When Heidi Hallett purchased Frog Hollow Books in Halifax’s Park Lane Mall a little over two years ago, she did so out of a lifelong love for literature. After almost a decade as a co-owner of The Coast, Halifax’s only independent weekly newspaper, she decided that it was time to turn the page on her profession.

“I have been a big reader ever since I was a little girl,” she says. “Books were my way of both escaping the world and making some sense out of it. I have always been a big supporter of Atlantic Canadian literature and believe that we have some of the best authors in the country here on the East Coast. I wanted to play my part in our great tradition of storytelling.”

Ms. Hallett is not alone in her struggles, as independent booksellers from coast to coast feel the pressure from the onslaught of deep-pocketed big-box stores, online purchasing, the high dollar and the cost of prime real estate.

Ms. Hallett is doing what she can to keep her dreams alive by spreading the word about regional scribes through book launches and in-store author appearances. “Local literature is a vital part of our culture here, and I am concerned that if more independent bookstores like mine start going under, we risk losing that history and heritage forever.”

Dave Hill is the manager of Munro’s Books in Victoria, one of the country’s oldest and most successful independent booksellers. He says that stores like Frog Hollow have to find and work with their core strengths. “The key is to focus her efforts upon the things that the big chain outlets or online sellers cannot offer their customers,” he says. “First and foremost, that means excellent service and expert advice.”

To that end, Ms. Hallett and her staff should always make it a point to engage their clients in literary chit-chat. “Bookstores are tailor-made for browsing and discussing ideas,” he says. “What she ideally wants is for the bookstore to become a point of destination for readers of all ages. Along with that literary expertise and those added personal touches, things like author readings and signings, special events, weekly or monthly theme sales, on-site contests, book clubs, having an activities area for children and even serving coffee and muffins will all add up to a higher volume of in-store traffic.”

He adds that Frog Hollow must then use its in-house and front-of-store display space as effectively as possible. “A real emphasis should be placed upon specialty products, such as local and regional authors and books,” he says.

“Ultimately, however, Hallett is going to build her reputation in the community through word of mouth and referrals.”

Eleanor LeFave agrees. President of the Canadian Booksellers Association and owner of Mabel’s Fables Children’s Bookstore in Toronto says businesses like hers must make the most of their marketplace. “We will never be able to compete with the Chapters/Indigo outlets or the Amazon.coms of the world,” she admits, “but we can find a good niche for ourselves and make ourselves a vital and vibrant part of the neighbourhood.” That means reaching out to the local community as well. “Getting involved with local literary festivals, or bringing books or book discussion into the schools or libraries is always a great way to keep up visibility,” she says.

“Sending out a weekly or monthly e-mail is an effective and cost-efficient way for Hallett to keep her existing customers up to date on current and upcoming releases and events.” Ensuring that the store’s website remains fresh and dynamic is a vital component of the marketing mix as well. That technology can also help to cut costs in other ways. “It sounds tedious,” she admits, “but by establishing best-business practices through process streamlining, Hallett will be in a better position to keep an eye on cash flow, stay on top of special orders and monitor inventory. With such a low profit margin, there really is no wiggle room for any kind of systematic errors.”

Excerpted from the Globe and Mail, April 28, 2008

Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia

Only a few years ago, bookstores helped define neighborhoods. They were physical and cultural markers on the landscape - showcases of what mattered, there and then.

“It’s an antiquarian business model in a changing world,” admits Melissa Mytinger, manager of Cody’s Books in Berkeley. That Mytinger still has her job is cause for celebration of a sort: Cody’s is a storied institution in more ways than one, but the saga of late has turned bleak.

In the past two years its 10,000 square-foot Telegraph Avenue flagship on boutique-lined Fourth Street has closed, and the business has moved to a 7,000-square-foot outpost one block from UC Berkeley.

But survival beats the alternative: locked doors that mean there’s no chance you’ll stumble across some unexpected volume of insight or delight. It’s a fate known to anyone who loves bookstores, who visits a familiar shopping street and remembers what was.

