This is something I've been meaning to talk about in a little more detail, and it was something that stuck out while I was at The Verge last weekend, so now's as good a time as ever. It's also something that's always on my mind because in my time at Emerson College--which, as of this posting, is OVER--I encountered a lot of people who might be characterized as snobs when it comes to certain subjects.
You'd think it was fairly obvious that the things we deal in--books, music, film, etc.--are art, but I'm always surprised how much debating people do about this. Harold Bloom comes to mind, but he's just one prominent example. People who, whenever genres of entertainment like science fiction or hip hop are mentioned, start making crosses with their fingers as if to ward of cooties, are never out of view.
What these people don't understand is that every form of entertainment essentially has two genres: commercial and high-art.
High art is easy to point out. Free-associating with the term, I think, Proust, Kubrick, Van Gogh, and some of my personal favorites--E.L. Doctorow, Oscar Micheaux, Gene Wolfe, and the list goes on. There's a lot of high art out there, and very little of it is ultimately influential or well-remembered, but most of what is highly influential and remembered--what we think of as ground-breaking--tends to belong to this category.
Commercial is a category that people tend to pay less attention to. If I was asked to define what it is, I'd say it's more or less what you expect it to be. My visual art professor from this past semester would call this "craft;" whatever it is--since I'm talking about The Verge I'll use a rock & roll song as an example--it's made according to the way that people expect a rock & roll song to be made. In terms of structure and content, most of it is highly similar to each other--I think of Weezer, or Foo Fighters.
My visual art professor was very explicit in his opinion that everything under the "commercial" label is NOT art. To me, though, saying this ignores the fact that all art is also entertainment, and it ultimately exists to serve the needs of its audience. More importantly, it ignores the fact that every medium, no matter how experimental it is in terms of content, is formula-driven to a significant degree.
I don't watch much TV, and what I do watch tends to be fairly unconventional. But I don't pretend that every episode isn't formatted to the same length, uses the same narrative and plot devices, and has a whole bunch of other identifying markers. What many people consider to be two of the greatest TV shows ever--The Simpsons and Seinfeld--aren't even about anything; they're pure formula.
More importantly, the commercial genre is the one on which the industry survives. Harold Bloom can deride Stephen King all he wants, but it was the formula authors who, in the early 20th century, created a market for literature in which it was possible to make writing a profession.
When I entered college--and I'm sure that it's the same for most of us, to a degree--I had these grand ideas of revolutionizing my art, etc. etc. If there's one thing I've learned since then (despite the efforts of certain of my professors), it would be that working in this field is inevitably going to involve working on the commercial side. And no matter what anyone tells you, there's nothing wrong with that. Formula exists because it works, after all.
Art vs. Entertainment
And More Importantly...
So, I've talked plenty about where to find freelance gigs; since I now have a bit more experience in doing so, I should probably mention how to actually land them. Once you've got the e-mail address or phone number of the person to inquire to, what's next?
As you might guess, the process begins by sending in a resume and cover letter expressing your interest. I won't talk much about writing a resume, because there's plenty of information about how to do that--on this website, in fact. So, right, keep to one page, have an attractive format, and--this I will stress particularly--have several of them. At the present I have, I think, three or four resumes and I'm fully conscious that that number is going to go up.
Earlier this year, when I took a comedy writing class, my group project was writing a pilot episode for a sitcom about a talent agency in LA. When we were coming up with characters, one who we considered was the proverbial guy-who-thinks-he-can-do-anything. We imagined throwing in a running joke of him popping up every time any kind of role was offered: "Sure, I can be an Elvis impersonator!" "Me! I can do an old Afghani man!" "A part for an autistic twelve-year-old? I'm there!"
As time goes on, I feel more and more like this guy. Each of the different resumes I'm accumulating identifies a different area as What I Am Interested in Doing. Dishonest? Not really. It's true, for each of those resumes, that there are also other things I'm interested in doing, but why would they want to know that? As long as you don't start applying for inappropriate jobs or faking credentials you don't have, creating focused resumes is no different than being focused about the work you're seeking.
Of course, that's just the first step, and it's mainly a way for employers to weed out the obviously poor bets. The single most important thing when seeking freelance work--and this makes me so happy I could (ahem) "spit"--is usually some form of work sample. If it's comedy sketch writing (one thing I am doing), for example, it ultimately comes down to your writing samples. If it's copyediting (one thing I hope I'll be doing), they'll want to test your abilities as a copyeditor before taking you on.
