Some of the published titles are already well-known works, such as Natsume Soseki’s Botchan and Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories. The selected works cover a number of genres, including mysteries, poetry, short stories, and novels. Upcoming titles (for which, I believe, the publishing rights are still available), include an introduction to contemporary Japanese poetry, fantasy novel The Mandala Way by Masako Bando, historical novel Tokyo Seven Roses by Hisashi Inoue, and literary biography A Thousand Strands of Black Hair by Seiko Tanabe.

Thanks to the very informative Three Percent blog, which focuses on international literature, for clueing me in about JLPP! I’m definitely going to check out some of these books.

Anyone who ever looked at picture books as a child knows that books aren’t just about text. Visual images can be just as powerful as the written word. I find myself drawn to books that celebrate visual images, whether they are photographs, graphic designs, or hand-drawn artwork, so I was excited to discover viction:ary, a Hong Kong-based publisher that specializes in collaborative image books.

viction:ary’s books cover a range of topics, including tattoos, architecture, fonts, and logos. The firm’s latest offering is Nice to Meet You Too: Visual Greetings from Business Cards to Identity Packages. It’s a sequel to, you guessed it, Nice to Meet You, which was published in 2006. I learned about this book via Yuko Uemura, a graphic and textile designer whose screenprinted towels I have purchased. Her business card is featured in this edition.

Here are a few more covers to tantalize you:

Musikraphics, a book that shares designs related to music, such as album covers and music posters.

Tattoo Icons, complete with trial tattoo stickers!

In the world of literary translators, Edith Grossman is a rock star. She is known for her mastery of translation, which includes the seemingly insurmountable ability to merge translated language with cultural nuance and style. Grossman is responsible for the English translations of a number of titles by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, including Love in the Time of Cholera, as well as the 2003 translation of Miguel de Cervantes’ classic Don Quixote.

Though many acknowledge that translation is an art form, there are plenty of others who hold translation in lesser regard, not giving it the credit it is due. It’s possible they consider translation a technical task, something a translator can plow through, dictionary in hand. Grossman takes offense to this, and she details the importance of translation in her forthcoming book, Why Translation Matters (release date March 30, 2010).

Works in translation are not wildly popular in the United States. According to research firm R. R. Bowker’s 2005 report, translated works make up only about 3 percent of book releases in the United States each year. Works translated from English, on the other hand, are plentiful (double-digit percentages) in other parts of the world. This is partly due to the dominance of the English language in print.

But all is not lost, as works translated to English do have an audience in the United States. Take, for example, the popularity of such books as Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (translated from French) and of the crime genre “Nordic Noir,” including The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell (Swedish) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (Swedish).

To read more about Grossman and translation, see this article.

People seem to have very strong feelings about digital media. It seems every day I read articles embracing digital media and articles dismissing it. And even within the differing camps there is discord—Kindle vs. iPad vs. whatever the e-readers from Sony and Barnes & Noble are called. Putting aside the nuts and bolts of publishing costs, I just don’t understand what the big deal is. If you want to read books on paper, then read books on paper. If you want to read ebooks, go right ahead. Can’t we all just get along?

One thing on which we can probably all agree is that the traditional publishing model is outdated and needs to be modernized. So, whichever tribe you belong to, you might find some humor in this tongue-in-cheek article from The Atlantic.

I remember back when Giant Robot Magazine first started up. It was some 15 years ago and launched by two young UCLA graduates. The magazine focuses on Asian and Asian-American popular culture, and it introduced me to a brave new world of artists, designers, musicians, movies, trends, food, and more. The magazine has spawned several Giant Robot stores/galleries, as well as a restaurant, gr/eats, and it has launched the careers and boosted the visibility of a number of artists and musicians, including Japanese artists Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara.

