Publishing as a business model. Seriously, Seth Godin?

Seth Godin is a smart guy. He got his MBA at Stanford and named one of his first companies Yoyodyne in a nod to Pynchon. His 10 marketing books have made various bestseller lists, and his blog is (currently) ranked by Ad Age as the #26 marketing blog on the internet.

So what was he thinking when he advised entrepreneurs today to eschew traditional funding streams -- banks and venture capitalists -- and go the publishing route?

It works like this: you have an idea, a fledgling business or a new market to enter. You find an amateur investor (a wealthy dentist, a retired executive) and raise the money to bring it to market. And in return? The investor gets $xx for every unit you sell. From the first one until forever.

No fancy bookkeeping, no board meetings, no worrying about the accounting. Instead, you pay a royalty on income. The rest is up to you.

Of course, this is exactly how the math of book publishing works. The publisher puts up money and keeps 80 or 90 percent of the income. You get the rest.

As elegant as this may sound -- no board meetings! No fancy bookkeeping! -- it's plain fantasy. Anyone who's ever published a book knows that the bookkeeping is fancy. And more important, everyone in publishing is becoming increasingly concerned that publishing, as a business model, isn't working.

One of the challenges facing publishing is that not all books are equal. A very few books sell very well; a few more make marginal profits; many never generate income at all. It's not much different from other creative industries, like music and film. Except that publishing historically created a mix in which the profits were modest, even wee -- rarely at the level that corporations expect. And in recent years, most publishers have been vertically integrated into a handful of corporations.

Then there are the bookstores, which are closing. And the online retailers, which are discounting. Ginormous unrecoupable celebrity advances. Archaic modes of delivery and returns. Readers going online -- scattering -- to get their content. Can books survive the online content boom? Will today's toddlers even give what we think of as a book -- the kind with covers and paper pages -- a second glance? How can the publishing industry go digital and avoid the piracy and swapping issues the music industry faced?

You don't have to listen to me go on. Here's New York magazine with the big picture (the story, from last year, includes comments like "It's a very trying time" from the president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

If publishing is the best model Seth Godin can think of, it seems like the real trick here is finding the willing investor. And for that, you'll need a couple of Max Bialystocks and Leo Blooms -- they were great at securing matrons with fat wallets in "The Producers."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Seth Godin's book "Permission Marketing" discounted from $25 to $5.99 by Border's Books; the company laid off nearly 900 people between January and April 2009. Credit: wombatunderground1 via Flickr.

Will Amazon go Zappos, or the other way around?

Earlier this year, when Amazon bought Zappos, there was some concern from faithful fans of the shoe-selling website -- would its famed, topnotch customer service survive the purchase? Amazon may make buying easy, but trying to get a customer service representative on the phone is something else.

In the Sept. 14 edition of the New Yorker, on stands now, Alexandra Jacobs goes inside Zappos and tries to get a handle on its upbeat, sometimes goofy corporate culture, spending time with its visionary Chief Executive Tony Hsieh.

The Customer Loyalty Team, or C.L.T., is the nerve center of Zappos, whose thirty-five-year-old C.E.O., Tony Hsieh, has earned a zealous following by imposing an ethos of live human connection on the chilly, anonymous bazaar of the Internet. He talks about being the architect of a movement to spread happiness, or “Zappiness,” via three “C”s: clothing, customer service, and company culture.

“Eventually, we’ll figure out a way of spreading that knowledge to the world in general, and that has nothing to do with selling shoes online,” he told me after I visited the company over the summer.

The piece provides an interesting snapshot of the company, a good portion of it shortly before the Amazon deal was announced. There are hula hoops and an internal singing team and Christmas lights and shots of vodka at Claim Jumpers -- the idea being that people in customer service should be enjoying themselves. "We're having a great day at Zappos!" one CLT member answers a call, fully meaning it. "How can I help you?"

But how this will merge with Amazon's corporate culture is yet to be seen. As one potential hire tells Jacobs, "Everybody’s wondering what’s going to happen now. It’s going to be so big. I hope that Amazon will take what Zappos has and not the other way around."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: misocrazy via Flickr

These boots are made for reading

Amazon.com announced Wednesday the purchase of much-loved online shoe retailer Zappos. While it seems an odd fit -- shoes and books? -- it's been a long time since Amazon was solely (har har) an online bookseller. And it seems like this deal is not about product, but about process.