This is the thing that's always appealed to me about hiring practices in the writing business; most places, skills really are what sells. As in all of entertainment, networking and first impressions are important, but you can't survive on them. Melinda Snodgrass, though I quoted her a few months ago saying that living in Santa Fe had probably hurt her career, is still a celebrated screenwriter in her genre, because she does good work.
The hard part about freelancing comes when once you've demonstrated that you can do good work, you have to keep doing it. Unlike conventional employment, there's no sense of "once you're in, you're in." As a freelancer, you are hired on an independent contract, meaning you're not, in the traditional sense, an employee. Getting good work demands a good reputation, which demands--well, good work.
Another note: flexibility is a huge positive. Being able to do work on short notice, and to take assignments that require an odd schedule, can get you in at the head of the line some places. One dilemma I'm facing right now is the choice of whether to go full freelance, or look for a regular job to supplement, and that will affect how well I can perform in this department. So we'll see how that goes.
On the (Freelance) Road Again
And now to talk about my other favorite topic, freelancing. As I seldom forget, I'm graduating in less than a month, and will then be back in my hometown striking out with all I'm good for after cash. I'm working with a BA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing here; this is not a degree that carries a good deal of weight in terms of getting a job (and anyone upholding the delusion that it does should drop the idea as soon as their conscience allows).
Long story short, I don't have one. What I do have is three or four freelance gigs lined up, from which, by themselves, I could scrape together rent and food if necessary. Needless to say, I haven't stopped looking. These contracts are no replacement for a real job, but they do take the edge off when it comes to finding one; chances are I'll either be combining them with a more low-maintenance part time job or taking on about twice as many freelance contracts at once. (I'm also publishing a book, but the profits from that will most likely go toward publishing other books)
Question 1: how did I find these jobs, and how can you (and, hopefully, I) find others like them?
Answer: Craigslist. Not even kidding. Mind you, I have been surfing several actual freelance job boards, such as Guru (which I'm not particularly fond of) and iFreelance (which I like a little better). However, those sites and similar ones tend to host projects that are presently a little beyond my reach. They generally involve "bidding" on freelance projects with rates and credentials. You have to be a paying member to bid, and are usually competing with professional firms when you do.
The advantages of craigslist are that it operates on a local rather than national or international level and often hosts employers that are more friendly to relatively inexperienced professionals. The flipside is, of course, that people on craigslist often don't pay as well and there are just less of them.
I won't pretend that looking for jobs on craigslist is a good idea for just anyone. I have the advantage that my hometown is a major metropolitan area with an expanding job market. Others looking to freelance might have an easier time seeking out telecommuter-friendly positions on one of the larger job boards. A larger board might also be better if you have (as I'm sure more people than I know of do) more credentials coming out of school than I do. If your internship was at Simon & Schuster, you probably get your start in greener pastures.
What I'm doing is also somewhat risky. Taking freelance contracts requires a good deal of caution and close reading of terms. As of now, I'm only accepting on job from a startup operation, and probably won't take any more from unestablished sources unless there upfront pay involved. NEVER work for free, even for purposes of "resume building," unless you're taking a very prestigious internship. If you're not getting anything in return for your work, then... well, you're getting NOTHING in return.
Most importantly, freelancing requires heavy self-management. As I've said before, saving all your documentation and knowing how to file taxes for yourself is a must, and it's likely you'll have to seek out your own insurance coverage too. Such is the world of self-employment.
But I will say this: working for myself, even if I just do it part of the time, is gratifying. As is the value of my career, I'm doing what I like, and if I'm presented with work I don't like, I can turn it down. And in spite of the hassles, that's nice.
Beyond MySpace
I just got back from The Verge, a college-oriented music conference for which Experience was a sponsor, and I was figuring on blogging about some of the nifty promotion tips I got there. In the middle of planning my post, it occurred to me that I talk about marketing-related subjects all the time, and I wondered if, seeing as this is an entertainment industry blog, that was appropriate.
The thing is that this is such a promotion-oriented business, and the number of avenues for promotion is constantly expanding. One of the first things I picked up at The Verge was a dropcard, a credit card-like item with a code printed on it that can be entered in at dropcards.com to download a set of mp3s. It came with an ad targeted at musicians, which described the cards as a cheaper, more portable alternative to CD's.
