The scene of the crime: The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City
At the Observer, Dan Duray takes a look at how big publishers eat each other in a report about Hachette imprint Little, Brown‘s crime imprint start-up Mulholland Books. The report, which is written as if spoken by Humphrey Bogart reading Raymond Chandler, which is a bit much at that length, describes how stars like Laura Lippman are “shocked” to learn that one mega-conglomerate spent a fortune to hire another star — Laurence Block — from another mega-conglomerate, where he was no doubt already making a fortune …. Then there the reporting — as if it too were news — of various other layers of cynicism in-house, as the robots debate the mix of authors necessary for a good crime imprint:
But there are hazards. Genre offers face heavy competition from the e-book world, where nobody cares if there’s a Michael Connelly quote on the cover, and there’s always a danger that an imprint like Mulholland can turn into a ghetto where you place books you’d never want on the list of Little, Brown proper.
“You can call it a ghetto or you can call it a specialized imprint,” Abel said. “You can spin it any way you wish.”
A heavy at another house whispered a little something in my ear about the whole plan. Little, Brown already handles big names like Michael Connelly and James Patterson, not to mention the stuff they do under Regan Arthur, the source said, so why do this imprint? Crime makes money. Money means resources, and in a sleek operation like Hachette, that can make all the difference, even if it means competing with Grand Central, which does a neat little thriller business of its own. This was Mr. Pietsch’s bid to remain the olive in the cocktail at Hachette.
As I say, no surprises. But the most telling thing in the report may be the scene of a Mulholland Books launch party for one of its star authors, Marcia Clark — remember her? the losing public prosecutor in that great nineties non-mystery known as the O.J. Simpson case? — at New York’s mecca for crime book lovers, the Mysterious Bookshop. It’s a big party, but with one problem: No one shows except for a bunch of people from the publisher, who apparently just stood around talking about James Elroy. The take-away: “‘There, there,’ said an agent, pouring Ms. Clark a stiff drink of book-party white wine.”
Well, actually, the take-away is worse than that. As Duray writes in his relentless gumshoe voice,
The next day I called up Otto Penzler, who owns the store, and asked him for information on the imprint.
“How can I say this without getting myself in trouble?” he began.
“Trouble’s my game,” I told him.
“Mine, too,” Mr. Penzler said. “But I’ve got a lot of friends at Hachette.”
Today Melville House is publishing The Lake, the latest novel by Japanese literary phenomenon Banana Yoshimoto. And, honestly, we couldn’t be more thrilled. Erin Kodicek’s review for Amazon’s Best Books of May sums up as well as anything why: “E.L. Doctorow‘s Ragtime begins with a Scott Joplin quotation: “Don’t play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast.” Not just a musical admonishment, it’s also cautioning the reader not to rush through the deceptively simple prose, which is packed with poignancy. I would caution any reader thusly when diving into Banana Yoshimoto’s The Lake. Mining conscious and subconscious worlds, this delicate and unusual love story finds two wounded souls slowly swimming to the surface of their grief. Yoshimoto unleashes “Banana Mania” every time a new work is released. The Lake will be no exception.”
Sadly it is starting to seem to me that this amazing pair of ereaders are yet another example of an idea (good or bad) that was announced with much loud trumpeting and noise, and then sort of quietly faded away into an embarrassed silence.
I got a job offer from Barnes & Noble mere hours after I had accepted my current position at The Strand. Even now — some three years after the fateful day — I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if that B&N manager had been just a little bit quicker. Compared to the wild, unpredictable nature of working at one of the largest and most eclectic bookstores in the nation, it’s hard to imagine an alternate reality of neat displays, khaki pants, collar shirts, Starbucks coffee, and Nooks.
In a post on daemonsbooks.com, the author warns us about a new danger out there. As you know, it is very easy to embed hyperlinks into ebooks, which is a rather useful possibility for readers of ebooks on devices that connect to the internet with a built in web browser, such as the Kindle, the Nook and several other models of ereader, but this also enables those canny folk, the internet crooks to embed links that pretend to be to something relevant to the subject of the ebook, but are in fact links to websites which may well contain all manner of nasty things, including small programs (invisible apps to use the current terminology) that can cause all manner of problems for us.
Even though this is an e-book blog, from time to time I poke my nose over into the world of computer gaming to point out some parallels. You could say that Internet game distribution is a sort of first cousin of the e-book, as they share a lot of commonalities. They’re both about telling stories—in books, you read the stories, but in games you experience them.