_Here at Phoenicia, we're always going to value lasting quality over quick success, and to understand that our authors are artists whose work doesn't always fit into an obvious niche -- because real artists grow and change over their lifetimes, and need the freedom to do so.

Upcoming Phoenicia author Marly Youmans, (Thaliad)  who already has a number of notable books to her name, has an interest in marketing in the brave new online world. On her blog, she's recently published a "conversation" with marketing guru Seth Godin, in which she quote some of his pronouncements and comments on them. Here's a sample, but please go read the whole thing!

SETH: I think it’s a fading of the power of a published book to influence the conversation. When anyone can publish an ebook, anyone will.

MARLY: Nevertheless, Seth, I still believe that there a secret world tucked inside our big, fat, hyper-materialist, and often-tasteless world--a world of people who care about beauty and rightness and all the golden things handed down to us by the Gawain poet and Shakespeare and Herbert and Austen and Dickinson and Dickens and more. And maybe that hidden world is enough to sustain a lot of us who are seeking to make something worthy."

SETH: An author starting out today needs to pick herself, establish a niche, become truly the best at it and relentlessly and generously give it all away as a way of leading and making a ruckus.

MARLY: ... Seth, I find that writing the strong, beautiful book I always dream of writing and that having a position of humility before the great masters of the past is more to me than having a niche and so gaining numbers. I like “increasing readership”: yes, I do. But I love the tradition and the burning image of the strong, beautiful book more. And if I must choose, I choose the image and the masters.

...Give me "a great book" over making "a great living." I have that choice, and I choose. The attempt to write true books is labor and play in the vale of soul-making.

The conversation ends with a critical question:

MARLY: How will we know when books are great, Seth? Tell me that? When everybody has an e-book, and Babel is a nest of clamor, how will we find those voices?

One answer to that is "right here." Thanks for this thoughtful look at marketing and writing today, Marly.

We've been enjoying a number of books on our mobile devices, and are pleased to be able to offer the first two Phoenicia ebooks:Odes to Tools, by Dave Bonta, and Ice and Gaywings, by Ken Pobo. Both are available in .MOBI format, for the Kindle, and .EPUB format for most other e-book readers, at the attractive price of $2.99!

In the comments, below, we'd love to hear about your experience reading chapbooks and poetry books on your mobile devices. Poetry e-books have lagged behind prose because of difficult formatting issues. We're wondering: Have you bought poetry e-books in the past? Is this something you'd like to see for all Phoenicia titles?

Down the stairs, onto the porch, into the truck, up a different set of stairs...are all those book boxes we've lugged from college to first apartment, from first apartment to our first home, from city to city, becoming a thing of the past? The debate about e-books is one thing, but when we start talking about whether to simply get rid of all the books - as some of us have done with records, and then CDs and DVDs - it feels like the distant drummer is right outside on that porch. In today's New York Times, Nick Bilton, a converted e-book reader, struggles with what to do with his print book collection before he moves from NYC to San Francisco, and readers respond in the comments.

I've thought about the same thing, of course. When we moved from Vermont to Montreal two summers ago, we culled a third to a half of our large book collection, but brought the rest. They were one of the first things we unpacked, because filled bookshelves are one of the things that make us both feel at home; arranging a bookshelf has to be one of the most satisfying acts in establishing a new place, and rearranging it can be cathartic and symbolic. Dismantling the library of someone we've loved is like taking a final walk with them, and almost always contains revelations. Like some of the commenters on Bilton's article, I can't imagine a home without books; to me they are the soul of a home, a collection that is open to be "read" not only by their owners but by visitors who stand and browse the titles: a short course in the characters of the book collectors themselves.

But the last four books I've read have been e-books (read on both my PC and my android) and I can feel myself sliding into greater acceptance of the new media. I buy books more selectively now than I ever did, partly because I don't want to acquire a lot more things and partly because English-language books are more difficult to get here in Quebec. But I do still buy them -- the ones I know I'll want to keep, poetry and certain novels especially -- and can't imagine a time when I won't.