This kind of thing was all over the place, which was the main way that The Verge was different from any other conference I've attended. Everywhere I turned, someone was handing out demos or press kits or pins or postcards or chocolate. Forbes Marketing Group had a booth set up, and the number of items they can print a logo on is probably higher than we have a word to describe.
In any case, it's obvious that music is significantly more publicity-focused than other areas of the industry, which to my mind is because it's one in which the product is much less tangible. Most musicians make most of their money from live performances, and I'm sure most people will agree with me that there's no way to really capture or reproduce a live musical performance. Marketing and publicity efforts just need to be that much more ambitious to get the product out there.
As times and technology progress, there's an increasing amount of DIY work involved in these efforts, even for well-established artists. One of the people I talked to was PJ Antonik, who holds the ubiquitous role of manager for the band Edison. PJ used to manage a couple of other bands, but dropped them in favor of Edison because they just didn't have their (ahem) act together. And while this may seem like an arbitrary matter where things like talent are concerned, I do see a strong correlation. By Friday evening, I had a large stack of CD demos in my apartment, which I've been listening to since. Some of the CD's have a professional look, while some are pretty shabby. See if you can guess which ones inevitably have better music on them.
Of course, there's more to it than CD's these days. The first thing that comes to mind is MySpace, which has become more-or-less part of the standard toolbox for artists of any genre. The funny thing is that I've met very few people who actually like MySpace; for every one who does, I talk to at least three who would gladly abandon it in a heartbeat if something better came along (I'm not a fan myself, though that's mainly because of MySpace's ugly layout and frequent use as a tool for social drama).
This was actually a question raised by Kevin Lyman, creator of the Vans Warped Tour, who was one of the conference's most prominent speakers, when he asked his audience for a marketing and promotion workshop whether they thought the future of music lied with huge uber-communities like MySpace or smaller, niche communities. Nobody was particularly willing to pass judgment, but it was clear that Lyman was interested in niche development.
Both kinds of communities have their merits. We'll always have use for mega-sized ones like MySpace for purposes of basic accessibility, but I think that it'll be through the more specialized ones that real publicity and community building will take place.
For any medium, the best way to expand your audience is through the one you've already got. The thing is that even that audience is fickle, and you need to offer them something they can't get anywhere else. This takes targeted efforts, and more than anything it takes innovation.
(This is the idea behind guerrilla marketing, but the problem there is that guerrilla marketing only works once. No matter who puts up lite-brites advertising their product in public places, all it's going to invoke is the Mooninite scare. Get the idea?)
So in other words, for any of you who are skipping to the bottom of this gargantuan post, the reason I talk about marketing so damn much is because it's so damn important for us. One thing that all The Verge's speakers made clear is that the traditional record label industry is dying (or dead, depending who you ask). It's not enough anymore for everyone to just do the tour, the t-shirts, and the $16.99 CD. Getting entertainment out there means making it unique. Between a band putting out the usual stuff and a band selling their entire album on a dropcard for three bucks, and having Forbes or another firm print up CD wallets with their logo, I'll put my money on the latter.
New Standards for Crud--in All Seriousness Here
E.L. Doctorow is one of my favorite authors, because The Book of Daniel showed me that it is possible to make Walt Disney World deeply, deeply frightening; Joss Whedon is one of my favorite filmmakers, because Firefly showed me that it is possible to make electric shock torture funny. In other words, good entertainers are capable of doing pretty much anything.
On the other hand, that's not necessarily a good thing. A few years back, some friends and I formulated a comedy sketch based around the mantra "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." I'm convinced it was no coincidence that we picked that particular saying to spoof; it's a notion that pops up among entertainers, and people who deal with them, pretty often. Sure, we can do pretty much anything, especially with the aid of modern technology, but at what point do we reach limits of integrity?
The problem with this question is that it usually has to do with relative viewpoints. Fans of South Park will remember the stint between the show's creators and Isaac Hayes, who played Chef, which resulted in Hayes's resignation. Hayes, a Scientologist, criticized the creators for being in poor taste with the show's satire on Scientology, to which the creators rebutted that Hayes had never voiced any problem with their satirizing other religions, until his own faith was brought into the equation.
