Renegade
Thanks to freedom of information, we know all about Sarah Palin's tanning habit
Sarah Palin’s book tour got her a lot of publicity, but other Republican hopefuls for the 2012 presidential nomination have been bashing away on their laptops too.
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is about to publish No Apology: The Case for American Greatness. He plans to use the book tour to reinvent himself as the Republican centrist—which is odd, considering his 2008 campaign was based on him being a conservative. But the new Romney has shunned the populists of the tea party movement and appears to see same-sex marriage and gays in the military as a done deal, with social mores changing too fast for Republicans to reverse the tide.
The Christian evangelical candidate and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee published his book, A Simple Christmas: Twelve Stories That Celebrate the True Holiday Spirit, last year. The soggily sentimental tome reached number three in the New York Times bestseller list. And like Sarah Palin, Huckabee appears on television for the Fox network. His radio show, The Huckabee Report, is the fastest growing radio programme of the past decade.
But all their hopes of winning the New Hampshire primary have just been dented by the emergence of an unexpected New England rival. Scott Brown, the new Republican senator from Massachusetts (and former Cosmopolitan nude model) is writing “an inspirational book” and has hired super-lawyer Robert Barnett as his agent.
The pre-campaign will soon start to get dirty. Expect to hear a lot about the 3,000 emails of Palin’s husband Todd, known as “first dude,” recently obtained through a Freedom of Information Act inquiry. Particularly the one about how the Palins coached her staff to disguise the amount of electrical work needed at the Alaska governor’s mansion to hook up her tanning bed.
This article originally appeared in the March 2010 issue of Prospect
Tom Chatfield
Coming to an iPhone near you: lots of books
There are now more than 45 million iPhones in the world, each offering more electronic diversions than you can shake a small stick at, via the highly profitable wonders of Apple’s App Store. And what, apart from making phone calls, are iPhone users and App developers expending most of their energies on? As of this September, the answer is an unexpected one: books. For the first time ever, books have overtaken games as the category of App with the largest number of monthly releases.
To be precise, according to industry analyst Flurry’s October report:
In October, one out of every five new apps launching in the iPhone has been a book. Publishers of all kinds, from small ones like Your Mobile Apps to mega-publishers like Softbank, are porting existing IP into the App Store at record rates. Flurry first evaluated the iPhone as an eBook reader in its July Pulse (”You Trying to Swindle my Kindle?”) where it looked at consumer demand for eBooks. In that report, we observed that during the month of August 1 per cent of the entire US population was already reading a book on the iPhone. Now, with books shipping in droves, we are seeing the supply-side explode.
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Tom Chatfield
The ancient ways may be the best
A striking piece has recently appeared on essayist and programmer Paul Graham’s website, and attracted plenty of comment elsewhere, on what he calls “post-medium publishing.” The thesis – which Jeff Jarvis has already declared to be seminal (or close to it) – is that it’s a mistake to think that consumers of any kind of medium have ever, really been paying for content. They may have bought things because of the content but, Graham argues, the economics have always been about the cost of creating and then distributing a physical medium (paper, vinyl) that happens to have stories or pictures printed on it, or makes a nice noise. The trading of valuable information is, Graham concedes, a different game, but a marginal one, and from a different world to most publishers’ crumbling houses of entertainment and diversion:
Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won’t pay for content anymore. At least, that’s how they see it… In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn’t better content cost more? A copy of Time costs $5 for 58 pages, or 8.6 cents a page. The Economist costs $7 for 86 pages, or 8.1 cents a page. Better journalism is actually slightly cheaper… Now that the medium is evaporating, publishers have nothing left to sell. Some seem to think they’re going to sell content—that they were always in the content business, really. But they weren’t, and it’s unclear whether anyone could be.
It’s provocative stuff. But what aren’t touched on here – much as in most of the ongoing debates about what digital media mean – are two themes that I would like to see explored in proper depth: the history of commercial publishing; and what the future looks like not only for the book or the magazine, but for the author. Read more »
Tom Chatfield
The best brands become icons: the iPod for the noughties; the VW Beetle for the 1960s; Chanel in the 1920s. With the next decade fast approaching, though, the book trade has been lumbered with something more sinister: a brand that may live up to its name by sending the old order up in smoke. It’s estimated that 10m Americans now own or intend to purchase a Kindle e-book reader from Amazon, with the product likely to launch globally in 2010. The word “kindle” itself means to set alight, taken from the Old Norse kynda, and features in Voltaire’s praise of book-learning as like fire: “we fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.” But it also has a distinct ring of Fahrenheit 451 to it, with Amazon’s “firemen” gleefully building a funeral pyre for the printed word. Sometimes an icon is also an epitaph.
