Roy Miller's Blog, page 281
February 6, 2017
Warsan Shire and Beyoncé: Superheroes for Our Time
Last Saturday, shortly after President Trump announced a ban on citizens from seven majority Muslim countries from entering the United States and the suspension of the entire US refugee program, a particular verse of poetry started circulating the internet:
No one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
You only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
Your neighbours running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
The boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
You only leave home
when home won’t let you stay
It wasn’t the first time this poem had gone viral. Two years ago, when the Syrian refugee crisis started exploding on Europe’s shores, thousands had already turned to Warsan Shire’s brutal poem Home to express solidarity and empathy. The poem encapsulates the refugee experience precisely and accessibly, putting into words so many feelings that are hard to articulate—as a piece of writing, it galvanizes the public and critics equally.
Shire would later rise to global stardom when she collaborated with Beyoncé on Lemonade, launched mid-last year. Their partnership has been shrouded in mystery—no one knows how or when they began collaborating and, since the album dropped, the poet has been pretty much off the radar except from occasional social media updates.
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Foggy-brained by a week of obsessively reading the news unfold, I re-watched Beyoncé’s Lemonade a few days ago. I can’t pinpoint why, but it felt like the right combination of beauty, escapism and anger release. It was Shire’s poetry in particular, solemnly read by Beyoncé, that felt soothing—her words, read out loud, are hypnotic. Both women were in the back of my mind all week.
Later on, I opened Instagram and, gloriously, there was Beyoncé’s announcement (coinciding perfectly with the first day of Black History Month, and instantly celebrated as her bringing much-needed light into 2017). Such is the year we are living in that, at this point, she might as well be carrying the two Skywalkers. A day later, she posted the entire photoshoot on her website, interspersed with Shire’s poem I Have Three Hearts. On the same week that a poem by an African artist was being heralded as a rallying cry for refugees and referenced everywhere from the New York Times to social media, the most influential star in pop culture was making a statement, yet again, by elevating—and letting herself be elevated by—the very same artist.
Shire’s role in Beyoncé’s announcement is the cherry on top of the poet’s moment in pop culture. Whether she is writing about the refugee experience, war, family or relationships, Shire grants humanity and individuality to people who have for too long been subsumed under collective terms like “refugee” or “immigrant”—or not talked about at all. Shire shines a light on their realities, and forces us to see up close.
A Kenyan-born British-Somali poet, Shire embodies Audre Lorde’s notion of language as resistance. Her work is raw, bloody, painful, while at the same time it can be read as hopeful—by affirming the pain, we free ourselves from it. Recognized as the inaugural Young Poet Laureate for London in 2014 (alongside other awards) she has published two pamphlets: her first was “Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth” in 2011, which already displayed narratives of journey, war, and trauma that hit the reader in the face. Mouthmark, the small imprint that first published her in Britain, put it like this: “[Shire’s] poetry is a kind of literary pointillism applied on a jazz-blues-blood-sex-rock-and-rolled canvas with sweat, tears and spittle as primary colours; if you don’t get it you’re not listening.”
The timing couldn’t have been better for Beyoncé to lift everyone up, yes, but also for Shire’s poetry to consolidate as the words we turn to in this dark period. To me, their collaboration represents the duality of this cultural moment: the anger and the hope, the despair with a politics that eliminates all pretense of normal life, the need to take action while also just putting one foot in front of the other. The visual combination of old snaps of Beyoncé’s family life, baroque pictures of her pregnancy—surrounded by flowers, saint-like, submerged in water—and Shire’s words—an ode to a black Venus and the mysterious power of motherhood—feels at once divine and grounded in nature, both saintly and full of life. It reads like a sublime declaration, made even more powerful by the artists’ silence around it. They let the art do the talking.
Almost echoing the rebels of Fahrenheit 451, these two women are telling us: When everything is falling apart, we fight. When our bodies are in peril, we take supreme care of them and celebrate them. When the world is ending, we reproduce. When we are told we are worthless, we love each other.