As we all know, times are tough in the publishing industry. Independent publishers such as Giant Robot that already operate on a shoestring budget have been hit harder than others. Even though Giant Robot Magazine is a well-established organization that cranks out a professional product, it still operates like a start-up, with just two full-time employees (the founders, Eric Nakamura and Martin Wong) and two part-timers. The company is as streamlined as it can be. This is why it has decided to launch an online fundraising campaign. The publication hopes to raise $60,000 so it can continue, at least for another solid year, to produce an uncompromised, quality magazine. The online campaign began about a month ago, and so far it has raised just over $18,000. To read more about the magazine and to donate, go here.

Classroom Publishing is a revised second edition and focuses on introducing publishing in the classroom and using it as an educational tool. Ooligan has set up a dedicated website and blog for Classroom Publishing, a twitter feed, and an e-mail newsletter. The website is much more than a mere advertisement—it serves as a guide, offering educator resources, news, and links to helpful information and sites. It continues the dialogue introduced in the book.

Ooligan will be hosting a launch party for Classroom Publishing on Friday, February 19, at p:ear gallery in Portland, Oregon, from 7 to 9 pm. See you there!

Steve Almond, author of Candyfreak and My Life in Heavy Metal, among others, has taken publishing matters into his own hands. Though Almond is still a hot commodity (his Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life will be availble April 13, 2010), he found that one of his book ideas was not generating much interest with publishers. His idea was a book that could be flipped over and read in two directions. One side would offer short stories, and the other side would contain essays about writing. The title? This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey.

Unable to secure a large publisher, Almond decided to self-publish the book on demand using the Espresso Book Machine. His first reading was at Harvard Bookstore, which has an Espresso Book Machine that pumped out copies of the book as Almond read.

Almond isn’t ready to overthrow the corporate publishing model, but he does delight in the innovations that make such self-publishing possible. This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey is available only at Almond’s readings. Read more about Almond’s experience here (it’s entertaining!).

Quick, name some Japanese authors. I bet you couldn’t come up with many names, could you? Plenty of English-language books get translated for the Japanese market, but not many
Japanese-language books get translated into English. Japanese book editor Hiroki Sakai decided to do something about this inequity and in 2001 founded Vertical Inc., a small publishing house that specializes in translated works of contemporary Japanese fiction and nonfiction.

Vertical publishes books in a number of genres, including graphic novels, comic books (manga), games, cookbooks, craft books, mysteries, and historical fiction. The company has a small but capable staff well versed in translation, marketing, and book design. Vertical is responsible for introducing American readers to the works of such authors as Kenzo Kitakata, a popular mystery writer who had published more than 100 novels in Japan yet was virtually unknown in the United States.

For a somewhat dated yet detailed article about Sakai and Vertical, go here.

“While people are busy ranking the hit books of the last 10 years,” the Guardian says, “many a publishing insider is quietly mourning a volume that unaccountably never made the ‘best of’ or bestseller lists, but should have. Here publishers, agents and translators speak up for the ones that really shouldn’t have got away.”

It’s fascinating to get this behind the scenes perspective on books that were expected to do well but didn’t.

Take, for example, the case of Mutiny (2001), the fourth novel by Lindsey Collen, a critically acclaimed and award-winning South African author (now living in Mauritius) whose readership was thought to be growing. The book was “published with great energy and commitment by Bloomsbury” and received a few excellent reviews, including John Berger’s declaration that it was “a break-out and a breakthrough.” Still, “somehow it just never quite took off.”

Or Black Juice (2006), a collection of short stories by Margo Lanagan. Simonn Spantz, the editorial director at Gollancz, recalls that the in-house excitement about the book “was like having a new Angela Carter on your list.” Black Juice was packaged and marketed well. And it got great reviews. But 60 percent of the print run was returned, leaving the publisher “[c]rushed. And utterly mystified.”

Reading these accounts of miscalculation and inexplicable failure, one is reminded that the book business is capricious and nothing if not humbling.

So let’s conduct a little experiment here. Following are four covers for the same book, Chinua Achebe’s seminal Things Fall Apart.