This also goes for works that are, as we say, "products of their time." What comes to mind for me is Shakespeare's overbearingly evil portrayal of Richard III; the play is a historical catastrophe, but one must remember that it was commissioned by the Tudor throne, and that Richard was a Plantagenet. In other words, portraying him as anything other than a psychotic madman could well have landed Shakespeare's head on a chopping block.
What troubles me is the way that narratives like Shakespeare's Richard III are used to excuse modern ones that make a more-or-less equal mess of things. As someone who rubbernecks at car crashes, I've often been tempted to look at Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, in my mind a failure both financially and narratively. I will say that Marie Antoinette is one damn pretty movie, which I gather was its goal: 2 hours of pastries, dresses, parties, shoes, jewelry, and so on. Which is pretty shallow, but I don't particularly have a problem with that.
What got me was, "Why is Marie Antoinette an American teenager who's played by Kirsten Dunst?" I've been dating a historian for the better part of two years, so I've checked my facts on this one, and most of that movie is either incorrect or grossly distorted. When I watch it over, it looks more like a movie about Sofia Coppola's life bundled together with a laundry list of things that happened to the ill-fated Queen of France 200 years ago. The problem isn't that it's not true; most movies aren't. The problem is that it plays with truth and messes with the lives of real people. Isn't that... you know... wrong?
You can go back and forth on that one. I have a feeling that Columbia Pictures's CFO would say "yes," in view of the fact that the film lost about $30 million; I also have a feeling this would be an easier call to make if Marie Antoinette were a good movie. But let's look at the next step forward:
In post-production now is The Other Boleyn Girl, an adaptation of a novel by the same name. Unlike Marie Antoinette, The Other Boleyn Girl isn't just wrong; it's really, really, really wrong. I've done my research on this one too, and if the movie is anything like the book, then its historical distortion is pretty much on par with Shakespeare's Richard III. The difference is, Shakespeare had an excuse.
Now, I know that neither of these movies is going to do real harm to anybody, aside from promoting grand misconceptions about real people. I know that both of them are fictional portrayals, and they're not going to influence my conception of hard facts in any way. But I still believe that what the filmmakers are doing here is, on principle, against ethics; it's one of those things that just should not be done. It's disrespectful toward its subjects, its audience, and its makers, to what I think is an unacceptable degree.
The reason I think this is because, unlike the other cases it tends to bring up, The Other Boleyn Girl is not a product of its time. We know it's wrong, and so will anyone else who spends 5 minutes with a history book. Richard III might still be an important play, and The Birth of a Nation might still be a milestone in film history despite how hopelessly wrong they both are, but for dog's sake, we're past that. Context does not excuse these things anymore; we know better.
But despite that, few people in the industry seem to give the issue a great deal of thought. As new minds going in, I encourage all of us to think a little more about these things; remember that times are changing, and learn to distinguish what kinds of integrity depend on your point of view and which are more objective.
Revolution! ... Not.
I like to think that I can say everything I want to within two posts every week, but every once in a while I skip over a thing or two. For whatever reason, most of the stories I've passed over these dozen or so weeks have had to do with a rising number of wiki projects in areas that the wiki hasn't been used traditionally ("tradition" not being an extensive length of time here, but you know).
I've heard about several, but there have been two that really caught my eye. The first was an experiment by Penguin Group to write a novel in wiki format. It wasn't quite as open as other wikis, though I did hear about several incidents of wikipedia-esque sabotage. As of right now, there's no word on how the project turned out--there may be further rounds of editing--but overall Penguin's approach was a casual one, making clear from the first that the project was nothing more than an experiment. It was never definite if the result would ever be published.
One that raised my eyebrows a little higher, and a little more sustainedly, have been proposals to integrate "citizen journalism" into the (faltering) commercial journalism industry via wiki. The idea would be to collect data and source materials for news stories quickly, efficiently, and cheaply via a wiki that anyone can access. Most of these projects are still in developmental stages; to my knowledge, no major news organizations have adopted large-scale citizen journalism programs, so the place of such a system has yet to be determined.
Of course, that's true for wikis in general. The debate over wikipedia as a credible source continues, punctuated by criticism of journalists who cite it for fact checking, both from the inside (such as a memo that circulated at the New York Times a little while back instructing employees not to accept wikipedia as a source), and from the outside (such as criticism of Boston Globe journalists citing wikipedia in smaller-scale news weeklies like Boston's Weeky Dig).