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Declaring War On Alzheimer’s
It may be something small, but it’s enough to scare you: you misplace your car keys, or you can’t remember the name of the movie you saw last week. Or your mind suddenly goes blank as you try to retrieve a word that hovers maddeningly out of reach. And you think, that’s it, I’m getting Alzheimer’s disease. While most people of a certain age have probably experienced that stab of anxiety, I’m particularly fearful. My father died with Alzheimer’s.
I say he died with it, not of it, because one can live with Alzheimer’s for years until some other illness—a heart attack, a stroke—mercifully ends the agony. For two decades, Alzheimer’s ate away at the man who was once my father, robbing him of speech, leaving him mute through a long, grim twilight.
As a writer, I’m particularly horrified by the prospect of words, the tools of my trade, slipping away from me. Like many of my friends, I’m trying to avoid the disease by staying physically fit and mentally active, but Alzheimer’s remains the only cause of death in the U.S.’s top 10 that can be neither prevented nor cured. It costs the U.S. $226 billion to care for our current five million Alzheimer’s patients, and by 2050, it’s projected that Alzheimer’s will cost our nation a trillion dollars. It destroys many more American lives than terrorism in this country ever has. Isn’t it time we declared war on this devastating enemy?
This war won’t be fought on battlefields but in research facilities, and our soldiers will be scientists. As a medical doctor, I’ve witnessed dramatic changes in medicine over the decades, and I’m certain that a cure for Alzheimer’s is within reach. In 2013, to help fund that research, I began my War on Alzheimer’s fund drive. I chose to work with the nonprofit Scripps Research Institute, an internationally known leader in basic biomedical research, because I knew the money would go straight to their Alzheimer’s research program.
I had noticed the importance of small donations to political campaigns, and I thought that same strategy might work for my campaign. Every $5 given to my cause (managed through GoFundMe) automatically placed the donor in a random drawing for various prizes, including autographed copies of my books; Rizzoli & Isles T-shirts, hats, and DVDs; and two grand prizes: the chance to name a character in my next Rizzoli & Isles novel. The more money you donated, the more chances you had at a prize. I pledged to match donations up to $25,000.
We raised over $50,000 in that first drive two years ago. My campaign wasn’t just about raising money; it was also about sharing personal stories of loved ones we’d lost to Alzheimer’s. On my campaign’s tribute page, donors wrote about their once-vibrant mothers and fathers who had faded into oblivion, just as my own father had. They posted photos and shared their fears that they too would one day succumb. They found comfort in knowing that they were not alone.
When I contacted the two grand-prize winners to ask which names they wanted as characters in my novel, one winner said, “Please use the name of my late mother. She died of Alzheimer’s, and I want to see her live again.”
This, I felt, was a sacred assignment. The character had to be worthy of his mother’s name, someone who wouldn’t simply walk on the page and walk off again. Someone who would have an adventure of her own and would live to tell the tale. And so Millie Jacobson, named after a woman who died of Alzheimer’s, made her entrance on the very first page of Die Again. Stranded in the African bush, Millie falls in love, fights for her life, and nearly loses her sanity. She emerges triumphant, a scrappy survivor who helps Jane Rizzoli catch a killer. Alzheimer’s disease may have killed her namesake, but this Millie Jacobson would live on.
Millie’s fictional adventure may be over, but my War on Alzheimer’s will continue until there’s a cure. I’ve already launched a second fund-raiser on GoFundMe, and once again, two winning donors will have a chance to name a character in my next Rizzoli and Isles novel. I hope other authors will join the fight for more Alzheimer’s research dollars by spreading the word, or by launching their own fund-raisers. There are a number of excellent biomedical research institutes around the country, and they can all use our support. Words are the tools of our trade. Let’s use them now to fund a cure, so those words won’t slip away from us forever.
Tess Gerritsen is a physician and bestselling author of several medical thrillers and the Rizzoli & Isles crime thrillers. She lives in Maine, where she is currently at work on her next suspense novel.
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Media Sales Rose 7.5% in 2016 at Amazon
Total media sales rose 7.5% at Amazon in 2016 over 2015, hitting $24.21 billion. The strongest gains came in its North America group where revenue increased 9%, to $13.6 billion, while media revenue in the giant company’s international operations rose 6%. The media group is home to Amazon’s print and e-book sales.
