plan? 100 free copies of the book they wrote, not including the manuscript. That would be 101.

An annual picnic in Fairlawn, New Jersey. This year’s event was held in February, but next year Marty’s planning on May. The snow and ice were a problem, but 400 hundred lucky authors showed up for pigs in a blanket and box wine. That beats cash any day.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 7:33 am and is filed under Biting the Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.