"Zappos is a company I've long admired, and for a very important reason," Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a video posted about the announcement (it's after the jump). "Zappos has a customer obsession that's so easy for me to admire."

Indeed. Zappos has a reputation for providing excellent customer service; Amazon, not so much. Author Jennifer Weiner lost her Kindle on book tour and tried to get another sent to her: "Amazon needs to step up their customer service. The Kindle that cust. service said would ship Sat just shipped this morning," she Tweeted on Monday.

But maybe Amazon will learn something from Zappos. Tony Hsieh, the company's CEO, posted a letter about the deal online:

A big part of the reason why Amazon is interested in us is because they recognize the value of our culture, our people, and our brand. Their desire is for us to continue to grow and develop our culture (and perhaps even a little bit of our culture may rub off on them).

If not, the normally satisfied Zappos customers might just ... walk.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo, top left: Christian Louboutin sky-high stilletto. Credit: Kirk McKoy  / Los Angeles Times

Indie publishers celebrate summer with sales

Assuming that you're heading to the beach and might need something to read, two very different indie publishers have set summer sales in action.  

If you're feeling groovy and visual, head to Chronicle Books, where all titles are 35% off with the coupon code FRIENDS at checkout. Bestsellers include the very summery "The California Surf Project," a fully illustrated travel/surf diary, and surfer Kelly Slater's "For the Love."

Or if you'd rather dig into a book that's more about text than pictures, Dalkey Archive has several that'll make your head spin. Their summer deal is seven paperbacks for $35, as long as you order from their website.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Hoang Ding Nam / AFP / Getty Images

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Does Tavern on the Green not want its own book?

Tavern on the Green, the Central Park restaurant and lounge, is the subject of the 310-plus page book "Tavern on the Green," which came out in January. At the time, its publisher, Workman Publishing, breathlessly touted the book as "a glorious celebration of the legendary eating spot in Manhattan's Central Park."

Nestled in Central Park, one of the most fabulous settings imaginable, Tavern on the Green has been dazzling generations of New Yorkers and visitors with its inventive, eclectic menu and playful decor. Some 700,000 guests dine every year at this one-of-a-kind restaurant, which has also played host to countless weddings and birthday parties, Broadway opening nights and glamorous afterparties, and many other memorable events.

This enchanting souvenir volume captures all of Tavern on the Green's rich history — from its origins in the 1870s as a shelter for the sheep that grazed in the nearby Sheep Meadow to its reincarnation as a restaurant in the 1930s and rebirth in the 1970s as the glistening jewel of the great restaurateur/showman Warner LeRoy.

Well, the shine is off the jewel; Wednesday the New York Post reported that Workman has sued Tavern on the Green for more than $200,000 for "allegedly going back on a deal to buy 10,000 copies of their own book, 'Tavern on the Green,' the suit claims."

But the book lawsuit is just one of the restaurant's challenges. Its 20-year contract for the property is up on Dec. 31 of this year, and this week at least two other restaurateurs joined the LeRoy family in submitting proposals -- and $50,000 checks -- to compete for an operating license for the next two decades.

If the LeRoy's tenure at Tavern on the Green does by chance come to an end in December, then maybe they'll have wanted those books after all -- they'll be collectors items.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo of Tavern on the Green by phenominam via Flickr

Publishers Weekly's editorial staff takes another hit

 

Today is the last day for three editors at Publishers Weekly, the book industry trade magazine; their layoffs follow January cuts that sent five editorial staffers packing, including respected Editor in Chief Sara Nelson. The firings are part of a 7% across-the-board cut by parent company Reed Business Information, which also owns Variety. The movie industry trade magazine, which moved 20-year veteran Peter Bart out of the top editorial position earlier this month, fired 15 staffers this week.

The publishing industry may be smaller, but it's facing challenges that are even more complex than Hollywood's, what with questions of electronic publishing, e-readers, declining readership and inefficient models of distribution.

"The publishing industry needs an on- and offline forum where it can confer about strategy and direction," said Richard Nash, former publisher of Soft Skull Press. "But it doesn't appear as if [Publishers Weekly] is going to supply those needs."

With these layoffs, Publishers Weekly has lost some very Web-savvy staff, particularly associate editor Craig Teicher. He was a go-to guy for electronic publishing and the Web; as a bonus, he also covered poetry. Firing him, Nash says, "does seem like a counterproductive development." The staff cuts throw the company's commitment to new media into question.