Mytinger and the 18-person staff are doing the right thing by tailoring the selection to Berkeley’s distinctive academic clientele. They’re even scheduling afternoon appearances by authors who might appeal to readers from nearby Berkeley High School. The shelves are filling up, and more books are on the way.

“We’ve had to give up on the idea that we can stock every book that we love,” says Mytinger, 60, who joined the staff of Cody’s in 1982. “That model doesn’t work anymore. It isn’t viable.”

The hope is that this year’s model - lean but not mean - will evolve into something that attracts people willing to buy books in person rather than simply adding to their online shopping carts.

Cody’s might also help downtown Berkeley emerge as a cultural and artistic destination. At the end of the block, construction crews are pouring concrete for the future home of the David Brower Center, conceived as a four-story clubhouse for environmental advocacy groups. Work also has started on a new home for the Freight & Salvage folk venue. On the drawing boards are more ambitious projects, including a home for the Pacific Film Archive and Berkeley Art Museum.

Why should we care? After all, who needs a building stuffed with paper in the age of clicks and mortar?

Because a good bookstore is like a good city block: varied and rich, with layers that bear evidence of imagination and pride. There’s a tactile connection to the ephemeral world of ideas. This is merchandise, but it’s not something to be worn for a season or hung up on a wall; it’s something to be discussed and shared, maybe even something that will shape your thoughts and actions. There’s more going on than the creation of a scene. It’s the slow formation of identities, of thoughts and passions and who knows what else.

In the grand scheme of things, bookstores’ long retreat isn’t a crisis on par with climate change or the war in Iraq. Some stores will survive at least for another generation, Cody’s among them, I hope.

But the landscape has changed irrevocably. Ultimately, we’re all the losers - in ways we don’t even yet know.

Excerpted from SF Gate

The first time Jeannet Leendertse, a freelance book designer, saw the software on the Blurb.com website that could automatically produce a book, she was more than a little sad.

The software could help anyone turn some text and photos into a bound book in a few minutes.

Soon after, though, she saw an opportunity. “I realized there would always be people who appreciate time and effort going into design. I decided to put myself onto their website.”

Today, Leendertse still turns a pile of pictures and paragraphs into bound books, but instead of working just for a roster of major publishers like MIT Press, she helps individuals create books. She is participating in an offshoot of the scrapbooking phenomena, the hobby of collecting and preserving photos and mementos.

What was once a pastime for mothers recording family memories for their children has blossomed into a new, fertile marketplace of collaboration. People with stories to tell are creating personalized books filled with pictures, blog entries and even business proposals. While some of these glorified scrapbooks are aimed at the world at large, many new titles were never intended to be sold in stores or marketed in any way.

The digital tools – the camera, scanner and word processor – have opened the field of book creation to the amateur as the hobby moves away from pasting buttons and rickrack onto pages. But sometimes the bookmakers need a little help. Leendertse recently worked with the filmmaker Robert Gardner, who told her: “This is the artwork that I have. This is my story. How do you think the artwork tells the story best?”

She said he gave her access to his archives and they worked together to create “The Impulse to Preserve,” a 384-page book on Gardner’s philosophy of creating films. She organized the content and arranged the pages of the book. Soon afterward, a publisher, Other Press, saw the design and agreed to publish her finished work.

Suzzanne Connolly, a San Francisco-based book designer at Picturia Press, says couples who want to bind the pictures from their wedding day come to her with elaborate plans. “We decide on the layout, the colour, the fonts and the style and the flow of each book,” she said. “We can find illustrators, photographers and writers for our clients if it is called for.”

One of her projects was a 52-page 7- by-7-inch soft-cover book with black-and-white photos of a man’s huskies, including one that had just died. In another project, she converted a mother’s blog into a 116-page hardcover book.

“She writes practically every day and takes lots of pictures,” Connolly said. “She wanted to convert her blog into a book so that when her children grew up they would have something wonderful to look at for each year of their lives.”