Music? I haven't bought a physical CD in a very long time, and we moved our entire music collection to mp3s. Are the two media parallel? Will print books go the way of CDs eventually? Or will we continue to have bookshelves - perhaps housing smaller collections -- for the comfort they give, and because, like art, they are objects that we like to see every day, both for their beauty, and for the way they chart our path through life?

The Canadian postal strike has finally ended; yesterday we rode past a postal truck filled with packages, and today received a phone call at the studio about a package delivery at our apartment. I'd gotten used to not checking the box, actually. Except for the occasional package, most of what we get is either financial, or advertising. With the prevalence and convenience of door-to-door service of other delivery companies, the post has become increasingly irrelevant.

I was thinking of that yesterday, too, as I downloaded the Nook reader for PC, and ordered my first e-book. Yes, I'm still behind the times; I don't have a Kindle or any other kind of hand-held e-book reader but I do read everything else on my laptop, so why not a book? But the real reason was that it's not always easy to get English language books here, either in stores, by mail order, or at my preferred outlet: the library. The Bibliotheque nationale is a fabulous resource, though the majority of their holdings (including the vast majority of their fiction) are in French - it is, after all, the Quebec national library. I can use interlibrary loan to order just about anything, but it takes time and a special trip to the library. I buy some books from a used book stores, and I order some, but shipping is very expensive here, and slow, especially from the U.S.

There are a lot of good reasons why I've been stubborn about printed books, one being that by evening I am tired of looking at a screen of any kind. Another, of course, is that I'm a designer, and excellent typography and page layout matter to me. We said all the same things in the early days of website design, and I'm sure that e-books will eventually have many of the design features we've become used to on the web, and the differences will become increasingly irrelevant. As a publisher, I'm also going to have to bite the e-book bullet. The main reason, though, is that I just love printed books; I like reading that way, I like holding them and turning the physical pages, and I like having them around me. A room without bookshelves seems as bare to me as a mind devoid of literature: but what a telling remark that is! I recognize that these visible symbols are a kind of claim to intellectual status as well as a comfort, and that part of my attachment to printed books has to do with identity and pride.

I don't buy the claims that e-books are a financial advantage: that's only true if you're comparing prices for recently-published books. I found a lot of discrepancies. Yesterday, for instance, I looked at the prices for "Netherland" by Joseph O'Neill from B&N. The e-book was 11.99. paperback, 12.32. Hardcover? 2.99. And both paperback and hardcover were available in the marketplace for 1.99. Is it really worth it to me to pay $9 more for instant gratification? Uh, not exactly. On the other hand, the book I did download, "Nemesis," by Jo Nesbo, was 4.99 for the e-book and 9.03 for the paperback. I have no desire to keep that particular book on my shelf, and it's a good one to read while traveling, so the e-version makes sense. Still, I know when marketing is capitalizing on human impatience and our desire for the latest technology. I don't like being manipulated; the library and used bookstore retain their appeal.

I'm curious about your own experience: do you have an e-book reader or a way to download and read books on your computer? How many books do you download in a month? Have your book purchases gone up as a result? What do you have to say about the advantages or disadvantages of reading this way?
(read other readers' comments at the original post on The Ca

Marly Youmans has just published part 1 of a 2 part interview at her blog, "The House of Words." We talk about the strengths of Phoenicia as a micro-publisher, and what's rewarding about doing this work. To my surprise, Marly has illustrated the interview with some of my own artwork. Thank you, Marly!

It all depends on where you look.

Phoenicia editor and publisher Beth Adams takes a close look at the recently-released statistics on the gender gap in traditional literary journals vs. online publishing, using qarrtsiluni as an example, on her blog The Cassandra Pages. The conclusions may surprise you!

For a closer view of our most recent book and the people behind it, you might like to listen to the podcast published last week by Dave Bonta at ViaNegativa. It's an interview/discussion with  Rachel Barenblat (left) author of 70 Faces:Torah Poems, and me, Beth Adams, the book's editor and publisher (at right above). Dave is a great host, and the three of us had an excellent time talking about Rachel's new book, listening to and discussing some of her poems and the texts they respond to, and the often-difficult subjects they bring up and address.