But in particular, that debate is much more present when wiki communities revolve around fields like entertainment and journalism, in which subjectivity and objectivity are harder to define than other places. Its uses in other areas--citizen science is an example of a field in which amateur involvement is much more defined--have had an easier time figuring out where and how far to implement wikis and similar systems. Science is one of numerous fields in which this is just easier to figure out; trusting open communities to report bird sitings, but not to interpret the large bodies of data that arise from these reports, is a fairly straightforward judgment call to make.
We live in a slightly different world. It's easier to judge who can do what in scientific fields because certain functions simply cannot be done without adequate training. For us, however, the bestselling American novel of all time--Gone with the Wind--was written by an amateur who never planned to publish it except at the urging of others, and the journalistic story of the century was reported by an anonymous source--"Deep Throat"--who was not himself a journalist, working through established names at the Washington Post.
I still think we have something to learn from science, though. Regardless of how far they take citizen sources, they've figured out how to take them: with a grain of salt. This may be because fields like science and technology are confronted with innovation and new ways of doing things on a very regular basis, and people who work within those fields are less prone to overestimate the implications of new developments, but in any case they seem to have the idea.
So does Penguin. Nowhere along the line have they made any silly assertions about revolutionizing the novel or changing the industry, etc. The journalism people seem a little more over-enthused, but it's once again worth noting that the first place I read about this was--that's right--the New York Times, and I swear to dog, those people's grasp on reality is light enough to make those guys identifying themselves religiously as Jedi sound convincing.
As for the debate about Wikipedia, I'm not going to go claiming that it's rife with lies and misinformation, but the NYT at least has it right on this count: I wouldn't cite it when my reputation is on the line. Wikipedia is a great thing to have at our fingertips, but I greatly doubt that I or anyone else would pay to be able to use it, and anyone who suggests that it will replace commercial encyplopediae is kidding himself.
As people find more and more ways to use wikis, it's important to remember that they're not The New Way of Doing Things. They're just another method that may or may not be appropriate to any given situation.
Where Do You Draw the Line?
A curious incident has been coming to light over the past couple of weeks involving a scammer who ripped off what statistics from book distributor Ingram suggest to have been hundreds of bookstores across the country. The perpetrator appears to have been (or, at least, been involved with) a company called Author Identity Publishing, which past research has suggested to be a vanity press.
The structure of the operation is that someone calling himself Michael Evers (which would subsequently be revealed as a pseudonym) would order a couple copies of a book of short stories called The Shortcut from a bookstore, which would get the non-returnable copies from Ingram. "Michael Evers" would never pick them up, the idea being to effectively force bookstores to stock copies.
This tactic is nothing new. Another disreputable vanity press, PublishAmerica, has advocated it to its authors in the past. However, AIP's case went a step further.
It would soon become clear to bookstore owners that Michael Evers wasn't coming (based on comments I've heard, this kind of behavior happens to booksellers all the time). They'd try to charge his credit card information and discover that it, along with his name and phone number, was fake.
As of right now, there hasn't been anything in the way of a lawsuit, but Ingram has made The Shortcut returnable and just about every bookseller in North America has something in the way of a "do not order" flag on it.
This is yet another reason I'm not fond of guerrilla marketing. One man's nifty, under-the-radar marketing tactic is another man's wire fraud (or vandalism, or, I don't know, indecent exposure; at any rate, something you shouldn't be doing).
Whatever you're going to do, this is a field where you need to know the law. If you're not sure about something, for dog's sake, look into it. The crux of this story is that I'm sure Michael Evers (who research indicates is probably Kevin Fabiano, one of the book's contributors) thought this was just a neat little trick to get his book on the shelves, not something malicious or illegal (in a way that could merit a federal investigation, if Ingram's sales numbers mean what I think they mean).
There really should be courses on industry legal matters required for college programs in entertainment fields. I've met a discouraging number of industry professionals who don't understand that trademark and copyright aren't the same thing. As it is, however, we'll have to do it ourselves. All I can say for the time being is, when faced with "innovative ideas" in any field, always keep this story in mind.
Okay, Fine, I'll Talk About Harry Potter
As many of you may have heard, there's this book coming out, and for reasons I'm sure we're all aware of, it's going to have the largest first printing in history--somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 million copies in North America alone. Indeed, it's hard to imagine that news of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has managed to slip by anyone in the world at this point. And with the book coming right on the heels of the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix movie, I think it's safe to anticipate a veritable feeding frenzy this June.