Amazon had no specific details on how the sale of books and other content performed in the year, but the media growth rate was far below that for the entire company. Total revenue rose 27% in the year, to $136 billion, and net income increased to $2.4 billion, up from $596 million in 2015. The most important growth driver in the year was Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud computing division. Sales at AWS jumped 54% in 2016, to $12.2 billion, and operating profit more than doubled, to $3.1 billion.
Among the parts of the company highlighted by Amazon were the growth in its third-party fulfillment business, the additions it has made to Prime (Prime Reading, Twitch Prime, Audible Channels for Prime), the success of Amazon Studios, higher sales of Echo devices as well as that of Fire tablets, the launch of more renewable energy projects, and the development of host of new software tools.
With all that activity it is no surprise that media sales accounted for 17.6% of Amazon’s total revenue in 2016, compared to 20.5% in 2015.
Amazon's CFO on The Company's Take on Physical Retail
In a question and answer period with analysts following the release of its results, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky touched on why the online giant has opened bookstores and other physical stores. “We think the bookstores for instance are a really great way for customers to engage with our devices and see them, touch them, play with them and become fans. So we see a lot of value in that,” Olsavsky said.
He indicated that Amazon will continue to add more physical spaces, saying that “we’re still in that phase where we’re testing and learning and getting better.” Olsavsky praised the launch of the Amazon Go food store, explaining that that the store uses some technologies that are used in self-driving cars, computer vision and deep learning. The store is in beta now, Olsavsky said, adding “we like the promise of that.”
In addition to bookstores and Amazon Go, the company has opened some pop-up stores and pick-up kiosks in colleges. Olsavsky said Amazon learns from those locations as well and that the physical locations “create a great value particularly at the college pickup points.
He had no definitive word on expansion plans for the bookstores, noting that the company will open five bookstores this year (those locations have already been announced—two in the Boston area and one each in Chicago, New York City and Paramus, N.J. ) Olsavsky did say that Amazon “will be adding more bookstores,” but it wasn’t clear if he was referring to the five outlets set for 2017 or more stores beyond those five. Amazon already has opened three stores.
This story has been updated to include Olsavsky's remarks.
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Never Read a Romance Novel? Grow Up
A few years ago, I was invited to a writing conference at Mount Holyoke College. There were romance writers there—me, Judith Arnold, and Linda Cardillo. The other writers were mostly poets and memoirists, and there were a few well-known novelists. The keynote speaker was Andre Dubus III. In his address, he described the typical romance reader as “some woman reading a schlocky romance novel while simultaneously watching soap operas and eating.”
During the q&a period, Judith (a friend of mine) asked Dubus about his knowledge of romance books. He admitted he’d never read one. Most people who criticize romance haven’t, she countered. Dubus said he was put off by “those cheesy covers with Fabio” and went on to apologize—and change the subject.
Judith was valiant that day. I’ve been valiant, too, during more conversations and interviews than I can count. But here’s the thing: I’m tired of defending romance. I’m tired of giving a good-natured, tolerant you-should-try-it answer for the thousandth time. I’m tired of the media using the words bodice ripper and mommy porn. I’m tired of explaining that, yes, I too have read the great works of literature, and that, yes, I continue to read them today. I’m tired of being told I have the talent to write a “real” book.
Instead of defending romance books to those who’ve never read one, I’d like to say this instead: grow up. The categorical dismissal of the most-read genre in the world reveals ignorance, not intellectual superiority. This is a billion-dollar industry, and it’s not built on vapidity and cliché. It exists and thrives because romance authors offer readers an emotional experience that mirrors an elemental desire in life: to find a constant and loving companion; to become our best selves; to forgive our mistakes of the past and learn from them.
Romance encompasses fantasy, suspense, comedy, history, mystery, coming-of-age, and crime. The only difference between romance and just about any other kind of fiction is the promise of an emotionally satisfying ending. I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t think readers are lazy or stupid because they want to feel uplifted at the end of a book.
There are some very poorly written romances out there, it’s true, just as there are lackluster mysteries, self-indulgent literary works, and rambling memoirs. But most romance novels depict women and men who believe in their strength and convictions, who are willing to learn from their mistakes, and who take on issues and conflicts that stand in the way of a better life. Heroines are not rescued by a hero; instead, they save themselves. A typical female protagonist is not incomplete until marriage. Her journey is not about getting to the altar—it’s about growing as a person so that she can create a full life for herself, and yes, find happiness with a decent, kind partner who deserves her and whom she deserves.
