Candice Hughes

For anyone who has missed it, Elisabeth Sifton has an essay in The Nation this week (The Long Goodbye? The Book Business and its Woes). Her experience in the industry spans decades giving her a rare perspective. She expresses frustration and sadness at the many changes in the industry, particularly the consolidation and transformation to what she describes as a poorly functioning profit-focused model. She declaims the lack of interest of those running publishing companies in their products and product generators (books and writers). Her essay is well worth reading.

I know so many people who are passionate about books. A good number of these people are young- just the sort of readers the industry needs because they have many years of book buying ahead of them. I’ve seen tweens drooling over catalogues of books at libraries. They aren’t shy about putting in requests for book orders with their librarians. Recently when I commented on how teens/children may soon be reading text books on the Kindle, one groaned and told me he certainly didn’t want his books on one.

Books as objects have a special power. Think of magic books like in Harry Potter. Would it work to have a magician’s blog? How about books so controversial they’re banned. I have an early edition Orlando by Virginia Woolf. The cover is stamped, “Not to be introduced into the British Empire.” Woolf’s book provoked thought and discussion. It served it’s purpose. How does one ban a web site or a blog for offending sensibilities? Except for the most egregious offenders, few web sites or blogs are removed. Electronic words are more accessible and more pervasive yet Web sites and blogs simply have less psychological power than books in my opinion- even though all are based on words and all attract readers and discussion. Somehow being intangible dilutes the power of the words. Imagine holding up a print out of a blog as one shouts about its seditiousness. Or maybe one would bring a laptop on the podium and (shudder) display it with PowerPoint?

While I welcome and embrace electronic media (I am a true techie at heart), I think books retain their magic. Why, I wonder, can’t electronic media and books continue to live in harmony? Each will serve it’s purpose.

Bookmarked: Dust by Martha Grimes

This month our fantastic CoLoNY Chapter hosted Deb Werksman from Sourcebooks. While the industry as a whole is in a rough patch, Sourcebooks is thriving. They publish 300 new titles per year with a third of them being fiction.

Deb affirmed that it’s harder than ever for new authors or even mid-list authors to gain traction with their manuscripts/new novels. She noted that 93% of books sell 1,000 copies or less. Only 5% of the general public even goes to a bookstore each year and that doesn’t factor in whether or not they actually buy a book.

Sourcebooks focuses on romance, historicals, and women’s fiction (sadly they don’t acquire thrillers or mysteries currently). When acquiring novels, Deb follows Philip Larkin’s rules that a book should be readable, believable and (should I? Oh, why not.) careable. By the last, I mean that the reader should care about the characters and what happens to them.

It was clear from listening to and speaking with Deb that she has a great passion for books and is supportive of her authors. She cited the strong marketing focus at Sourcebooks as an advantage and benefit for their authors.

By the end of the talk, I was certainly sold on the fact that Sourcebooks is a great place for writers to be. Now if only they would change their mind about thrillers….

Bookmarked: City of Light by Lauren Belfer

The swine flu epidemic, grounded in the mixing of bird, human and pig DNA, started me thinking about how sci fi or medical thriller type books are often closer to reality than we might like to believe. I primarily stick with near future or contemporary medical thrillers. I base the likelihood of events in the books on what I know from my training as a scientist and additional research I do.

Sometimes that future is even nearer than it seems. The truth is that science is in many ways an art rather than being fully quantitative. As a scientist, I deal in probabilities. However, nature often tosses a rock in the pond upsetting the carefully organized numbers.

Fundamentally, that’s what’s so frightening about medical thrillers and what’s so thrilling about science. We are forced to look nature in the eye and admit how little we know.

Michael Crichton captured that line between science and nature. It’s the heart of what I try to capture in my books. Any time I lose sight of it, I can look back to Jurassic Park.