We talked about the patriarchy and violence of the Bible and the problems modern people have relating to a God who supposedly ordered/allowed the wholesale destruction of groups of people, or the dispossession of their land, and how these scriptures relate to the current political situation in Israel and the Occupied Territories -- all subjects that Rachel takes on in her poetry, and are of great interest and concern to me because of my long-term marriage into an Arab-Armenian family. In fact, this sense of grappling with difficult issues and trying to build bridges is a big part of my purpose here at Phoenicia, and one of many reasons why I wanted to publish this book of Rachel's.

At the end of the interview, the conversation turns to publishing and we talk about Phoenicia's first year, what we've learned from it, and our plans for the future. We thank Dave for his generosity in hosting this interview, and hope you'll enjoy it.

Note: if you don't want to download the whole podcast, there's a "pause" button on the audio player window, and you can listen in sections if you wish - it will start up where you left off.

A little while ago, on Twitter, Ernesto Priego posted a link to a video, "The Future of Publishing," put out by the UK division of DK Books (Penguin). The video, with its minimalistic scrolling text read by a young female voice, was originally intended for the company's internal audience but has been released externally, and generated a lot of buzz. Ernesto, a poet and writer who's writing his PhD in London on comic books in the digital age, expressed some of the same doubts I felt after seeing the video, so I wrote to him and asked if he'd like to discuss it. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.


  ERNESTO: The most crass commonplace in discussions about digital media, the future of the book etc. is the incorrect assumption that what in this advert is called "packaging" can be clearly differentiated from "content". Media are not simple receptacles where content is contained and that can be poured into a different receptacle. Media -- print or digital, aural or visual or multimedia -- are not only a means of transmission, they also communicate things in themselves, impose a particular framing that defines attitudes, meanings, readings.

BETH: Can you give some examples?

ERNESTO: In the case of some publications such as art books or other coffee table books (design, architecture, photography), in children's literature and books for very young readers (pop up books, books to teach kids about the 5 senses etc) and importantly comic books and graphic novels, that are collectable and make a very conscious use of graphic/editorial/publishing design, packaging is surely something that is not neutral, expendable or easily translated into other media.

BETH: For your PhD, you're working on comic books, right?

ERNESTO: Yes. My research is specifically about comic books and the new digital publishing scenario. Originally I was looking at webcomics or online comics as digital counterparts to physical, print comic books, but then mobile comics (to be read on the iPhone, and now the iPad) came along and started changing the game again.

BETH:  How do you feel a comic on the IPhone differs from one printed and read on paper? How does a paper book affect the content within it?

ERNESTO: First of all we need to consider the format: page size, for instance. Other elements come into play, like the tactile feel, smell, etc, as well as behaviour that comes hand-in-hand with reading the books, such as going to a book shop every week (new comic books usually arrive on Wednesdays to shops in North America; Thursdays in the UK), meeting other readers, going to comics conventions, book-signing sessions, etc. There's that element, but the format one is key. The size of the iPhone (things are different in the case of the laptop screen or the iPad) is just minimal in comparison to even the smallest of 'mini-comics'. (self-published comics).

BETH: Books have historically unfolded in a linear manner. Comics and other graphic-intensive documents are linear, but they also have had a flow (historically, anyway) that depends on the viewer seeing more than a single frame at a time.

ERNESTO: Yes, that's true. The way comics work is through the juxtaposition of still graphic images on a delimited space (traditionally the paper page). Comics are different from comic strips and cartoons because they usually rely on a grid layout: panels are arranged sequentially, and the reading process, at least in the West, is guided by this element: first we see the whole page automatically, it's almost like an intuitive thing (unless we are seriously short-sighted). One sees the whole page, the whole grid, then one focuses on the first panel, which is usually the one on the top left corner. We follow to the next, then the next, up-down, left-right. 

I believe that it's the grid layout that makes comics what they are (or used to be). In digital comics that are read on a small screen like the iPhone's, usually what used to be beautiful, complex visual narrative structures in the form of multilayered panel grids are now constrained to just one panel. One drags the fingertip to get to the next panel, but the experience of the page layout is lost.

