I would like to be able to easily bring my annotations—along with rich metadata about where they come from — into other tools , perhaps Word to write an article, or WordPress to write a blog post.
I would like to track when I am reading books, and what the impacts are on my sleep habits.
I would like to be able to plug into a service that will map out all the locations mentioned in the books I have read and show them to me.
I would like to plug into a service that will automatically build for me a reading list based on all the books mentioned in the books I’ve read.
I would like to plug into a service that will let me ask an AI chatbot to search for references to the book I am reading in other books.
At the moment, he can’t do any of these things.
Ereaders have come a long way in the decade and a half since they were first introduced. They have surpassed anything the creators of Star Trek imagined. Phone screens are getting bigger to accommodate books as well as browsing. Tablets are sending dedicated ereaders into obsolescence. Publishers have figured out that the experience of reading onscreen is different from that of reading on the page, and they now hire skilled designers like Erik to create ebooks that are visually distinct from the printed version. Higher design standards are having an impact on self-published ebooks, which at first were the electronic equivalent of mimeographed handouts.
Bob Brown’s prediction of almost a century ago is well on its way to coming true. The Readies are not only increasingly inexpensive, accessible, and functionally sophisticated, they are set to become delightfully, satisfyingly “optically pleasing.”
THE LAUNCH
Hugh arrives early, struggling across the lawn with his hitching gait, barely visible behind the tower of cardboard boxes in his arms. He lowers them to the grass under the spreading apple tree where I’ve set tables for the book display and signing. The day promises to be killingly hot: the food and drink are cooling inside.
“Your wand has worked very well on the weather,” Hugh says. “Good job!”
“And good job on the books,” I toss back.
Hugh is laying the books on my grandmother’s white linen tablecloth in numerical order. For months I have been looking at lines of type, random pages, disconnected images. Seeing these parts brought together, not just in one book but in the hundred lined up along the tables, moves me more than I thought possible. Each book rests in its own lovely sage-green sleeve, a metal paper-knife glinting in a slit along one side, the instructions trapped gently beneath the blade. A book plate on the front of the sleeve lists the title, the author, and the number of the book. At one end of the table, a printed sheet lists all the advance buyers and the book Hugh has assigned to them.
We are expecting about eighty people: friends, family, colleagues, country neighbours, and many of those who bought books in advance, including my dentist, who bought four. Next week Hugh will ship copies to out-of-town buyers, including the rare book libraries, but he has brought these books to the launch, too. He sets a stack in front of me.
“These want your Jane Henrietta.”
I remove the first book from its sleeve, pick up my pen, pop off the lid, then freeze, Montblanc in mid-air.
“With this? Can I write on this paper with a fountain pen? Is the ink archival?” I turn to the last page and, sure enough, Hugh has signed and numbered the colophon page in pale lead. “Pencil is archival, right? I’ll go get a pencil.”
My mind is racing through HB, 2B, my father’s 1960s mechanical pencil, the collection of late-nineteenth-century ladies’ mechanical pencils I’ve accumulated over the years.
Hugh puts a hand on my arm. “Relax. Sign it in fountain pen—because it is you, because it is period friendly, and because it ain’t an f’n ballpoint.”
I pick up my pen, and Hugh picks up his needle and thread.
“Still finishing up?” I say, as I lay my signature in the first book. It feels like a desecration.
“Just a few left. You can help, Apprentice. When you’ve finished there, slide some of these knives into their sleeves.”
Still riding the rocket, right up to the minute the first cars pull into the lane.
The gardens are a bit past their prime but still beautiful, the pinks and blues of early summer long since retired in favour of the earthy yellows, burnt oranges, and reds of late summer. The Datura Belle Blanche shrubs are intoxicating; the August Lilies in full, fragrant bloom. The canna lilies and castor bean plants rise to exotic peaks; daylilies lay their long spears at their feet, offspring of the leaves that Emily immortalized in the Paradise endpapers.
Each set of endpapers is different, each one a garden. People stand around, staring in wonder at their books, holding the endpapers up to the light, comparing their Emily Cook gardens. Others sit on lawn chairs and benches, hunched over their books, slicing the pages open with the paper knife.
The crowd seems evenly split between those who can’t wait to open the pages and those who intend to release the stories one by one as they are read. “I don’t think I can cut these pages at all,” one friend confesses. I tell her about the rare book library that has purchased two copies: one to open and one to leave uncut. “If only I could afford that!” she moans.
Halfway through the afternoon, Hugh hushes the crowd to say a few words to officially launch the book.
“What have we really accomplished by producing this book?” he asks, waiting for the question to sink in before he answers it himself. “I speak more for those of us who have been intimately involved in the writing and production. I’m sure that when Merilyn created these stories such a collaboration never entered her mind. However, she had the courage to take a chance on me, an unknown person. We hooked up with Erik, certainly unknown to me, but then I always look for the good and build on that. We then met with Emily, who we were able to fool into thinking we were intelligent. What we had accomplished at that point was the assembly of four creative people. I’m sure that we all bit our tongues from time to time, but we managed not to shoot one another. As a matter of fact, we each started to appreciate the skills of the others. I think it must be outside the ordinary for four creative and, yes, headstrong individuals to get along so well in a collaboration. Thank you for this opportunity. It has been one of great joy for me.”
