Lilian Nattel's Blog, page 44
April 19, 2011
fact or fiction, here we go again
While the publishing industry waited to see whether it faced the embarrassment of yet another partly fabricated memoir, Greg Mortenson, the co-author of the best-selling "Three Cups of Tea," a book popular with the Pentagon for its inspirational lessons on Afghanistan and Pakistan, forcefully countered a CBS News report on Sunday that questioned the facts of his book and the management of his charitable organization.
via nytimes.com
Apparently the dramatic incident that launched his mission for education never happened or at least not in any way resembling the inspirational incident (man near death, rescued by villagers, vows to return and build school). I don't much care as long as kids are getting schooled. But…60 minutes visited 30 out of 54 of his charity's schools, found half of them empty or funded by someone else. Everyone associated with Mr. Mortenson including American high-ups who want to believe in him (and so would I) are staying low-key, wait and see.
I think the notion is an important and fabulous one. I am 100% behind providing assistance and funding for education in those regions. If it isn't happening, then it ought to be, and those who can make it happen should be encouraged and funded. Those who aren't–well, better to know the truth rather than cling to wishfulness, so the wish can become reality.
Filed under: Miscellany
April 18, 2011
Passover
The moon is full. Tonight we celebrate the exodus from slavery, the difficult passage to freedom. My family does this in its own way, a touch of the traditional, rather more of the untraditional, having evolved and grown up with my kids, now 9 and 12. Food is central. Jellies a must. Torte–2 kinds tonight because A and an invited friend independently realized this a most delicious dessert when flour is out of the question.
There are symbols to to remind us of the story: bitter herbs to bring tears to the eyes, and sweet haroset to ressemble the clay bricks that slaves made, the eggs of spring, the sacrificial beet (for vegetarians). The reminders jog personal memory, for we are to think of ourselves, this evening, as if each of us personally was there.
Each of us was a slave, bound by rules, frightened, dominated, whipped, our babies ordered drowned for fear of prophecy. Each of us followed the divine fire and pillar of smoke, wandered in the sandy waste, hungered for the familiar foods of slavery.
Each of us stood silent, admonished by angels not to sing over the demise of our enemies, because they too are children of God.
Each of us knew the taste of manna and the water from Miriam's magic well. As if it happened to us, that's how it's supposed to be.
It is easy for me. I really was there. Weren't you?
And then, in each generation, we are supposed to tell our story, mine, yours. Have you started?
Filed under: Personal Tagged: passover 2011
April 17, 2011
More on Accounting and Ebooks
After I finished yesterday's post and was mulling it over, another piece of information came back to me from one of my old accounting courses.
I didn't intend to be an accountant. I took English at university, over my parents' objections, but I had no idea, when I graduated, that there was any option for me but to get whatever job I could with an English degree. I was far from innocent about things I should have been but naive about ordinary parts of life. I had no one to tell me that there were all kinds of jobs an intelligent person with a basic post-secondary education could start with, or that I could go on with my education. (Before university, there had been a teacher, a Vassar alumnus, who had wanted me to apply there; but I didn't believe I was that kind of student, and I didn't understand how I could possibly get the money.)
I knew so little about the options (school loans, grants) that when I did need money for schooling later on, I just went and got a bank loan at the current rate, which was 18%.
I had worked in offices as a teenager to make money for university, so after I graduated, I opened up the want ads to office work. I got a job first as a receptionist and then as an order desk clerk at a factory that manufactured picture frames. (In those days, things were still manufactured in Canada.) By the time I'd been there a year, I was one of the most senior employees. It was that sort of place. My bosses sneered at my education and believed, in turn, that I must be mocking them behind their backs. I was too scared to.
It was odd that I decided to become an accountant. But it was a low time of my life when I thought little of myself and devoting myself to the last occupation on earth I'd ever considered made sense. I went to school at night 4 times a week, taking university courses in business. I got that loan to finance it. I studied my butt off to pass exams and I became a chartered accountant.
It was ok, really. At work I was treated with respect as a person with a brain and that was my first experience of it outside of school. And it beat waitressing as a way of supporting writing.
But back to the bit I remembered after I posted. You see dividing up your fixed costs across all your products, books as I was talking about, makes sense in terms of pricing, but it can lead to bad decisions.
Let's say you figure out that if you sell 200 books, your fixed costs amount to $10 a book. And that your printing cost is $1 a book. The author gets $1. You set your price at $16 and you, the publisher, get $4. Fair enough.
What happens if you have the opportunity to sell another 100 books but only at $9 a book. You decline. No thanks, the price is too low. But that doesn't make sense if the next 100 doesn't require you to hire any more staff or expand your offices.
You've already covered the costs by selling your first 200 books. The next 100 are gravy. Really all it costs you are the printing and royalties. You'd be making $700 selling those books.
