ARCHIVES OF October, 2011
By Shawn Coyne | Published: October 14, 2011
Throughout the 1990s, the American Booksellers Association—the trade organization that represents independent bookstores across the country—spent more than $18 million dollars suing publishers and big box book retailers. (read: “Booksellers Settle Lawsuit Against Chains“) The controversy concerned the third line item of my recent samples of book publishing Profit and Loss reports:
TERMS OF SALE
In 1994, the ABA accused Random House, St. Martin’s Press, Penguin, Houghton Mifflin, and others of giving special rebates and discounts to Borders Group and Barnes & Noble that were not offered to its membership. While publishers were extending independent stores a 40% wholesale discount off the retail cover price of an individual title, they granted chains secret additional discounts and credits that in some cases resulted in 50% off.
Wholesale discount policies, credit calculations and payment terms make up what is known as a publisher’s terms of sale. Every publisher has a one-pager that outlines their policies for retailers to order and pay for its books. The term sheets have lots of small type but the bottom line is pretty much the same for all of the big six publishers and their distribution clients. (When I was a publisher, I was distributed by two of the big six and the biggest mini-major).
But today there are two terms of sale models…wholesale and agency.
The wholesale model is the traditional model for orders of everything but eBook titles. Publishers, for the most part, invoice physical books to third party sellers (Amazon, B&N, Mom and Pop’s Independent story) at 50% off the retail cover price. So for a profit and loss report using the wholesale model, you can figure out how much revenue a book will generate by multiplying the total number of orders shipped by the retail cover price of the book and then cut it in half.
The agency model is different—it’s commissioned based—and brand new. It is exclusively for eBooks and I’ll get more into it next week. Suffice it to say that it’s quite controversial and already the subject of a class action lawsuit. (read: “Apple, Publishers Conspired Against $9.99 Amazon E-Books, Says Lawsuit“) But before we look at the agency model, it’s worth reviewing how the standard “wholesale” model evolved. (more…)
By Steven Pressfield | Published: October 12, 2011
When I was living out of the back of my ’65 Chevy van, there was a kind of dude I used to run into from time to time. A hard-core road character, burnt brown by the sun, unbathed in months, living on dimes a day. I probably met and spent time with a dozen guys like this in places like Texas and Louisiana, northern California, Washington state—giving them rides, working day-labor jobs, staying up all night talking. They carried guitars and no-hope dreams. I used to ask myself, listening to their tunes in a stoned haze some place that I could never remember twelve hours later, “Am I as over the edge as these guys? Am I heading as straight down the tubes as they are?”
A still from Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven"
They were great guys, wonderful companions; I wish I knew where some of them are today. Okay, I hope. But I’m not so sure.
When I was struggling to teach myself how to write, I was so far gone that the idea of choice never entered the equation. The question wasn’t, Does this make sense? Am I getting anywhere? The question was, “Am I out of my mind? How much farther down is this road gonna take me?”
From time to time I’d make a stab at returning to reality. I’d get a real job. I’d work hard, I’d make friends, sometimes I even had a girlfriend. But I could never stick. I had to write. All through this time, I was estranged from my family. My Dad could make no sense of the choices I had made; I broke his heart. I had long ago driven my wife away. My mother thought I was crazy. What mainstream friends I had were on my side, but, on the rare occasions when I saw them, they regarded me partly with pity, partly with puzzlement, but mainly with that look that people get when they’re afraid they’re standing too close to something contagious. (more…)
By Steven Pressfield | Published: October 10, 2011
The following romance (in three parts) comes from one of my all-time favorite books, Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus a.k.a. the Cyropaedia.
Panthea was reputed to be the most beautiful woman in Asia
Xenophon was an extraordinary character—an Athenian aristocrat and devotee of Socrates, who became a great friend to Sparta and died an exile from his native land. The March of the Ten Thousand, also known as The Anabasis, is probably his most famous work (see my earlier post “The Sea, The Sea!”).
Xenophon’s Reflections on Socrates, while it pales alongside Plato’s dialogues, is still extremely illuminating, and his wonderful short works, On Hunting (meaning the pursuit of boars and hares, using hounds), The Cavalry Commander, and the Economicus (sometimes titled “How to Train Your Wife”) are great fun and give the reader unparalleled insights into life in Athens in the Golden and post-Golden Age.
The Education of Cyrus purports to be the life story of Cyrus the Great of Persia, who lived and died a couple of hundred years before Xenophon was born. Cyrus’s immortal quote
Better to live in a rugged land and rule than to cultivate rich plains and be a slave
became, incidentally, the inspiration for our friend Shawn Coyne’s independent publishing house, Rugged Land Books (which published The War of Art).
Cyrus founded the Persian Empire, no mean feat, and was in his way a precursor and inspiration to Alexander the Great, who, a few centuries later, conquered that very same empire. Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus depicts Cyrus as a young man of exceptional virtue, wisdom, ambition and generosity—as his actions in the following tale of the beautiful Panthea and her husband Abradatas (translated by Walter Miller from the Loeb Library edition) demonstrate:
And Abradatas’s chariot with its four poles and eight horses was adorned most handsomely; and when he came to put on his linen corselet, such as they used in his country, Panthea brought him one of gold, also a helmet, arm-pieces, broad bracelets for his wrists—all of gold—and a purple tunic that hung down in folds to his feet, and a helmet-plume of hyacinth dye. All these she had made without her husband’s knowledge, taking the measure for them from his armor. And when he saw them he was astonished and turning to Panthea he asked: “Tell me, wife, you did not break your own jewels to pieces, did you, to have this armor made for me?”
“No, by Zeus,” answered Panthea, “at any rate, not my most precious jewel; for you, if you appear to others as you seem to me, shall be my noblest jewel.” (more…)