Of course, it's great one can zoom in the text and the images, 'navigate' the visual text, but the specific texture of the comic book page is lost because physical dimensions have been constrained. We have a different case with the computer screen and probably with the iPad, where the dimensions are more generous.

BETH: Do you feel that comics and graphic novels are an entirely different category of book?

ERNESTO: What's important is that comic books ARE books. And people who study books have very largely ignored them, as if they were non-existent or from another planet. I strongly believe they offer some of the best examples to prove how it's not true that everything is translatable into 1 and 0s. It's literally like translation. The jar can never be rebuilt the way it was.

BETH: Let's get back to the DK advert...you had some reservations about it...

ERNESTO: My negative reaction is mainly to what it assumes about packaging... that these things can be seen in two reverse ways. I'm against this kind of bipolar thinking; it's a huge oversimplification. The video, supposedly engaging the debate about the migration of books from print to digital media, is reduced to two opposed ways of reading (scrolling down/scrolling up); where one is the negative one and the other the "optimistic" one. Perhaps paradoxically, DK Publishing's video, prepared by the UK branch of Dorling Kindersley Books and produced for by Khaki Films, could very easily be considered a plagiarism of "Truth," a 2006 promotional video by the Argentinean agency SAVAGLIO\TBWA and "Lost Generation" by Jonathan Reed (2008). In a time in which digital piracy is considered one of the biggest threats to creative content industries, DK Publishing's video's lack of originality seems counter-intuitive.

BETH: Well, the advert seems intended as a kind of slam-dunk, putting away (and putting down) any nuanced argument. And I hope readers will look at these original videos you mention - I'm rather shocked!


In my work as a professional graphic designer over the past three decades, I've had to  become expert at "translating" print publication for the web - but I notice the problems people have with this, even now. The two methods of taking in information are not equal because, for one thing, our brains cannot process them the same way.

What you point out about the reading process is also my experience with graphics-heavy documents, and it's probably maximized with comics. One thing that is totally lost when we view one frame at a time is the way comic artists, storyboard artists, and graphic designers have always played with scale in their drawings, both as an artistic device and as a way of creating emphasis and a shifting viewpoint, not unlike a camera's zoom. For those who are familiar with storyboards for film, this is the standard way of representing the flow of a story, and the best artists are tremendously skilled at this manipulation of view. It's another component of "content" that is lost on the small screen when we're forced to view one frame or a small segment of the whole at a time. Of course, larger viewers will help with that.

I also saw that you mentioned Issuu as a viewer for comics. That's the application I use here at Phoenicia to simulate the act of turning pages and allow zooming, as well as a sense of the pages as a sequence in the book. I chose it because I couldn't stand the single-page previews of most "look inside" applications.

ERNESTO: I liked Issuu in the case of European comics because it allows the larger format. What I said before about the page layout on the iPhone is not entirely true since it is often possible to see the whole page, but it's so small you have to zoom in anyway. I think there are different degrees in which physical format, design, typography, layout, paper type, size, type of binding, etc affect the way one reads something depending on what kind of publication we are talking about. I often think of the Financial Times, published on that characteristic pinkish paper: what if they started printing it on standard newspaper paper? Maybe it's just me but I think that an important part of --at the very least-- the corporate identity of the FT would be lost. It's interesting that very often, if not always, books are designed differently depending of which market they are for: US and UK for example, or the Spanish, French or Italian editions of the same books. Cover design but also physical format in terms of size, binding, soft or hard cover, etc can affect dramatically the reaction to a book. It's not only about marketing, it's about what it makes readers feel.

BETH: Thinking of visual material as a "scroll" is helpful sometimes too. In our early days of producing .pdf versions of printed reports, we changed the formats from double-page spreads to single horizontal ones, similar to the IPad screen. One of the objections people had was that they wanted to print out the reports and couldn't deal with landscape pages! A client actually insisted that we do a vertical format version so people wouldn't have to turn the pages once they were printed! Resistance comes in many forms - literally! And it's especially so when the market is older readers.