So if you realize that what you need to do is cover your fixed costs and then you're free to devote yourself to whatever you, as a publisher, value–then what would that mean? These are issues I don't see anyone looking at but it would present a range of choices for both part a) covering fixed costs (eg gamble on a bestseller, have a line of cookbooks, develop a backlist) and then b) books of value (art, experimentation, literature, young authors, niche markets, works in translation, graphic novels, you name it).
As I said yesterday, we don't have to worry about those things. Writers just need to keep on with it. But we benefit, too, from being released from the line that we're fed about how the market (as if it's a thing) works and what the numbers really signify.
It's easy as masters of words, which can create a mood or make a case, to think that numbers are different, that they're more solid, immutable. But that isn't the case. I'm reminded of an old joke.
People are lined up to apply for a job as accountant for the Tzar. The first person in the line goes in. He gets asked, "How much is 2+2?" Four, he says. No job.
He comes out, everyone asks what happened and he tells them. So the next person goes in and answers 3, the next 6, the next 0, the next 8, then 2, and so on. None get the job. Finally someone comes out smiling. Yes! He got the job.
So how did it go? he's asked. How did you do it?
He says, "They asked me how much is 2+2."
"So what did you answer?"
He shrugs. "I said, How much do you want it to be?"
Filed under: Literary, Miscellany Tagged: accounting and publishing
Accounting and Ebooks
I've been reading lately that publishers lose money on ebooks. This sounds counter-intuitive because ebooks have no printing costs, so I want to look at this from another point of view, bringing my abandoned but not forgotten accounting skills to the question.
Publishers, like any business, have both fixed costs and variable ones. For argument's sake, I'm just going to use easy to figure out numbers.
The variable costs are easy to attach to books. If it costs $1,000 to do a print run for 1,000 books, then printing costs $1 per book. But what about fixed costs, the ones that don't change based on how many or few books are published? The fixed costs are considerable, the cost of office space, salaries of publishers, editors, assistants, office cleaners, assistants, sales staff, coffee machines and more.
Something has to be done with that to figure out how much to charge for a book. Let's say all those fixed costs add up to $2,000 a month. And the publishers estimate that they publish 200 books a month. Then the cost per book would be $10. If you add another $1 for printing, then that means the book costs $11 and the selling price should be more than that. If the royalty to the author is 10%, we'll add on another $1 for that (keeping numbers rough and round) and make it $12 total cost. If the book sells for $16, then $4 goes to the publisher. Their profit.
If an ebook sells for $9.99, and the cost is $12, then the publisher loses $2. It all makes sense, doesn't it? But wait.
Let's go back to those fixed costs a moment. I see a couple of problems with that. First of all, the cost per book is radically altered by the number of books published. If you can publish 400 books with the same fixed cost of $2,000, then that would mean only $5 per book. No printing costs for ebooks. So if $1 goes to the author, the total cost is $6. If the ebook sells for $9.99, then the publisher still nets $4, same as in the example above.
The question is further complicated by the advances on royalties that publishers put out. If they spend millions on a book that bombs, how does that ripple out to affect the way costs are tacked on to other books? I don't know, but my suspicion is that tucked away in fixed costs is probably something like "reserve for losses" or some such so that bungles like that can be spread out over all the books.
Here's another complication: how many quality books can be published with the same fixed overhead? There's certainly pressure with the way accounting works to put out alot more books so that the cost per book gets smaller. But is it wise?
And another question: what overhead is really needed to produce a good book. Do you need the big office, the nice furniture, the expresso machine?
My opinion may differ from the opinion of people who have an investment in things as they are. But think about it. What do you need to sell ebooks? Good writers, good editors and someone to organize their working together. That could fit any number of infrastructures, not necessarily in the present formulation. Even promotion is something that nowadays most writers are expected to do for themselves.
As writers, for the present moment, we are bearing the brunt of the fear and change rocking this industry. But what we do is independent of how books are made and distributed. We just need to keep doing what we're doing. And a small lesson in accounting can help us put fear aside and see the possibilities.
Filed under: Literary Tagged: cost of publishing ebooks
April 16, 2011
April 15, 2011
the poetry of taxation
"Imagine someone who wants to have a purely realistic and Aristotelian outlook and metaphysic and wants to avoid thinking of how some of the radical insights of Gödel, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Derrida and Deleuze might chip away at his system. The complexity of language and its nature of being contradictory and deconstructing are there all the time. . . . Sooner or later this person's world view will have major problems. Our tax system wants to be a 'modernist' enterprise in an increasingly 'postmodernist' world."
via nytimes.com
That is a quote from a letter written by Stephen Lacy, one of the accountants who corresponded with David Foster Wallace as he researched The Pale King, published posthumously. I've always wanted to write a novel about an accountant who was only superficially boring, but never managed it. I was an accountant in between my English degree and selling The River Midnight (which allowed me to give it up). People were always surprised by that.
Filed under: Literary Tagged: The Pale King
April 14, 2011
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