At Hugh’s urging, I say a few words, too, then read from the book. I start with “Tree,” raising my eyes from the page now and then to look past the assembled crowd to the Norway maple and the mountain ash that inspired the story of a man who planted a tree for each of his children. I read “Stone,” my back to the field from which the boulders were lifted to build the wall where people sit. I feel giddy, light-headed, as if the stories have come alive and are walking around in the landscape, whispering in my ears, the words no longer inert pebbles in my mouth or ephemeral shapes on a computer screen. The book in my hand pulses with stories, the ones I am reading and the ones I was part of with Emily and Erik and Hugh. The place where I’m standing inspired this book, its harvest is embedded in the pages, and the people who made every word visible, who made them permanent on the page and protected them with such grace and beauty between covers—these people are all standing with me on the grass.
The feeling is oddly familiar, and with lightning-bolt shock I realize that here, today, my book and the wider world are linked in a way that I assumed was solely digital, connections zapping off in all directions, limitless.
What can I do but laugh and weep with joy.
The Paradise Project is my sixteenth book. My other launches have run the gamut from, “Look, honey, my book arrived in the mail!” to a wall-to-wall party that took over an art gallery where Erik’s paintings hung on the wall and Karl provided ambient music with his group, Lion.
Launches have always been celebrations, a birth announcement to those who have asked patiently for years, “When is the book coming out?” In recent years, a
s newspapers shrink, reviews dwindle, and radio and television interest in books has all but disappeared, launches have evolved from personal parties to a vital piece of a book’s marketing campaign. A book isn’t launched just once, it is launched in city after city in the hopes that the launch, if not the book, will stir media interest. Launches have become so entrenched as a marketing tool that there are endless blogs offering advice: “How to Organize a Book Launch” and “Twelve Tips for Successful Book Launch Parties,” including How to Build Your Crowd, Prizes and Giveaways, and How to Sign. (I should have read that one, but I have a feeling archival paper isn’t discussed.) Guests are expected to buy books in droves. As marketing guru Tim Grahl shamelessly said of a client’s forthcoming event, “Our goals for the launch are to hit both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists.”
When Erik finished the design for the ebook of The Paradise Project, I posted the book on Amazon, Kobo, and iBooks. While I was on those retail sites, I created an author profile. My web mistress and I worked to freshen my website to showcase the new ebook I was launching together with two other backlist ebooks and three estories. I hired Karl, now a sound designer, to record me reading excerpts of the stories and posted the audio files, introduced by his rich baritone, on the site, too. I finished a few days before my birthday, so I waited and, as a present to myself, I sent out an email on that day to all my friends and associates announcing the new Paradise Project ebook. I tweeted and posted Facebook comments. I had a postcard made with the gorgeous Erik-designed covers of all six new digital and audio books to leave at bookstores and hand out at workshops and literary gatherings.
I was pretty pleased with myself until, months later, I Googled “How to Launch an Ebook.” I got dozens of hits: ebook launch plans, launch tips, launch strategies. Step-by-step action plans. Keys to successful ebook launches. A 30-Day-Ebook-Launch-Formula workshop that I could attend for only $75. The most astonishing site recommended setting the launch date before writing the ebook, as a personal incentive. The blog went on to recount how one young woman sat down in March, set a launch date for June, then wrote her book, finished it on schedule, and sold 359 copies of the ebook in the first week!
One of the launch tips suggested releasing sample chapters in advance, to whip up public appetite for the ebook, an oddly anachronistic strategy. That’s pretty much how books were promoted 400 years ago. In the early years of mechanical printing, books were expensive, bought by what publishers today would call a niche or a premium market. In order to increase sales, publishers in the seventeenth century produced books in instalments called fascicles. By the nineteenth century, the fascicles were being serialized in magazines.
Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, first serialized in 1836, is the book that established serialization as a profitable and appealing marketing strategy. In France, The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas, was meted out in 139 instalments. The economic benefits worked both ways. The circulation of the magazines that carried book serials soared. And when the full novel appeared—just before the final instalment—it was snapped up by readers who couldn’t wait even one more day to find out how the story ended.
Serialization was one of the reasons nineteenth-century novels were so long: it was in everyone’s best interests—especially the author’s, who was paid by the line and the episode—to keep the public panting for more. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe and published in 1852, was one of the biggest hits in early American literature, selling 10,000 copies in the first two weeks. Her publisher threw up his hands to the clamouring public: “Three paper mills are constantly at work, manufacturing the paper, and three power presses are working twenty-four hours per day, in printing it, and more than one hundred book-binders are incessantly plying their trade to bind them, and still it has been impossible, as yet, to supply the demand.”
If Gutenberg had printed my book, it would likely have been launched by hiring a young lad to hand out flyers that said something along the lines of “We are pleased to announce that The Paradise Project is now for sale direct from the printer, Hugh Barclay, at Thee Hellbox Press.” In fact, that’s pretty much what we did. We sent out announcement emails, we sent a press release to the local newspaper, and we posted news of the print release on various literary websites. For a few months prior to the launch, I posted bits about the making of the book in what I very loosely called a blog.