To those who, like Dubus, would dismiss an entire genre without ever cracking a cover, I say, hang out with us romance writers. You might be surprised. Our community is filled with brilliant women (and a few men)—professors, doctors, lawyers, people with stellar educations and experiences. Some of the most successful writers balance a day job with family and a writing career on top of that. Our books are real, filled with the entire range of human emotions. They speak of the strongest and most universal yearning there is—to belong. To be accepted. To be loved.
Writing about these subjects tends to make romance writers happy, optimistic people. We’re a very tight-knit group, by and large. We’re—dare I say it?—fun. Some in the business are extremely prolific, but we don’t churn out books. We work as hard as any writer in any genre, and we write of the vagaries and hopes of the human heart, of faith and tenacity, independence, strength, and forgiveness. The best romance novels depict characters that are flawed and complex, characters who struggle to create the life they want and who succeed in doing so.
There’s nothing simplistic or formulaic or schlocky about that. Our books have happy endings, yes. Our books affirm faith in humanity and preach the goodness and courage of the ordinary heart. We make our readers laugh, we make them cry, and we affirm our belief in the enduring, uplifting power of love. I fail to see the problem here.
To view with contempt the entire romance genre—and the hundreds of millions of people who read these books—is simply ignorant and narrow-minded. So if you’re one of those who’s never read a romance novel, pick one up. Yes, there’s kissing. You can handle it. You might even like it.
Kristan Higgins is a bestselling author whose 14 novels have been translated into more than 20 languages and are sold worldwide. Her latest book, If You Only Knew, is coming out Aug. 25, 2015, from Mira.
A version of this article appeared in the 08/17/2015 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: It’s Not The Sex
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February 5, 2017
Tracking Unit Print Sales for Week Ending January 29, 2017
Unit sales of print books fell 1% in the week ended Jan. 29, 2017, compared to the similar week last year, at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. The decline was due entirely to a poor performance in the mass merchandiser channel, where units dropped 18% compared to the week ended Jan. 31, 2016. For the first month of this year, units through that channel were down 11% compared to January 2016. The biggest decline in the week ended Jan. 29, 2017, among the major book segments came in juvenile fiction, where units fell 5%. Veronica Roth’s Carve the Mark, the top seller in the category in its first week the prior week, saw sales drop significantly in its second week, selling more than 11,000 copies and putting it in second place on the list. Jeff Kinney’s Double Down, the 11th installment in his Wimpy Kid series, was on top in the category with just under 17,000 copies sold. Adult nonfiction had the best performance in the week, with units up 3%. Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly remained in first place on the adult nonfiction list, selling more than 22,000 copies. Tools of Titans by Timothy Ferriss had a big boost in sales in the week, selling more than 15,000 copies, which landed it in the fourth spot on the category list. Unit sales rose 2% in juvenile nonfiction, led by I Got This: To Gold and Beyond by Laurie Hernandez, which sold more than 9,000 copies in its first week, putting it at #1 on the category list. Unit sales in adult fiction fell 4% in the week despite a surge of interest in George Orwell’s 1984, which sold almost 26,000 copies and landed in the top spot on the category list.
Unit Sales of Print Books by Channel
Jan. 31, 2016
Jan. 29, 2017
Chge Week
Chge YTD
Total
11,572
11,461
-1%
-1%
Mass Merch./Other
1,620
1,325
-18%
-11%
Retail & Club
9,952
10,136
2%
1%
Unit Sales of Print Books by Category
Jan. 31, 2016
Jan. 29, 2017
Chge Week
Chge YTD
Adult Nonfiction
5,221
5,357
3%
0%
Adult Fiction
2,408
2,317
-4%
-0.2%
Juvenile Nonfiction
841
861
2%
-4%
Juvenile Fiction
2,653
2,515
-5%
-6%
Unit Sales of Print Books by Format
Jan. 31, 2016
Jan. 29, 2017
Chge Week
Chge YTD
Hardcover
2,810
2,824
0.5%
1%
Trade Paperback
6,698
6,725
0.4%
-1%
Mass Market Paperback
1,179
1,007
-14%
-9%
Board Books
511
526
3%
4%
Audio
62
58
-6%
-7%
A version of this article appeared in the 02/06/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: The Weekly Scorecard
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Pearson profit warnings wipe almost £2bn off its value | Business
Almost £2bn was wiped from the stock market value of Pearson after the beleaguered FTSE 100 company issued profit warnings for the next two years and said it would cut its payout to shareholders.