Also departing are managing editor Robin Lenz, who has been at the magazine for more than two decades, and Dermot McEvoy, who managed the e-mail newsletter PW Daily.

In a Tuesday morning e-mail obtained by the Wrap, Reed Business Information Chief Executive Tad Smith wrote that the company "may need to make additional reductions to fit the business conditions,” and that remaining staff will be required “to take mandatory unpaid days off.”

-- Carolyn Kellogg

A Different Light going dark

After almost 30 years as the preeminent gay, lesbian and transgendered bookstore in Los Angeles, A Different Light in West Hollywood will be closing its doors. As far back as 2000, manager Brad Craft, above, warned the L.A. Times that the bookstore, which he called "the intellectual focus of our community," was struggling. This week owner Bill Barker, who has no intentions of shuttering the San Francisco store, says there were two circumstances that made things increasingly difficult for the WeHo location.

The first, he told Instinct Magazine yesterday, was a massive construction project on Santa Monica Boulevard that began in 2001. "[The city] came in and ripped all the sidewalks out, and foot traffic and parking disappeared from West Hollywood for a year or 18 months," he said, "and it never came back."

Then in 2007, Mickey's, a bar next door, had a terrible fire. "They closed it down, barricaded the front, and again I saw a dropoff in sales. The bars attract people," Barker said. "They [Mickey’s] were supposed to open last June, and that didn’t happen, and then it went to October before Christmas and that didn’t happen. And now the economy is very, very serious."

Earlier this month, the nation's oldest gay bookstore, the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York's Greenwich Village, announced it will close in late March. The closures are bad news for independent bookstores in general and gay bookstores in particular.

But one thing that A Different Light has going for it, in addition to its storefront in the Castro in San Francisco, is a robust online marketplace, where it sells books, DVDs and "adult selections." And you know how the Internet loves "adult selections."

The West Hollywood store will close sometime this spring.

— Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Al Seib / Los Angeles Times

Will Obama's hope lead us to new riches?

Magazine reporter Ryan D'Agostino wanted to know what it was like to live in the toniest neighborhoods in America — so he walked around, knocked on doors in the wealthiest ZIP codes and asked the people who answered how they got there. The result is "Rich Like Them: My Door-to-Door Search for the Secrets of Wealth in America's Richest Neighborhoods." In this new period of economic uncertainty, finding out how to get rich sounds like a great idea.

D'Agostino's book might present a slightly skewed perspective — he didn't get to talk to the people who were at an office instead of at home, who let their household help answer the door, or who were disinclined to talk to a reporter. Most people who talked to him had earned their wealth, rather than inherited it; they wanted to tell their stories.

One of these is, improbably, a bookstore owner. Harvey Jason — who, technically, lives not in but adjacent to Beverly Hills (90210 is the 64th-most-wealthy ZIP code in the U.S.) — is the proprietor of Mystery Pier Books on Sunset in West Hollywood. A longtime character actor, Jason's ties to the movie industry have helped foster a trade in first editions and movie-oriented collectibles, like Harvey Cobb's "Paths to Glory" signed by Kirk Douglas, who starred in the film version. Harvey Jason told D'Agostino:

If I made a list of all the things in life I thought were coincidences and then looked back at them, I would see they weren't coincidences at all.

If we're happy, we make other people happy. If we're miserable — well, you know how contagious misery is.

Gratitude is the single emotion that propels me through life. It's the only emotion, I believe, that is thoroughly incompatible with negativity. And without negativity, you can have optimism — and optimism creates more optimism. I look over my shoulder and say 'This happened because of this and this and this.' Today I'm an optimist, but I'm an optimist based on my own experience.

As Obama said in his inauguration speech, "we gather because we have chosen hope over fear." If under the new Obama administration we all — even booksellers — can have hope and optimism, things might be looking up. 

— Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Cher's Malibu Mansion, courtesy of Sotheby's

Glenn Goldman, RIP

Here's some absolutely dreadful news to start the new year: Glenn Goldman, founder and owner of the West Hollywood independent bookstore Book Soup, died today of complications from pancreatic cancer. He was 58.

I knew Glenn for a long time ... 18 years, to be exact. He was a charming gentleman: shy, smart, exceedingly well-read and committed to reading and bookselling and the literary life. He founded Book Soup in 1975, on the Sunset Strip, across the street from the old Tower Records, down the block from the Whiskey and Duke's Coffee Shop.