Discoverability has always been the issue when launching a new work. Typically a print book is listed in the publisher’s catalogue, from which a store orders copies for its shelves. Readers see it on the store’s shelves or read reviews of it in a newspaper, and they buy it. Sometimes, a reader discovers the book at a public reading and buys a copy from the person selling stock at the back of the room—a bookstore, the publisher, or the author herself.
In the heyday of CanLit, Jack McClelland, the master impresario of Canadian book promotion, pulled all sorts of pranks to make readers aware of the books he’d just published. In 1980, to launch Sylvia Fraser’s The Emperor’s Virgin, he hired a chariot to drive down Toronto’s Yonge Street—in a blizzard—carrying himself, Fraser, and the charioteers, dressed in togas and sandals.
Jack’s world was relatively small: just the million or so people in Toronto. The world a book drops into today is as big as planet Earth.
BRICOLAGE
The common wisdom is that publishing is a business that aspires to make money by producing books. Seen from that perspective, it is no different from any business that makes money by producing widgets.
But Hugh doesn’t care if he makes money, so long as he’s relatively certain of his next meal. Money is involved, but he is pretty clear that it’s more likely to go out than come in. For him, a publisher is someone who makes good books. Like many small presses, especially literary presses, he practises publishing as art.
Almost as soon as mechanical printing was invented, so too was the art of publishing. In much the same way that Gutenberg brought together the essential physical elements of paper, ink, mechanical type, and press, a Venetian by the name of Aldus Manutius raised the careful selection of each of these elements to an art form: exactly the right paper, the perfect colour of ink, a particular shape of the letters and their design upon the page, the arrangement of the covers, the skilful and artistic binding of all these elements into a physical object that would present a carefully selected text. Manutius wrote epistulae, or short letters, in the front of the book to introduce his favoured texts—the precursor of today’s forewords and jacket copy.
Not much has changed in traditional publishing since Manutius created Aldine Press and founded a dynasty of great printer-publishers. A good publisher still chooses with care the manuscripts that will be published and oversees every step of production to release the most perfect book possible into the world of readers.
“If you think this is an unworkable enterprise,” writes Roberto Calasso in The Art of the Publisher, “you may remember that literature loses all of its magic unless there’s an element of impossibility concealed deep within it. I believe that something similar can be said about publishing, or at least this particular way of being a publisher.”
Calasso and Hugh have a lot in common: a yearning for the impossible.
Calasso himself is the publisher of Adelphi Edizioni in Milan, a house known for its exquisite books and high-quality literary authors. “Part merchant, part circus impresario, the publisher has always been considered with a certain mistrust, like a clever huckster,” Calasso continues. At the same time, he says, “publisher” can also be among the most prestigious titles in the working world, if the job is done right.
Calasso describes the first book published by Manutius—Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or The Strife of Love in a Dream—which Calasso refers to as a novel in the same vein as James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, written in a mash-up of Italian, Latin, and Greek. “The vast majority of bi
bliophiles regard it as the most beautiful book ever printed.”
Manutius not only had the aesthetic sensibility to create a beautiful book, he was also innovative. In 1501, he introduced inexpensive editions of Greek and Latin classics, small enough to fit in the hand. He called them para forma—we would call them pocket books today—and they revolutionized not only how people read but also the number of people who took up books.
Calasso cites another example of a remarkable publisher: Kurt Wolff, a wealthy young German who, during the First World War, released a series of slim black books containing a single story by writers who would become the brightest lights of German literature. Like Manutius, Wolff selected the texts he published with the greatest care, then passionately and obsessively controlled every element of the bookmaking process to ensure that the physical form reflected the quality and character of the content.
Calasso makes the case for calling this kind of publishing “bricolage,” an odd French word that is sometimes translated as “do-it-yourself,” although DIY doesn’t come close to the true meaning of the word. Bricolage is a process of making something in a way that is opposite to the practical, rational process of moving from a goal through various means to an end. In the 1960s, Claude Lévi-Strauss used the word “bricolage” to describe how a society creates something new by using what already exists, as in the creation of a mythology.
Fine publishing, Calasso says, is bricolage. Gutenberg was a bricoleur. Hugh is a bricoleur. This is also how Sherry Turkle, in her book Life on the Screen, recommends Internet programmers should work.
Publishing is always casting about for new ways to make books, but never before with the creative zeal driven by digital innovation. In 2006, Wattpad started up: a free site where writers share their works-in-progress. With more than forty-five million subscribers in 2016, Wattpad is used to serialize finished books, too. Since then, many serialization sites that offer books in bits to readers have emerged, most recently Tapas Media, an app-based platform for mobile devices. Team publishing is a hybrid model between self-publishing and the traditional approach. At Booktrope, authors whose manuscripts were selected for publication were admitted onto a platform where they chose their own team of editor, designer, and marketer of the print-on-demand book. Everyone shared in the profits. In May 2016, after six years and four million copies of one thousand titles, Booktrope closed its doors.
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