The group is also putting up for sale its 47% stake in publisher Penguin Random House.
Shares in the group plunged by 30% as it said its US education business suffered a near-one third slump in revenues in the final quarter of the year.
John Fallon, the chief executive of Pearson, admitted that the company “got a few calls wrong” at its US business last year, including a belief that college enrolments would stabilise and the huge impact of students renting books through services such as Amazon.
He rejected suggestions that he should step down as chief executive but said he would start meeting with disgruntled shareholders in the coming days.
“I am accountable and I fully accept that accountability for the fact that we got two big calls wrong last year,” he said. “I am also accountable for leading the company through a far more difficult period than anyone could have imagined. The board have asked me and the management team to get on and that is what we are going to get on and do.”
Pearson graphic
Pearson has issued a string of profits warnings in recent years and axed more than 4,000 jobs last year. The cut in the dividend this year will bring to an end almost 25 years of annual increases.
Penguin Random House is the world’s largest book publisher, with titles ranging from Fifty Shades of Grey and The Girl on the Train, to Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver’s recipe books.
The sale of its stake could net about £1.2bn for Pearson and would mark the final exit from its once-considerable non-education publishing empire, which previously included the Financial Times and a 50% stake in the publisher of the Economist.
Bertlesmann, which owns 53% of Penguin Random House, said it was keen to increase its stake to as much as 75% with a further investor such as a private equity firm likely to take the remaining stake.
Pearson said it will issue an “exit notice” to Bertelsmann “with a view to selling our stake or recapitalising the business and extracting a dividend”.
It is understood that Pearson’s preferred outcome is to sell-out of the joint venture entirely.
The world’s largest education publisher has found itself struggling with a huge decline in textbook sales and the transition to digital learning following the rise of Amazon.
“The education sector is going through an unprecedented period of change and volatility,” said Fallon. “Our higher education business declined further and faster than expected in 2016. We are taking more radical action to accelerate our shift to digital models, and to keep reshaping our business.”
Pearson said it had been able to maintain operating profits of about £630m in line with City expectations for 2016 – but only because the company was paying £55m less than expected in management bonus payments.
It expects profits of £570m-£630m this year, well below the City consensus of about £700m, and has slashed its target of £800m in operating profits for 2018.
Pearson said the ongoing troubles at its North American higher education business, which accounts for about 45% of profits, meant that it would need to “rebase” future dividend payments.
The company has enjoyed a 24-year run of dividend increases, between 1991 and 2015. The 2016 dividend is being frozen and the cut to future payouts is a major blow to Fallon and senior management.
“Our argument has been, and remains, investors have no visibility on what this company looks like in five years,” said Gary Paulin, the head of global equities for Northern Trust Capital Markets. “The one saving grace, the dividend, is now at significant risk. As, we suspect, is the chief executive’s tenure.”
Pearson has issued five profit warnings in the four years since Fallon took over running the company from Marjorie Scardino in 2013. He formerly ran Pearson’s international division.
He has pocketed more than £6m since becoming chief executive. This includes an estimate for his pay in 2016, which will not be made public until Pearson publishes its annual report later this year, as well as about £1.5m in total annual and long-term incentive payments.
Pearson said it was taking actions including investing a further £50m in speeding up the digital element of its education business, and reducing ebook prices by up to 50% for 2,000 titles, “making digital rental the best option for price-conscious students”.
Fallon said that its £1.3bn higher education business in the US, which is about 50% tied to print text books, needed to move to a 75% digital model by 2020.
He said that while currently Pearson gets one fee of more than $200 for its textbooks for three-year course use, services such as Amazon were eating away at its business by offering repeat rental options for each book to multiple students.
