Simon & Schuster Case Study, Part 1: What the *Bleep* Are They Doing?

Yesterday morning, I learned from Publishers Weekly (which means this story will probably appear in The New York Times sometime next week) that publishing giant Simon & Schuster is suing the CIA over Valerie Plame's memoir. Plame, you will recall, is the former CIA operative whose identity was leaked to the press by the Bush administration. The CIA has apparently attempted to stop Plame and S&S from revealing the dates of her service in her forthcoming memoir, despite the fact that they are already public knowledge.

This news by itself didn't strike me as huge. The case looks like unjustified saber rattling by the CIA and a show trial that S&S can't possibly lose. What hearing about it did make me think is, "Gee, where else have I heard about Simon & Schuster recently?"

Well, lots of places, most of them questionable.

Later that day, I discovered that S&S and Gather.com had announced the winners of the First Chapters writing contest. If you've been reading this blog for a while, First Chapters may sound familiar. To keep the record straight, I've always felt that the American Idol-esque contest was a little off (read the linked post for more info). They seem to have gone through with it as planned, but there's still something peculiar about it.

Victoria Strauss over at Writer Beware puts her finger on it: the two selected winners are to be on bookshelves in a mere three months. Highly unusual; I talked to authors last year who had just sold books that wouldn't be published until 2008.

This highlights just what was weird about S&S's stake in First Chapters to begin with: it seemed then, and still does now, that their decision to do this is more of a publicity stunt than anything. Three months is barely enough time to have the books printed; no editorial or marketing work can go into them, and review copies can't be sent out pre-release. All the books have behind them is the built-in publicity from the contest, or so it would seem.

(The authors aren't getting very generous terms either, which I'll be covering in part 2).

This is not to say that the project is doomed to failure. Despite its suspiciousness, there's still a chance that the books may go well.

Still, that's not a huge chance, and it's a bold experiment in any case. You'd think that S&S would wait to see how the venture turns out before trying something like this again, right?

Well, they're not. Even before First Chapters, S&S hopped on board with the Sobol Award (which tanked), and even before winners were announced for the Gather.com contest, S&S got together with "online game" Media Predict to create Project Publish, which, when you get to the core of it, is more-or-less First Chapters under a different name.

And the weirdness doesn't stop there. Around the same time, S&S popped up as a sponsor (this time along with two other mega-publishers, HarperCollins and Penguin) of FanLib, a company with a slimy, amateurish, boneheaded plan to make money off of fanfiction (I get "slimy, amateurish, and boneheaded" from the fact that their plan seems to involve treating their target audience like cattle; more here).

If you're skipping to the end of the article, I'll digest it for you here: Simon & Schuster has, for the past several months, been behaving very, very, very oddly, taking enough out-of-the-box risks to make industry experts question their sanity. And it's not just their own necks they're risking either. Some of their recent shenanigans are causing a lot more uproar from people--mostly authors, but editors and literary agents are joining the fray too--who are purely looking out for their own interests. That's for part 2 of this case study.