Tom Chatfield
The Da Vinci code: a (marketing) triumph
With Harry Potter gone, 2009’s book world is all about Dan Brown and his recently-announced sequel to The Da Vinci Code, which will be released in September under the bafflingly (or rather, calculatedly) bland title The Lost Symbol. As I mentioned recently on this blog, just 500 top authors last year generated around a third of Britain’s £1.8bn book sales—a new record for top-heavy sales—and Brown’s latest may tip the scales still further towards the few, backed by cross-media marketing of a density and penetration only usually encountered in especially prolonged assaults by the US military. But why care? Because more and more eggs are being put into just one or two baskets of this type and, to belabour the metaphor, at some point I suspect one is going to get dropped and there’s going to be the mother of all omelettes (that is, a very rude shock and an utter economic disaster for a very big publishing house).
In May, Angels and Demons—the film sequel to the Da Vinci Code, based on an earlier Brown book—comes out. There’ll be an illustrated movie book to accompany it, of course, together with a new paperback edition of the novel, while Sony—who own the rights to Brown’s protagonist, Robert Langdon—will usher the Brown’s latest novel, The Lost Symbol, towards celluloid as fast as they can. If The Da Vinci Code is anything to go by, moreover, glossy websites, videogames, mobile phone tie-ins, and spin-off “factual” texts are sure to follow in an effort to wring every last penny from this particular Intellectual Property. It’s not so much a secret code as a finely-honed formula: and its effectiveness is both a matter of faith and one of urgent financial necessity for the modern book trade. On which note it’s worth remembering that The Da Vinci Code itself was a surprise hit from an author who had hitherto enjoyed only modest sales and advances, just like almost all of the mega-hit books of recent years, and that it’s on this fertile class of great unknowns that the written word has always relied for its long-term profits and vigour. Too top-heavy can very easily translate to falling-flat-on-your-face.
James Crabtree
Kindle: its geek for cash cow
“Dear Kindle Owner,” begins an e-mail received by anyone who owns one of Amazon’s much sought after e-book readers earlier today, “We are excited to introduce Kindle 2—the next generation of our wireless reading device.” As a current Kindle owner, it goes on—and this doesn’t apply to anyone here the UK, where it isn’t for sale yet, or indeed anyone in America who tried to buy it for Christmas, because it sold out—to offer a “special opportunity” to “be among the first to experience Kindle 2.”
Having been chatting a lot about this for various reasons with my colleague Tom Chatfield here at Prospect Towers, I’m increasingly convinced that the Kindle is the real deal. People have been talking about e-books for donkeys years; its never happened. But last week i got to see one—a Kindle 1, mind you, not the sexier Kindle 2—and was completely won over. It feels like a book, it holds like a book, and people will use it like a book. My mother won’t be won over, but i’m guessing within 5 years a good proportion of high end book readers—10%? 30%? More?—will have one. The choice between taking one book reader on holiday, or packing 10 books? Having all your magazines in one place, not all over the place? The fact that book and subscriptions are basically half price? While people won’t stop reading books or buying (especially high quality monthly) magazines, this is going to have a seismic impact.
But, don’t take my word for it. I got in touch with a friend—my partner’s brother, who works for Disney, since you ask—in LA, who in turn put my in touch with a friend of his—Jennifer Freel—who send me an mail explaining why she liked it. She is a book lover as much as a gadget person. I reprint her message in full below—while it shows that these things are by no means perfect, in terms of the direction of travel for the book industry, I think it rather speaks for itself.
Hi James! I’m so happy to help—
Before deciding on the Kindle, I compared the Kindle to the Sony Reader (with touch screen). There are obvious advantages to the Kindle (for instance the “whispernet,” of which more in a minute) but at the time, the Kindle was completely sold out, so I was exploring other options.
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Tom Chatfield
Old Cairo, snapped yesterday morning
As yesterday’s posting from warm (ish), dusty (very) Cairo concluded, I was promising further details of an emerging theme: a certain parochialism among the British reading, writing and publishing classes. Since then, two anecdotes have come to my aid in spelling out what this means.
First, from the author Jamal Mahjoub. London-born to an English mother and Sudanese father, he grew up in England and Sudan and is most recently the author of Travelling with Djinns (2003) and The Drift Latitudes (2006). He recounted his experience when Travelling with Djinns was initially rejected by a certain London publishing house. Although Jamal was already the author of four well-regarded novels, all written in English and published in Britain, an editor there explained to him that, unfortunately, she already had four authors on her list with exotic names, and she hoped he understood that she couldn’t really go to her sales and marketing department and ask them to put their money behind a fifth author with a name like “Jamal Mahjoub.” The book was subsequently published by Chatto, and all was well. The real sticking point of the story for Jamal, though, was not so much its absurdity as the fact that this editor assumed that he would be sympathetic towards her decision, and would agree that it was only logical and reasonable: this was just the way the book world works, and that was that. Read more »
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