Now, it's not just those big numbers that make this book important. The fact that it's being published in the first place is something to remark on, considering that we already know nobody is going to make money on it. That's been true for the last few books; nobody, other than J.K. Rowling, makes a dime.
I know that seems counterintuitive, but here's how it works: sales of most bestselling books look like a bell curve. They increase, hit a peak, and then gradually decline. Not so for Harry Potter. Almost all sales of every Harry Potter novel take place on the day it is published. After that, they go flatline. Everybody knows it's coming, and they all need to have it as soon as they possibly can, which is understandable.
(Side note: I've read and enjoyed every Harry Potter book to date, but so help me, those books are ALL plot--the plot's amazing, but the characters aren't believable and the writing isn't much better, and I won't kid myself otherwise. The reason we all need our copies on the day of is because if we get them even a little bit later than everyone else, the spoilers will be everywhere and the whole book will be ruined).
Because of this, we get the discount wars. Every bookstore needs to have as many people as possible buying from them, or they can't hope to sell anything, and the easiest way to do this is to be the "loss leader," or the store that gives the most insane discount. For this last installment, some of the discounts are approaching 50%, and despite the increased cover price, there's just no way to make that profitable--not for the publisher, not for the bookstore, not for anybody.
The theory is that taking these ridiculous losses generates more foot traffic into stores, and thus more sales of books other than Harry Potter, and more future sales of other books (get people into your store, and they're more likely to come back next time they want another book). For me, though, it's hard to see how any amount of new sales could possibly make up for all the lost money on Harry Potter books. To give you an idea, Cormac McCarthy's The Road was just selected as Oprah's new bookclub pick, which pretty much makes it an automatic super-bestseller. As a result, Vintage (its publisher) printed 950,000 copies.
950,000. Less than 1/12 of how many copies are being printed of Harry Potter. Getting an idea of the magnitude of the loss here?
The thing that really kills me is that Scholastic could stop this pattern in its tracks by making Harry Potter books non-returnable and refusing to offer the discounts the bookstores want. There'd be nothing the bookstores could do about it; either pay up or don't stock Harry Potter (pretty obvious decision). Of course, they'd have to lower their discount to customers, but in all honesty, who thinks that people wouldn't pay $25 instead of $18 for the new Harry Potter? Considering what we've seen so far, I think most folks would gladly shell out.
UPDATE: Publisher's Lunch reports that the publisher is capping returns at 10% as an "eco-friendly" measure, which is in line with their decision to print the book on recycled paper. A nice way to limit the damage without pissing anybody off, I think.
There's two reasons I can think of why Scholastic wouldn't do this, and they're so closely related that you might even say they're the same thing. The possibilities are: (1) they're a bunch of sissies, and (2) they want to appease the fans.
Making the books non-returnable would create an unprecedented amount of drama at all levels of the trade. And with all the horror stories I've heard about sales reps from Scholastic getting screamed at--SCREAMED at--over the phone by bookstore buyers who felt they weren't getting enough copies, when I say unprecedented, I mean unprecedented. And really, who wants that?
For me, this is the really heart-warming thing about these books. The way I see it, the reason everyone's willing to take their losses isn't because of all this mumbo jumbo about generating future sales; it's really, truly for the fans. We know Harry Potter is going to sell; we don't need the parties and knight bus tours and all this craziness that goes on.
This is what makes entertainment better than other businesses: the people calling the shots on Harry Potter are people who like to read, and most of them reserve just as much of a place in their hearts for the books they publish as do the people who buy them. It's the same reason major houses still publish poetry. There's no money in poetry; it doesn't sell, and it almost never earns out. But the people at the top like it, so they put it out for the small audience that receives it.
Now, the movies are another matter. Movie deals are tricky business, and I'll have more to say about that later.
Borders Blows It
To give a quick review of recent events, Borders Group (which controls Borders Books & Music and Waldenbooks stores) recently imported a new CEO who's making a big load of changes to the way they run things, in hopes of distinguishing Borders as it continues to slump behind its major competitor, Barnes & Noble. The changes include closing a bunch of Waldenbooks and focusing on Borders superstores, closing down international stores, revamping their customer rewards program, developing their own website (instead of having one through Amazon.com), and launching their own proprietary publishing line.
After careful observation, I've come to the conclusion that they've blown it.