Book creators use Adobe Photoshop (about $650), but others find the simpler and less expensive Photoshop Elements (about $100) adequate. Some amateur bookmakers prefer focused scrapbooking software like Nova Development’s Art Explosion Scrapbook Factory selling for about $40. As the name might imply, the package comes with thousands of fonts, illustrations, templates and “photorealistic embellishments” like pictures of buttons, ribbons or charms.

Companies that print bound books also offer free programs. Blurb.com and Picaboo.com distribute free software with all the tools needed to start a book. They expect to make money when users upload the final versions to their websites and order printed versions. A 7- by-7-inch soft- cover book from Blurb.com starts at $13 for 20 to 40 pages, with extra pages additional. Bigger, fatter books like a 150-page 13-by-11-inch hardcover cost $85. There are volume discounts. Picaboo.com sells some 20-page soft-cover books for $10 and offers a variety of bound books including ones covered with linen or padded leather.

Eileen Gittins, the chief executive and founder of Blurb.com, says that her site is working on nurturing a culture around creating books by cultivating relationships between the amateurs and the professionals. “We’re finding that books are this very interesting way for people who want to meet up. People want to see each other’s books,” she said. “We realized we had the beginnings of a marketplace here.”

Excerpted from Globe and Mail

Stuff White People Like and I Can Has Cheezburger have been topping WordPress’ Blogs of the Day charts forever.

Now both of those blogs have received book deals.

Stuff White People Like contains a list of cultural totems, including gifted children, marathons and writers’ workshops, that a certain type of moneyed and liberal American might be expected to like.

“The No. 1 reason why white people like not having a TV,” reads the explanation under entry No. 28, Not Having a TV, “is so that they can tell you that they don’t have a TV.”

Readers discovered stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com earlier this year, liked it and forwarded links to their friends, who forwarded them to lots more friends. Newspaper columnists mentioned it, stealing some of the better jokes. By the end of February, the NPR program Talk of the Nation ran a report on it, debating whether the site was racist or satire.

And then on March 20, Random House announced that it had purchased the rights to a book by the blog’s founder, Christian Lander, an Internet copy writer. The price, according to a source familiar with the deal but not authorized to discuss the total, was about $300,000, a sum that many in the publishing and blogging communities believe is an astronomical amount for a book spawned from a blog, written by a previously unpublished author.

One of the first literary agents to troll the Web for talent was Kate Lee, who in 2003 was an assistant at International Creative Management, the sprawling talent agency, looking for a way to make her name.

When she started contacting bloggers and talking to them about book deals, many were stunned that a real literary agent was interested in their midnight typings. Her roster was so rich with bloggers, including Matt Welch from Hit & Run and Glenn Reynolds from Instapundit, that the New Yorker profiled her in 2004. Two years from now, the magazine noted, “Books by bloggers will be a trend, a cultural phenomenon.”

And two years after that?

“If I contact someone or someone is put in touch with me, chances are they’ve already been contacted by another agent,” Ms. Lee said. “Or they’ve at least thought about turning their blog into a book or some kind of film or TV project.”

It will be difficult for the publisher to make a profit, said Sara Nelson, editor of Publishers Weekly. Doing some back-of-the-envelope math, she figured Random House would have to sell about 75,000 copies, a total that would likely land the book on best-seller lists, to earn back its $300,000 advance.

But can 1.5 million hits, the number Random House says Mr. Lander’s site has attracted, be wrong? If a blog has lured that many eyeballs in the freewheeling terrain of the Internet, publishers are willing to take a chance it will attract attention in the bookstore, said Kate McKean, a literary agent with the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency, who is one of those now scouring the Web for new clients.

The site I Can Has Cheezburger (icanhascheezburger.com), which features lolcats, photos of animals with humorous, ungrammatical captions, debuted in January 2007. Three months later, Ms. McKean contacted the founders; by last August, they had chosen her over other agents, she said. The site has 1.6 million page views a day, she said, a fact noted in the book proposal she helped prepare.