Pretty different, aren’t they? Now let’s assume you had never heard of this book. If you saw these lined up on a shelf, would you stop to investigate any of them? Personally I am attracted to the anniversary edition cover. I would buy that book for the cover! The red and orange one? Not so much, but then, that is the cover sported by the school-copy edition I read.

A captivating cover leads me to anticipate what kind of magic is on the pages within and inspires me to take a chance on that book. Call it superficial if you want, but if you’re the publisher who produced that book, you win.

Small, independent, or university presses get little glory. These publishers are generally not in the business in order to make heaps of money or attain celebrity status. Books are selected with much thought and care but probably with little hope they will ever make it onto a bestseller list.

Literary prizes, however, can sometimes boost a publisher’s reputation and affect sales. Take, for instance, the Nobel Prize for literature. The Nobel committee tends to bestow its awards upon relatively unknown authors, at least to readers in the United States. This, as you can imagine, generates a lot of interest and curiosity. When French writer J.M.G. Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2008, you would have been hard pressed to find anyone in the United States familiar with his work. Also, at that time, some four U.S. presses had published Le Clézio’s works: David R. Godine, University of Nebraska Press, University of Chicago Press, and Curbstone Press. David R. Godine printed 6,000 copies of The Prospector in 1993 and still had 420 copies when the Nobel Prize was announced. Of course, those didn’t last long—they quickly sold out, and back orders started piling up.

University of Nebraska Press also reaped the benefits of having a Nobel Prize winner in its catalog. It had in its stock two titles by Le Clézio: The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts and Onitsha. Sales for the works weren’t exactly brisk, but once Le Clézio won the Nobel, demand increased, and the two titles contributed a healthy $100,000 in sales to the press. University of Nebraska Press lucked out again in 2009 when Herta Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The press published Müller’s Nadirs. News of Müller’s win generated some 3,000 backorders for the title. Hip hip hurray for the underdog!

Publication Studio Makes A Book from Mike Merrill on Vimeo.

I was reading the local newspaper this morning and came across an interesting article about a print-on-demand publisher called Publication Studio. Their publishing model is unique in that Publication Studio aims not just to print and bind books but to create a community interested in the books. The publisher thus sponsors get-togethers to discuss publishing trends, books, what have you.

The publishing “laboratory” has its offices in the Ace Hotel in downtown Portland, Oregon. Cofounded by Matthew Stadler and Patricia No, Publication Studio creates jank editions, which are basic photocopies bound in manila file folders, using an Instabook III machine. Profits are divided evenly with the author. Anyone can publish a book with Publication Studio for a fee. The studio also publishes bootlegs for authors whose work is temporarily unavailable, usually when the author’s original publisher has fulfillment issues.

Some of the works published by Publication Studio are available for sale on the studio’s web site.

Some big-name publishers are banking on digital publishing. Jane Friedman, who has worked in the publishing industry for some 40 years, most recently as president and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, now has a new company, Open Road Integrated Media, that will concentrate on epublishing. Friedman’s cofounder is award-winning movie producer Jeffrey Sharp. Not only will Open Road digitally publish new titles but it will also reissue in ebook format backlist titles from prominent authors, including Joseph Heller, Pat Conroy, and William Styron.

Open Road plans to release and market nearly 1,000 titles its first year of operation. These will include new books and backlist titles. The company will also create videos to support the titles; documentaries that introduce authors and their works will be offered.

The epublication of backlist titles will be supported by aggressive online marketing campaigns. With the traditional publishing model, republication of older titles was done more as a matter of course, with very little marketing. Open Road plans to market the reissued titles using social networking sites and other online channels, such as blogs and Twitter.

For the full story on Open Road, see this article in the New York Times.