For one thing, these changes aren't going to distinguish them from Barnes & Noble at all; in fact, it's just about going to eliminate the only ways in which they were different from Barnes & Noble, which concentrates on superstores, has its own website and publishing line, and a very similar rewards program. This alone may be enough to doom Borders to further descent into obscurity, but I'm convinced that even if Barnes & Noble weren't already doing this stuff, it would still be a bad idea.
The biggest problem is that publishing line. According the the Shelf Awareness article covering the changes,
Borders has already begun negotiating to publish titles by "celebrities, undiscovered talents and others" that would be exclusive to Borders. The company imagines that it can make many of the titles bestsellers.
The article further reveals that Borders plans to take unproduced screenplays from Hollywood writers and develop them into novels. This is a terrible idea. There's not much money in trade (i.e. non-academic) book publishing in the first place; fiction, which they appear to be aiming to publish, is the least profitable segment of trade publishing, and first fiction (books by first-time authors, which they also appear to be aiming to publish) is the least profitable segment of trade fiction. Barnes & Noble has been driving its (very similar) imprint like crazy for years, and have had very poor success with it.
If Borders want to use publishing to, as they say, distinguish their brand and drive high-margin sales, they could publish textbooks and sell them for much less than any college bookstore, and it would be much more profitable than what they're doing now.
Incidentally, this is something that's true of the job market as well: there aren't many jobs in trade publishing, and as I've stressed before, connections are all important. Academic publishing presents more opportunities, but that's probably not what most of us are here for. Bookselling and freelancing present many, many more opportunities in this department.
Moving on, Borders's new rewards program is another problem.
Under the old program, 5% of every purchase you made at Borders would go into your "holiday savings" account. Once the holiday season rolled around, you could put whatever was in that account toward your purchases--provided you had at least $10 saved up, which meant you had to spend at least $200.
Under the new program, whenever you spend $150 they send you a $5 gift card. It sounds simpler, but what they're really effectively doing is decreasing their discount ($5 for every $150 you spend reflects about a 3% discount, as compared to the previous 5%). And despite the fact that it's simpler, I don't think it's going to increase sales any. If you look at the number of people who spend $200 a year at Borders, I doubt the number of people who spend $150 is going to be much higher. People either spend a lot or they don't, and making it so that those savings aren't tied to the holidays (which got the few big-spenders into Borders for their holiday shopping) isn't going to help things.
There's really not much to say in regards to the website. It's too late to start up their own; no matter what they do, they're never going to get ahead of Barnes & Noble or Amazon in that department.
The problem that I really have with all this is how it reflects the trend that's been happening in entertainment for years. Right now, we're at a point where there are basically only 3 outlets for people to buy entertainment products: (1) The giant bookstore that sells music and movies and magazines and has a coffee shop attached, (2) the new/used CD/DVD/Videogame and related accessories store, and (3) Wal Mart, Target, and Costco.
Within these categories, the individual stores aren't much different. It doesn't matter if you go to Borders, Barnes & Noble, or Books-a-Million; if you go to Strawberries, Gamestop, or Newberry Comics; even Wal Mart, Target, or Costco. In any category, they're all pretty much the same thing, and increasingly so.
I like small and independent, so you probably all know what I'm going to say here, but this is an area where smaller businesses, smaller entertainment outlets, can start to take back people's attention. I think people are getting tired of the staunch homogenization; I know I am. I'm tired of having to bounce back and forth between every Borders and Barnes & Noble in town whenever I'm looking for a specific book, because which of them will have it is ultimately a shot in the dark. I'm tired of the fact that I'll always have to travel for half an hour or more to get to a bookstore because I live in a neighborhood that is not, and will never be zoned right for big superstores.
The question is, why are independent retailers going under at such an obscene rate these days? I honestly think it's because they're too much like the big chain stores. Most of them do basically the same thing, except they have smaller selection and flimsier incentives to buy there. But they don't have to be like this.
I'm reminded of a case earlier this year where Pandemonium Books & Games, an independent bookstore in Cambridge, MA was in danger of shutting down. But unlike other indies, their customers--and even some people who weren't their customers--rallied around them, poured thousands collectively into a fundraiser, and saved the store.
Now Pandemonium isn't just an indie bookstore: it's a specialty bookstore, for science fiction. I've been to Pandemonium (they carry my magazine, in fact); they know their customers, they carry a much larger selection than big chain stores within their specialty, and they hold lots of nifty events that suit their audience. They're doing something the chains can't, and they're succeeding. In my mind, operations like this are where the future of retail (hopefully) lies for us in the industry.