“Amazon and others buy in year one and rent five or six times over the course of three years,” he said. “What rental has done is eat into new book sales and that has had bigger impact than we thought. If that $200 textbook is used by six students over three years we are not getting $200 per use, it is divided by six. In a digital model we get $70 to $110 every time.”
Fallon said as Pearson moves to a predominantly digital model, which will mean 5-6% declines in the US business each year while this happens, then its business “can’t be disrupted in this way any more”.
“You know this is a business that is going to be a winner from the analogue to digital process,” he said. “[It will be] a much more stable, reliable, repeatable business [and] at least as profitable.”
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A Book Well Worth the Wait
I had a grade school teacher who liked to tell us that patience is a virtue and that good things come to those who wait—messages that never seemed to penetrate the screaming skulls of her impatient charges. In publishing, it often seems that good things don’t come to those who wait. Good things go to the preemptors, with “you snooze, you lose” being the order of the day.
Sometimes, however, patience is rewarded. In October, I’m publishing at Picador A Poet of the Invisible World by Michael Golding. I had to wait more than 20 years for it, and for him.
Here’s how it went down: in 1994, just days after I’d been promoted to editor-in-chief of William Morrow, I was looking for books that would fit into a tradition that included works by authors such as Paul Scott, Gail Godwin, and John Irving, when one miraculously arrived on my desk. It was called Simple Prayers and was the first novel by a young writer named Michael Golding.
There’s a breathless feeling to reading a great submission—you keep turning the pages, captivated, but you’re also on the edge of your seat wondering if it will hold up. Will it stay this good? Will it surprise in ways that will later seem inevitable? Simple Prayers did all that and more. There was soon an auction, and I bid aggressively. But eventually I reached my limit and was out, and heartbroken.
I decided to write Michael a letter, telling him that I’d love to meet him, and that if he was ever in New York, he should let me know. Months went by, and then I got a call: Michael was in New York.
I don’t remember much of what we discussed the evening we met (we had a lot to drink). But I do remember telling him that one day I would be his publisher.
Simple Prayers sold all over the world. Michael wrote and published a second novel and also forged a successful career as a screenwriter and teacher. Over the following years, we kept in vague touch. I think we exchanged two or three letters in the late ’90s and met once for lunch. I left Morrow and went to work for Hyperion. More years passed.
After 11 years at Hyperion, I quit to start a website and pursue my own writing. By then Michael and I had lost touch, except for one email exchange in 2012, after he found me on Goodreads. He told me that he was working on a new novel set in 13th-century Persia, Spain, and North Africa.
Two more years passed. I sold my Web company to Macmillan and began running the site for it, also acquiring books for its various imprints. Then a few months later, I received another email from Michael, this time with a manuscript attached. After seven years of daily work, he’d just finished his new novel.
I started reading it at my desk and couldn’t stop. The story of a boy born with four ears who joins a Sufi monastery and overcomes staggering obstacles on his path to transcendence, the book moved me deeply, producing the same breathless feeling I’d had all those years before reading Simple Prayers. When I got to its perfect ending, I wanted to start again from page one. But first I wanted to call Michael.
When we talked, Michael told me that working on this book had kept him sane through a difficult seven-year period, filled with emotional, financial, and spiritual turmoil, which included coming out as a gay man. He hadn’t heard that I was back in publishing. He’d just sent me the manuscript because he wanted me to read it. So he was more than a little surprised when I told him that I’d already shown it to Stephen Morrison, Picador’s publisher, and that he loved it as much as I did. Stephen—who’d written his thesis on Sufism—agreed that we had to publish it.
My path from here was now obvious. I’d waited more than 20 years for this opportunity, but I didn’t wait more than five minutes before I picked up the phone and called Michael’s agent to preempt A Poet of the Invisible World. Patience may be a virtue, but at age 53, I was not going to wait another 20 years to publish Michael Golding. Especially when books like this only come around every 20 years or so.
Will Schwalbe is executive v-p, editorial development and content innovation, at Macmillan. He’s the author of The End of Your Life Book Club.
A version of this article appeared in the 08/24/2015 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Worth Waiting For
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PW Picks: Books of the Week, February 6, 2017
This week: new novels from John Darnielle and Viet Thanh Nguyen, plus how medicine changed the end of life.