So what is going to happen? The publishing industry is aswarm with utopian visions of an electronic, democratic future. Many find support in a theory developed by Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, and described in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. The kernel of the idea can be said simply. In the past there were limited distribution channels (e.g., movie theaters or bookstores), meaning only a small number of products found buyers. But the Internet has created unlimited access to goods, making consumers aware of niche and obscure products and increasing demand for them. Using the terminology of the idea, demand is moving away from the head (the most popular products) to the long tail (everything else).

Here is Chris Anderson explaining the theory.

Both publishers and self-publishers have seen potential in Anderson’s idea. Publishers hope for new sales in their own long tail—backlist and previously out of print titles. Self-publishers believe the Internet will draw sales away from titles controlled by publishers and toward material self-published or simply uploaded on the Internet. Not without its detractors, the “long tail” is so part of the discourse of online marketing that some view it to be almost self-evident, though especially in publishing, it remains an idea waiting for full validation. After all, book sales are often still in stores, and people sometimes want real human interaction. Sometimes 50,000 people wander to a small town to find books.

Below is Chris Anderson talking about the media.

Image by worldmegan via Flickr

Apparently securing a book deal is not cause for celebration until you actually have the printed book in your hands. According to London’s TheBookseller.com, the online arm of book industry magazine The Bookseller, the poor economy is forcing publishers to cancel book titles. Some of the book deals were commissioned when the economy was stronger, so those authors spent a year or two working on their books, only to have the publishers reject them. Generally publishers give reasons such as the final manuscript was not up to snuff or was not what the publishers expected. Deadlines, too, are more strictly enforced, so if a writer can’t make the deadline, that’s another easy out for the publisher.

Benedicte Page, associate editor of The Bookseller, commented in a blog post, “The lesson appears to be that, even during the warm glow of entering into a new contract with an enthusiastic publisher, authors and agents need to be highly vigilant over the details—especially if the book in question is not likely to be delivered for several years, during which time the market may have changed markedly.” In other words, writers should get good agents and attorneys who can negotiate airtight contracts.

The assignment was: “Use typography to create a series cover design for Faber Film’s range of books that reflects Faber and Faber’s long history of typographic excellence.”  They also wanted entrants to design specifically for POD (print on demand) by creating a single template that could be used to generate an infinite number of cover designs.  This is a clever solution to that problem!  Plus: pretty!

Michael’s design wasn’t chosen (here are the winners)—it was probably deemed too conceptual for the assignment.

If you’re intrigued by these images, you might be interested in this new book that’s all about art made from glitches (like the image below): Glitch: Designing Imperfection.

Among the most interesting publishing visionaries today is Richard Nash, formerly editorial director of Soft Skull Press. Nash is one of many people who think traditional publishing is broken and needs to be replaced by the new tools and social habits of the twenty-first century. In Nash’s view publishing has to stop selling books as objects (wholly opposite to the current fetish of the object in literary publishing) and consider a different way to get writers and readers together, especially on the Internet.

Nash outlines that different way in a recent Publishers Weekly article. According to Nash, except for the 500 best-selling books, which will be published on the Hollywood blockbuster model, the future of publishing will be based on niche social communities. Reflecting this vision, Nash is starting a new publishing venture, Cursor, which will contain a “portfolio” of online membership communities to which people can subscribe. The first two will be Red Lemonade, a “pop-lit-alt-cult operation,” and charmQuark, a “sci-fi/fantasy community.” Nash explains these communities in Publishers Weekly.

Each community will have a publishing imprint, which will make money from authors’ books, sold as digital downloads, conventional print and limited artisanal editions—and will offer authors all the benefits of a digital platform: faster time to market, faster accounting cycles, faster payments to authors. But the greatest opportunity is in the community itself. Each will have tiers of membership, including paid memberships that will offer exclusive access to tools and services, such as rich text editors for members to upload their own writing, peer-to-peer writing groups, recommendation engines, access to established authors online and in person, and editorial or marketing assistance. Members can get both peer-based feedback and professional feedback.

Nash is looking for investors, so we’ll have to wait a while to see Cursor in action.