Updates
This post will be an update on things I've mentioned in previous posts, anywhere I have new information or developments. A lot of issues from before are awaiting follow-ups, so rather than spend the rest of eternity pursuing them, I'll digest what I've found here.
- In addition to opening its new offices, The Onion recently launched a website with various types of multimedia. The site garnered a snarky review from the New York Times, in which the reviewer ragged on The Onion for staying small and being from the Midwest, and which I found to be in pretty poor taste. I personally don't think The Onion is that funny, but they strangely seem to be one of few newspapers with their bases adequately covered these days.
- For the record, contests in the entertainment industry aren't a bad idea across the board. Some segments of the industry, such as theater and music, place great value on awards and honors. The mistake often lies in thinking that all forms of entertainment work the same way, i.e. thinking that because American Idol works for singers (and honestly, that competition is a TV show first, second, third, and fourth, and a singing contest fifth of lower) that it will work for writers as well. Any contest should be evaluated for reputation and usefulness within its own industry.
- Subsequent reports about Steve Jobs's decrying DRM indicate that he is probably full of crap, just throwing out rhetoric in order to shift heat from himself onto the RIAA and its member labels. He's right that DRM doesn't work to stop music piracy, but that's mainly because at this point it isn't about stopping piracy, it's about stopping competition. Putting DRM on iTunes songs is about making it so that iTunes customers have to buy iPods. Since Jobs's announcement, Apple hasn't shown any signs of becoming less anti-competition, or of removing DRM from the media it owns. Spoke too soon. EMI has agreed to offer their mp3's DRM-free through iTunes, albeit for more money than the standard versions. Mark this as the day the record labels wised up just a little bit. UPDATE: Microsoft is now planning to offer DRM-free tunes as well. I'm sure that the awesomeness of this development will sink in sooner or later. I think I'm still experiencing a little bit of disbelief at this point.
- No further information came to me about the New York International Children's Film Festival that was of particular note. However, I did get some more extensive info on the Chicago International Children's Film Festival, a similar event in its 24th year. Documentation on this one is a little more extensive, including a clause in their promotional material specifying that the festival is a non-profit operation. Power to the organizers of these events, but it doesn't look like they're exactly making a chunk of change on them. Also , if you want a little bit of context for Beckman's comment about chicken fingers, do a little research on Richard Williams's The Thief and the Cobbler, a film that was acquired by Disney and Miramax in the early nineties and bastardized into this.
- Algonquin's guerrilla marketing stunt for its upcoming Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England is surprisingly paying off for Algonquin; in fact, they've booked the author for a speaking event at the Edith Wharton House, the same place that called the cops when they received Algonquin's oddball letter. Good news for them, but I should point out that the folks at Algonquin are the publicity masters behind the bestselling Water for Elephants. They can pull this stuff off if anyone can, but we shouldn't kid ourselves that sending inflammatory (oops... bad pun) letters is a good tactic for anyone to use.
- I can't find any evidence of My Boys condoms turning up anywhere else at this point. I can't even figure out who's leaving them around. For the moment, these little guys are still a mystery.
- On the subject of getting an actual job, I'm afraid I made one mistake: Beth Ineson's first work for a publishing house was at Yale University Press, not MIT. Sorry, Beth.
- I should clarify that I don't think Powell Books's short films are a bad idea. If you only pay attention to Powell's comments and the way they're going about it, I think they're doing things right, not expecting to make a profit or replace author tours altogether. The NYT just spun it in a really idiotic way, and that's what I have a problem with. Considering what kind of part the Times plays in the book business, they often seem to have a phenomenal misunderstanding of it.
On that note, I've discovered that no, unfortunately, I cannot presently afford to stop reading the NYT. No matter how many specialty publications I read, there's some stuff I'm just going to miss if I don't have the daily paper in front of me. The Boston Globe is not a viable alternative. I may check out some other major dailies, but for the moment it seems I'm stuck. On the bright side, though, I've found that I can easily do without BoingBoing, which, although it's the most linked-to blog on the web, isn't nearly as good a source about entertainment as I originally thought. This is welcome news, because I find BoingBoing rather annoying. It's like a cross between Wired and Adbusters. And I like Wired, but I hate Adbusters.
