Would we get more love from advertisers

. . . if we worked the way Yelp is accused of doing?

"Oh, we can make that 5-in-the-Guide totally go away, no problem. A star, you say? Well, let me tell you what I can do . . . ."

I remember some years ago my friend Mary K. Chelton raising a ruckus in the Letters column of SLJ, implying that positive reviews (in SLJ and elsewhere) bore an interesting relationship to advertising in the same pages. And I myself have pondered the practice of book award committee members being wined-dined-and-sixty-nined by publishers. While I know of no instance where a review or an award has been even attempted to be bought or sold outright, it behooves us all to keep the lines as bright as possible. At the risk of boring you with this anecdote for the tenth time, I remember a BBYA committee I was on arguing about what Gary Paulsen might have meant by some ambiguous turn of phrase or plot, I forget just which. One member brightly announced that she knew exactly what was meant because "Gary told me while we were dancing last night." It's not the dancing I minded so much as its bumping into the evaluation process.

How do you buy books?

I'm perplexed by Amazon's statement about their showdown with Macmillan, where, after pulling that publisher's print- and e-books from Amazon.com, they (paradoxically) go on to defend the free market as the best friend to the little guy:

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it's reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don't believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative. (from the Kindle discussion board)

So the idea is that if a book from Macmillan costs too much, a reader will choose a less expensive book instead. Really? Is that how we buy books? I can see taking a risk on a book that is cheap (the top five Kindle best "sellers" are not cheap, they are free) but I can't see wanting to read, say, Finger Lickin' Fifteen, and settling for something else because Amazon wasn't selling it (the situation now) or because it cost more than some other book. I do understand the bookseller's reluctance to allow publishers to set prices (although I also kind of wish I was back in Germany, where book-discounting is verboten, thus allowing independent stores to compete) but I'm not buying its logic. Unless--the reading culture of e-books becomes a completely different thing from that of print books, where you don't care so much about reading the new Janet Evanovich as you do for reading whatever the hot e-book du jour is, whose price might only be a buck.

What does this make the future look like?

Children's book publishing history is marked by scandalous firings and layoffs of editors; see Leonard Marcus's Minders of Make-Believe for some of the stories. I took one on a dozen years ago, but this latest round: wow. Emma Dryden and Kevin Lewis of Simon & Schuster are the most recent of many veteran editors and publishers who have left their positions in the past year; the list also includes Brenda Bowen, Ginee Seo, Melanie Kroupa, Michael Eisenberg, Joanna Cotler and Laura Geringer. (I'm a little leery of naming names here; when Leonard wrote last year in Minders that Susan Hirschman had been dismissed forty-five years ago from Harper Junior Books, Susan wrote to the Horn Book to correct the record, saying she had resigned. If you feel unjustly included or unmentioned, my apologies in advance.)

Beyond my sympathy and good wishes for all these individuals, I only have questions about what this disposal of proven talent means for the future of children's publishing. And they really are questions, not opinions in disguise: Will lists get smaller? (They should.) Or, will editors need to edit more titles? Will the increased reliance on editorial freelancers or "editors at large" change what sorts of books get published? Does company history matter, and who are its custodians? What happens to a profession when many of its leaders are removed from positions of authority? Will new leaders emerge (and how will they lead?), or will everyone just get a little more gun-shy?

I'm sure you have questions of your own, so ask them here. And I'd love for anyone to take a stab at some answers.

Presto, change-o

Collecting Children's Books has had a couple of interesting posts about books such as They Were Strong and Good and The Rooster Crows, which have been bowdlerized to reflect changing standards of "appropriateness" in regard to depictions of nonwhite characters. Those are two among several if not many; Mary Poppins, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Dr. Doolittle are some of the others. What I hadn't realized until Peter pointed it out was that changes like these are sometimes made without any acknowledgment of the fact within the new edition; kind of Orwellian, yes?

Many years ago I was on YALSA's (then YASD) Intellectual Freedom committee, and we had a bit of a tussle with Scholastic, which was asking authors to make "word changes" (read: remove obscenities) from their books before Scholastic would reprint them for its lucrative book clubs. Two things were at issue: Scholastic did not want to acknowledge, in the paperbacks, that changes had been made, and, in the cases of books that had been named to the Best Books for Young Adults List, the publisher wanted to be allowed to say that the expurgated editions were BBYA winners. No and no, although we only really had the power to enforce the second.

To me, the weirdest part of Scholastic's argument was that since it was the author making the change, an affected book was still a BBYA choice. And some committee members bought this argument, as well as buying into Scholastic's emotional blackmail that we were "punishing the authors" by disallowing the BBYA designation. Well, tough: why would we want to reward authors for caving to commercial pressure? The money would have to be enough.

More about money

Boston Globe writer David Mehegan has a great piece on what's going on at Houghton Mifflin. Don't skip the comments, either--lots of perspectives from people who used to work there.

And don't miss the aforementioned Patsy Aldana expounding at some greater length on just what money and publishing have to do with each other, for each other and to each other.

Rachel's last look around

Rachel presents the Ultimate Web Watch (the new overlords may have something planned but we don't know just what yet).

And don't miss the Cynsational interview with Groundwood publisher Patsy Aldana. That is one lady who tells it like it is:

Over the course of your career, what are the most significant changes you've seen in the field of publishing books for young readers?

The abandonment of the once great British and American houses of the tradition of the editor-driven list for a new reign of TV tie-ins, merchandising, and the need to make more and more money.

Add 'em up, Bobby

Could somebody do this math for me? If Sarah Palin did in fact receive seven million dollars for a book contract, how many copies would the publisher have to sell to recoup its cost? Would it be possible?

Yes, I intend to use song references for my blog headings until I get good and tired of it.

The perils, once again, of the passive voice

The headline led me to believe this was another old-school Chicago scandal but it's apparently just shameless bribery at work.

Five Cents a Dance

Well, it's not like we wouldn't do this if we thought we could get away with it.