Storm clouds remain heavy over New York publishing, but the sun is shining in Austin, Texas, where Greenleaf Book Group is turning the industry’s traditional business model on its head: instead of counting on a few blockbuster titles to compensate for insufficient sales across much of their catalog, the company expects each title to earn its keep. Greenleaf offers no advances and requires authors to cover their own production costs. In exchange for assuming this risk, authors retain the rights to their work and receive a substantially bigger cut of the royalty on each copy sold. If a book sells well, the author wins; if it doesn’t, he or she absorbs the loss but is free to walk out the door.

Not just a glorified vanity press, Greenleaf has built a strong brand identity by accepting only about 3 percent of the submissions it receives. The lucky (and apparently promising) few benefit from Greenleaf’s reputedly excellent marketing and distribution services, selling on average between 3,000 and 5,000 copies in their first year. According to a profile in the September 7 issue of Forbes Magazine, the ten-year-old company saw revenues increase by 37 percent to $8.1 million in 2008 and is on course to exceed $9 million this year.

Check out the article to read how it all began in 1997, when founder Clint Greenleaf (then a rookie at Deloitte and Touche) decided to put out his own 30-page grooming handbook, Attention to Detail: A Gentlemen’s Guide to Appearance, to prove to his friends that writing a book is—well, just not that hard.

Wednesday night I had nothing better to do than to eat a light dinner—Gouda with cumin, mâche with tomato—and to read a short book I just bought, Insoupçonnable (Beyond Suspicion) by Tanguy Viel, a thriller about family deceit in the south of France. But before doing that, it seemed like a good idea to shut off my illuminating little seducer.

That’s when I saw the news, a bleak tweet stuffed in its 140-character jacket.

 QuartetPress  I truly hate being the bearer of bad news, but it has to be announced: Quartet Press has disbanded. http://bit.ly/17zUsS_about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck

How can I explain my reaction? It was something like a heavy object and a thud. And suddenly gone were all thoughts of family intrigue in the south of France. I had a real death to consider.

There was, however, one problem.

I didn’t know anyone personally at Quartet Press. I just thought I did, sort of, in an Internet way. Quartet Press was an ebook publisher recently started with great fanfare and confidence, its little Windows-like flag flying bravely into the new world of publishing. But it didn’t last long enough to publish a single book.

So why did I care?

Quartet Press was to publish romance novels, a project far from our own. They were going to focus on ebooks, while we will be offering both paper and electronic options. But I admired the enthusiasm of its site, its clear desire to do something new, its courage. And, I guess, in the mysterious way the Internet, or a book, makes you believe in what you can’t see, I was seduced by the drama of another new publisher.

Only yesterday morning did I learn the cause of death: higher than expected editorial and technological costs. Kat Meyer, one of the quartet heading the press, said, “The financial risk was increased beyond what our financial backer was able to accept, and the only options we had were to close or to regroup and go forward without financing,”

So adieu, Quartet Press, onetime maker of digitized, illuminated colors on my screen. I’ll miss you, whoever you were.

Books not only furnish a room, to paraphrase the title of an Anthony Powell novel, but also accessorize our outfits. They help brand our identities. At the rate technology is progressing, however, we may eventually be traipsing around culturally nude in an urban rain forest, androids seamlessly integrated with our devices.

He also imagines degraded moments of nostalgia.

Reading will forfeit the tactile dimension where memories insinuate themselves, reminding us of where and when D. H. Lawrence entered our lives that meaningful summer. “Darling, remember when we downloaded Sons and Lovers in Napa Valley?” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

Wolcott seems concerned that, by using an e-reader, we won’t be able to show strangers on a train or in a coffee shop that we’re reading Nietzsche and not Danielle Steel. Or vice versa.

But not everyone wants to use books for creating an identity. Or at least not the books they’re actually reading. Some people prefer the anonymity of the Kindle. And for those wanting to hide certain embarrassing titles from people snooping on their Kindle, here’s a tip from CNET.