Over the years, Book Soup has become known for the celebrities who shopped there; its motto is "Bookseller to the Great & Infamous." For me, though, it is and always has been a neighborhood bookstore. Maybe that's because the first time I ever saw the place, in 1986, I was visiting the neighborhood, staying with a friend who lived a few blocks away. One Saturday morning, we spent an hour or so looking through the floor-to-ceiling shelves, ordering hard to find titles from England and having them shipped to my apartment in New York.

Five years later, when I moved to Los Angeles, Book Soup was one of the first places I came back to, and ever since, it's been a regular stop. When my son Noah was little, I used to take him there so he could play on the library ladders. I can't count the number of readings I've attended at the store, the books and magazines I've bought, the conversations I've had.

In every way that matters, you can chalk that up to Glenn. He set the tone, both intellectually -- the store reflected his tastes and interests, in art and film and fiction -- and in terms of personality. The staff is among the nicest I've encountered: smart and a little bit shy also, enthusiastic about the books. And writers love to read there, even though the space can be a bit unwieldy, because they know that this is a place where they'll be treasured, where their work will be treated not as commodity but as art.

According to a post this afternoon on LA Observed, Book Soup is looking for a buyer; I hope they find one soon. After all, in a very real sense, Book Soup is Glenn's reflection -- a place of decency and intelligence, iconoclasm and aesthetic vision. In a cookie-cutter world, there are far too few such establishments, the bookstore as neighborhood salon. This was Glenn's great talent and his legacy, his lasting gift to us all.

-- David L. Ulin

Photo by Carolyn Kellogg

2008's best food writing will make you hungry

If you can read a recipe by Chez Panisse's Alice Waters without a twinge of hunger, you have a stronger stomach than me. Like a trip to the grocery store, the recipe section of "The Best Food Writing 2008" should not be undertaken on an empty stomach. The 400-page anthology, now on shelves, includes plenty of other writing: on cloned cows, food in post-Katrina New Orleans, local restaurateurs, sublime burgers and other food trends.

The best of the trend pieces is "Miles to Go Before I Eat" by Mark C. Anderson. He tried to stick to a strict "localvore" regimen, eating only foods from a 150-mile radius of his Monterey County home. Despite the buzz "eating local" has gotten, it's monumentally impractical; even with Northern California's agricultural bounty, it meant going without any flour-based products, paying $60 for local olive oil, handing over persimmons that grew just out of range, and, most painfully, not using Tapatio. Really, how could we live in a world like that? I'd have to move.

Anderson's piece appeared in the Monterey County Weekly, and that's just the beginning of the diversity of sources. There are stories from all over, from local papers and websites, as well as the places you'd expect -- Gourmet, Food & Wine, The New York Times, The New Yorker.

Some of these stories can make you burn with a need to taste what they're writing about. Calvin Trillin's "Three Chopsticks" from The New Yorker convinced me I must get to Singapore and stay until I eat everything, and that I have to leave right now. Writing for Food & Wine, Thomas O. Ryder put several Louisiana restaurants on the roster for my next roadtrip in "Cajun Country by Car."

Others are simply glorious exercises in vicarious eating. Do I want to watch a whole pig be barbecued, sliced and served? Maybe not, but I'm glad Elaine T. Cicora did for Cleveland Scene ("Shakin' the Bacon Tree"). I might never go to Alinea and eat one of its inventive, multi-course meals, but Jess Thompson did, and she took notes ("Waiterly Conduct") for her blog Hogwash.

Momofuku Ssäm Bar makes two appearances, in an endearing profile of its chef, David Chang, by Larissa MacFarquahr ("Chef on the Edge" for The New Yorker) and for its notorious pork butt in Frank Bruni's "Fat, Glorious Fat, Moves to the Center of the Plate," in the New York Times. The restaurant has certainly made an impression since opening in 2006; only one other appears twice -- New Orleans' Mandina, which has been owned by the Mandina family for more than a century.

Wired may have a future as a food magazine. Ben Paynter's "The Other Other White Meat," about cloned cows and pigs and their role in our food chain, is not just intelligent and measured, but also good investigative journalism. He eats a steak from a clone and gets a farmer to reveal that you might have eaten one too.

Foodies will no doubt be familiar with some of the pieces here, but because editor Holly Hughes has tapped such a broad range of sources, there will be some new, appetizing discoveries. And that's what good food writing is all about. 

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo of ramen at Momofuku in New York by misocrazy via Flickr