ERNESTO: Yes, I'm sure of that. As my colleague Katharine Schopflin commented on Twitter, it's not only poetry that makes use of typographic and layout design in creative/meaningful ways. Even the most traditional prose-only novel will transmit different things in different editions with different formats. The best example is perhaps the much-hated "comic sans" font: can you imagine a PhD dissertation being taken seriously if typed on it? Lettering, like colouring, paper quality, printing method, etc., matters, and it matters very much.

BETH: So -- to get back to that advert -- what can we say about it in conclusion? It was, for sure, very clever and made its point, but I think there is truth in it read both ways around - attention spans are shorter, for instance, and publishing as we have always known it is definitely radically changing, if not dead.

ERNESTO: Yes, I totally agree. I think the advert can be read in many ways. What do you personally think of the voice they used? What does it make you feel or think? I have seen it once again, and I think I dislike it more now. It assumes there are only two sides to the coin, as if the print/digital debate were about seeing things in reverse only, about being 'positive' instead of 'negative'. I think it might even be patronising of young readers...

BETH: I agree about that. As for the voice - that's the whole point, isn't it, that it's female to be unthreatening, but definitely "young?" It reminds me of how I feel about a lot of Apple's marketing: it's so well done that it's manipulative. That kind of branding creates identification with the brand, makes you feel like an outlier and a rebel, but actually encourages conformity of behavior. I admire the cleverness - how can you not? - but it's important to think more deeply about the issues, as you've helped us do here, Ernesto! Refusing to think of digital and print in a bipolar way is the first step.

ERNESTO: I agree with you, it's marketing so it has to be taken with a grain of salt. It's not theory; it's not highly intellectual; it's what it is, an advert for ebooks or books on digital media. It's clever at the first watching, but if you think about it longer it's obvious it does not engage with the real questions.

BETH: Thanks so much, Ernesto! It's been great talking with you.

The recent flap between Amazon, Apple, and MacMillan over rights and payments for making titles available on Amazon's Kindle vs. Apple's new iPad has spawned a lot of talk about the future of the publishing industry. Contrary to the loud gnashing of traditional publishers' teeth, an article by Steve Pearlstein, in the Washington Post, takes a rosy view, saying that "what looks like death is actually progress."

"It will still be years before e-book technology matures and a sustainable business model emerges for the publishing industry. In the meantime, you'll hear lots of moaning and groaning about how the quality of writing and editing will decline, browsing for books will become a lost art, authors and their agents will be forced into poverty, and consumers will get hosed. Don't believe any of it for a minute."

Pearlstein, a business columnist and apparent Darwinian capitalist, says markets "have their flaws but in the long run are good at executing technological transformations." Execution is a good word, because the corpses from this revolution are already piling up. Pearlstein is right, I think, in saying that best-selling authors will be one of the winners, bypassing publishers and agents to sell directly to readers and, of course, cutting much more lucrative deals for their work in the process. But what about the rest of his arguments?

"Other authors will turn to smaller, more specialized publishing houses that will offer smaller advances but bigger royalties and will be built, as they once were, around great editors. Publishers will sell their books through competing online distributors and traditional hard-copy bookstores, the latter of which will continue to exist not only as places to browse and socialize, but also as places to have printed on demand. Backlists will be infinite, pricing will be dynamic, and more copies of more books will be read and sold."

That's fine if you're Anne Rice or Steve Jobs. It's even OK if you're Barnes&Noble. But if we stop talking about books as a commodity and talk instead about writers and readers, and the editors who have traditionally helped good books become better, this vision of "progress" looks much more like a fleet of bulldozers razing an historic neighborhood and scattering its inhabitants for the "progress" that is represented by a faceless mall or highway interchange.

Unfortunately, I agree with Pearlstein that this trend is not only inevitable but well underway. Independent bookstores have already closed, smaller publishing houses have been bought, newspapers and magazines have folded, and a great many people have already lost their jobs. But to insist that quality is unaffected by this trend, and that it's a great boon for authors and readers, is to disregard a huge segment of writing that has formerly been part of publishing in a "macro" sense.