After a bidding war among several publishers, Gotham Books signed her clients. Come this November, expect the I Can Has Cheezburger book on shelves. “It’s going to be predominantly photos but also will enlighten readers on the key memes of lolcats,” Ms. McKean said, referring to strange rules of grammar unique to the form.

On Wednesday, Mr. Lander, who is white, added his 92nd entry to Stuff White People Like: Book Deals.

“White people,” he wrote, “like having their dreams come true when they least expected it.”

New York Times: Fashion and Style, March 30, 2008

Raincoast Books, the Vancouver, British Columbia company that brought the blockbuster Harry Potter series to Canadian readers, announced Monday its imminent departure from the publishing business.

The Vancouver-based company is halting its publishing program and announced other cost-cutting measures, putting the blame on the strong Canadian dollar and the resulting detrimental effect on the book retail industry. The 15 books set for release this spring will be the final slate from Raincoast, which largely counted West Coast and children’s book authors in its publishing stable.

Raincoast officials said the company plans to refocus on its core business of distribution and wholesaling, but the streamlining measures will mean the closing of its warehouse in Mississauga, Ont., axing about 20 jobs in Vancouver and Toronto and reducing the number of its distribution clients.

Nevertheless, the company will continue to offer the Harry Potter books — part of its ultra-successful venture with U.K. publisher Bloomsbury — to Canadians, they added.

Amid the rapid rise of the Canadian dollar last fall, anger grew among the book-buying public over the fact that prices in Canada remained significantly higher than those of U.S. retailers.

Raincoast, “just like every other publisher in Canada and distributor here, was faced with an unprecedented situation last year, namely the appreciation of the Canadian dollar [relative to the U.S. greenback],” marketing vice-president Jamie Broadhurst said. “There has been a fundamental sea change in the Canadian book industry. Canadians have spoken loud and clearly in terms of what they feel is a fair price for books, and publishers and distributors are going to have to adapt to that new reality.”

For Raincoast, “85 per cent of our business is import books from the United States. So as a result, an appreciation in the dollar’s value affects us very close to our heart.” Raincoast reduced its suggested retail prices by 20 per cent as a result of the rise in the Canadian dollar, he said.

Carolyn Wood, executive director of the Association of Canadian Book Publishers, described Raincoast’s move as “very sad news.” The company “has published some outstanding books over the years. When a publishing program as important and well supported as that one can’t be sustained, it tells you something about the precarious world in which Canadian publishers operate.”

“We’re definitely in a deflationary spiral,” said Brad Martin , president and chief executive officer of the country’s largest trade publisher, Random House Canada.

Martin predicted the trend of declining prices for both U.S. titles sold in Canada and Canadian-written books will accelerate in the next 12 months. And while this may be good news for consumers - provided, that is, a much-predicted recession doesn’t sharply diminish their purchasing power - it means “a difficult year” in terms of revenues for publishers, distributors and booksellers, especially among smaller, independent operators.

He acknowledged that the Random Canada conglomerate, a wholly owned foreign subsidiary with imprints such as Knopf, Doubleday and Vintage, “is better able to withstand the coming storm” than, for example, a Canadian-owned independent like Toronto-based House of Anansi, which has to make most of its money from Canadian titles.

However, prices, particularly prices of Canadian titles, can only come down so far here, especially given the limited economies of scale available in a country of 33 million. “If Canadian books had to be priced according to real costs in a totally sort of Adam Smith world, with no government support, they’d be way higher than they are already.”

Remarked Carolyn Quinn, executive director of the Association of Canadian Publishers: “You can’t get blood out of a stone. Profit margins in this country are “very small … and a book costs what it costs,” even with subsidies from the federal government’s Book Publishing Industry Development Program, among other publicly funded support networks.

Raincoast Books

Globe and Mail, January 8, 2008

Globe and Mail, January 9, 2008