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Paul Auster’s Latest Trick? Celebrating 70 With David Blaine
Paul Auster
Credit
Lotte Hansen
Paul Auster’s new novel “4 3 2 1” has been praised for its “outsize ambitions and remarkable craft,” the latest achievement in a career that has also included filmmaking and radio production. So what’s next? A magic show.
To publicly celebrate his 70th birthday, Mr. Auster will share the stage at the Knight Concert Hall at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami on Feb. 21 with his daughter, Sophie, a singer-songwriter who has released several records of cabaret-style pop, and the magician David Blaine, known for such feats as encasing himself in a block of ice for nearly 62 hours and subjecting himself to one million volts of electricity.
Mr. Blaine and his Houdini-esque stunts would seem like a jarring addition to an otherwise genteel affair, but Mr. Auster said the two men have been friends since the 1994 publication of Mr. Auster’s novel “Mr. Vertigo,” which was set in the 1920s vaudeville era and inspired a then-unknown Mr. Blaine to seek him out. When Mitchell Kaplan, the owner of Books & Books in Miami, suggested that a reading of “4 3 2 1” could be expanded into a larger event, “I gave Mitchell two names,” Mr. Auster said.
Magic is actually in Mr. Auster’s bloodline. “My grandfather was a very skillful amateur magician,” he said. “In his retirement, as an old man, he went around calling himself the Great Zavello, performing in old people’s homes around New York City with his retired secretary Shirley playing the accordion.”
Yet as much as he considers himself a fan of magic, Mr. Auster said, “It skipped a generation; I’m utterly incapable of doing even the simplest card trick.”
Accordingly, in Miami, he will leave the magic to Mr. Blaine, though he wouldn’t rule out a collaborative illusion or two: “Maybe David Blaine will make me disappear while I’m reading.”
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Will the Pearson chief be brought to book over profits warnings? | Nils Pratley | Business
Forecasting is difficult, especially about the future, as the old line goes – but is it quite as hard as John Fallon, chief executive of Pearson, makes it seem?
Two errors in 2016 were understandable, or at least not unique. Most big US educational publishers were too optimistic about the numbers of students enrolling in US colleges and the pace at which all students would opt to rent, rather than buy, their textbooks.
Trickier to explain, however, is Fallon’s relative confidence only three months ago. Last October, when revenues from higher education courseware material were running at minus 13% at the nine-month stage, Pearson spoke of “improving trends”. In the event, revenues plunged 30% in the final quarter of the year.
“We now assume that many of these downward pressures will continue,” warned Wednesday’s statement meekly. Profits for 2016 will still hit the £630m target but 2017 could see a decline. More significantly, the target of £800m for 2018 – which had been a totem of Fallon’s long-term plans – has been abandoned, or “withdrawn” in the cute phrasing. Another ambition was to keep paying dividends at least at the old rate. That, too, has been ditched. Against those upsets and a 27% fall in the share price, the proposed sale of Pearson’s 42% stake in Penguin Random House was almost a side-story for shareholders.
The entire educational market in the US, on which Pearson staked its future a decade ago, has been blasted from many directions. An “unprecedented period of change and volatility” – his description – is accurate, but the question is whether Pearson adapted fast enough in the print-to-digital revolution. Back in February 2014, a year into the job, Fallon reckoned Pearson was “in the middle of what we believe will be a short, but difficult, transition”. Three years later, the transition is having to become faster. Pearson will cut ebook rental prices by up to 50% on 2,000 titles and invest an extra £50m at improving its digital capabilities.
Fallon offered a spirited defence that, when the dust settles, the digital future in education will be stable, reliable and “at least as profitable” as the analogue past. The theory runs that educational publishing in the US is not like the newspaper business: prices for digital content, complete with tailored material and self-assessment features, might be lower but old-style printed textbooks will no longer pass through six hands.
Will Fallon still be at Pearson to see his prophecy fulfilled or not? One doubts it. The share price has halved on his watch and chief executives tend not to survive five profits warnings in four years. Sidney Taurel, the chairman, is new-ish and thus hard to read – but Fallon should probably prepare for a short but difficult conversation.
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