Yes, you'll be able to buy Gladwell's latest book for $9.99, but what if what you really want to read is the book by an African survivor of genocide adjusting to life in a North American city? And what if you're that woman - talented, hard-working, and in need of an advance, a sympathetic editor, and a publishing house willing to take a chance? What if you're a poetry lover and have enjoyed collecting and reading beautifully-produced small editions?

What Pearlstein is talking about is dog-eat-dog market capitalism, where the players and pundits pretend to be talking about books but all they're really talking about is money:

Business models will change, companies will come and go, and people will lose their jobs. But at the end of the process, there will be fewer people who will be paid higher incomes to produce a wider array of products at lower prices. There's a word for that -- progress -- and it's exciting to see it unfold right in front of us.

Well.

Is there any sort of silver lining here? When technology drives massive change, as has happened in my own professional life in the graphic arts industry, there's a complex winnowing and a widening split, with most of the profits concentrated in the hands of fewer players who emerge on top, just as Pearlstein predicts. The basic technology, though, spreads into the hands of more and more people. In 1981, when we bought our first computer, "desktop publishing" was still a term of the future; graphic designers like me were going to be put out of business by all the people who would be able to do our job, once they had access to the technology.

To some extent that was true. The people who were able and willing to adapt did survive, but when things shook out, it also became clear that the average person, office, or company could only "design" on an "average" level: professionals who learned to use the new technology continued to be in demand for higher-quality artistic web and publication design. As Oscar Peterson said about the first digital synthesizers, which he embraced, "It don't swing if you don't swing."

Writers will continue to need good editors, readers will still look for higher-quality writing. The ability to publish your book on Amazon is now open to anyone. The question is whether there is any money in it.

As happened in "desktop publishing," in the early years of a technology's availability, everyone wants to get on board, and that's certainly been true of writing and publishing on the web. There's even an egalitarian ethos that arises: let's all share our work for free. Of course, this also means that people in the existing system feel threatened, and try to denigrate and exclude those who are advocating the new systems.

It's obvious that as the larger publishing houses merge and find themselves squeezed financially, taking risks on experimental, innovative writing -- especially where the audience may be limited, as it is for most poetry, for example -- has already become less and less viable. Academic publishing and journals are becoming, in my opinion, an increasingly  insular club. So, for truly creative writing, writing by people who don't fit into the existing systems, writing that crosses genres and boundaries and takes risks -- the sorts of things that small presses and independent bookstores once championed -- online publishing is one of the only remaining solutions. Doesn't some of that work also deserve to be in print?  Yes. But we've yet to figure out how the economy of it can work for everyone's benefit.

There are opportunities, I believe, for a vibrant micro-publishing effort for high-quality, short-run books and journals, running out of sight of the warring Titans of the big-league publishing industry. Frankly, that's up to us, and much more discussion and experimentation are necessary before sustainable systems develop, and writers, editors, publishers and internet-based arts-community-builders are able to work creatively without burning out.

1) It may be a radical concept, but I think serious poets and writers (especially those emerging from blogging and online grassroots communities, rather than the academia and the traditional literary world) need to gain the self-respect and confidence to refrain from publishing all their work for free online, so that their collected works in print gain in value and desirability. More on this in a subsequent post.

2) Publishers will need to develop innovative ways of getting the word out about new titles, hand-in-hand with writers and journals. Distribution and marketing remain the most difficult areas for small publishers.

3) Readers need to support these efforts by buying the works of writers they read and admire on the web, perhaps using more of their book-buying dollars for short-run books and chapbooks, and using the library more for mass-market titles.

Nobody is going to get rich, but everyone stands to benefit. The kind of cut-throat competition that makes headlines has no place here; we all need each other. Without the development of a mutually-sustaining micro-economy for short-run editions of poetry, essays, and prose, we risk losing the ability to preserve these voices and this kind of writing. People will continue to write, but their work will flicker into and out of our consciousness, disappearing shortly after it's posted on the web.

And that, in my view, is not progress at all.