Booksellers New Zealand has published a brief report on the 2011 Australian book industry that details some of the major developments, particularly in bookselling.

Australia’s book industry weathered some major disruptions in 2011, most importantly the closure of REDgroup-owned bookstore chains, Angus & Robertson and Borders. The report says that 130 bookstores closed, leading to a 20% loss of retail space.

Overall, the Australian book market was down 12.5% in 2011 as compared to 2010.

But there was a bright side for independent bookstores. Australian Bookseller Association CEO, Joel Becker, said some bookstores reported 10-30% sales increase over the holiday period.

Also in 2011, the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) made recommendations to the Australian government on how to deal with inequities in the industry. BISG recommended “a shorter time allowed for publishers to make new titles available on the Australian market following their launch in other markets before parallel importing is legal.” They also argued for a supply chain that would enable Australian booksellers to compete internationally, and for government assistance to booksellers in the amount of $5 million.

Read the full article here.

Book Blogger Con has a great logo and a new owner.

More from the press release:

REED EXHIBITIONS, ORGANIZER OF BOOKEXPO AMERICA, PURCHASES BOOK BLOGGER CONVENTION

Annual Event Continues to be Co-Located with BookExpo America

Norwalk, CT, January 26, 2012: Reed Exhibitions has purchased the Book Blogger Convention, an annual day-long conference devoted to providing support, instruction, and social time for people who blog about books. The Book Blogger Convention was founded by Trish Collins of Hey Lady! Watcha Readin’? and Michelle Franz of Galleysmith, both devoted book bloggers who sensed a need for bringing the community of book bloggers together so that they might share information and learn from each other. In order to capitalize on the captive community of book industry professionals who attend BookExpo America (BEA), North America’s largest annual book industry gathering, the Book Blogger Convention was launched in 2010 in co-location with BEA. It will continue to be co-located with BEA and it will be fully integrated into the overall activity of the convention itself.

“We are delighted with this purchase and we look forward to advancing and building what Trish and Michelle have so effectively created in the Book Blogger Convention,” notes Steven Rosato, Show Manager for BookExpo America. “Trish and Michelle are devoted to their community and they have invested a tremendous amount of their own personal time and energy into building a major presence for their colleagues at BEA. We are pleased to be able to take this responsibility over for them and to build even greater recognition for the Book Blogger Convention by fully merging it with our BEA marketing efforts, programs, and attendee outreach.”

This year, the Book Blogger Convention will take place at the Javits Center on Monday, June 4 just as BEA is getting underway. Previously, the conference and reception were held just after BEA concluded. “We feel this positioning will provide greater continuity for the book bloggers and will afford them more opportunity,” notes Rosato. “This way, the book bloggers can attend their own event and then immediately participate in BEA or BlogWorld East which gets underway Tuesday, June 5 and which is also co-located with BEA.” Convention officials note that pricing for all events has been structured to allow easy access including an “All Access Super Pass” as well as a “New Media Super Pass”. Further details about pricing and how to attend individual events and/or any combination of events at BEA are available at: http://www.bookexpoamerica.com/Register-Now.

The first Book Blogger Convention which took place in 2010 attracted just over 200 people and featured a line-up of speakers including online marketing specialists from most of the major publishing houses. Sponsorships by HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Crown Publishing Group, Peachtree, and Unbridled Books reinforced the industry’s embrace of book bloggers. Attendance in 2011 grew to 340 people. “Book bloggers have emerged as a critical constituent in our universe,” concludes Rosato. “We look forward to serving them as thoroughly as possible in the years ahead.”

Rumors have been flying about whether or not the financially beleaguered giant Italian RCS Mediagroup, which owns Rizzoli, Oxford University Press, Skira and 100% of the Flammarion group is looking to unload the latter.

Since RCS’ Executive Committee met on January 19 and decided to investigate whether or not it was in their interest to keep assets “not straightly included in the core business (comprising Flammarion),” French trade magazine Livres Hebdo reported, using Reuters Italy as a source, that two offers had been made to buy Flammarion — one of which was by Antoine Gallimard. Gallimard, however, denied the rumor.

Livres Hebdo added that the Flammarion group had ended 2011 in a “satisfactory” way, in part thanks to a boost in sales of Tintin books (published by Flammarion’s Caterman imprint) following the release of Steven Spielberg’s film.

To be continued….

White women writers dominate ‘Waterstones 11′, the chain’s pick of debut novels that it believes are potential prize-winners.  The authors include a bookseller from Alaska, a former Royal Shakespeare Company actress, and a woman who grew up in a fundamentalist religion in Wales.

The list was revealed at a party at the chain’s flagship store on London’s Piccadilly on Thursday night, with many of the authors in attendance.  MD James Daunt said: “There is a singular excitement to the discovery of a new writer of rare talent. For us booksellers, the process of introducing and guiding readers to the very best new work is one of the most important roles we perform. This year’s 11 are once again a marvellous selection. It is hard to believe these are debut novels, so assured and alive the writing.”

The full list, and their UK publishers, is as follows:

The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan (William Heinemann)

Absolution by Patrick Flanery (Atlantic,

Shelter by Frances Greenslade (Virago,)

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach (Fourth Estate)

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey (Headline Review,)

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Doubleday)

The Land of Decoration by Grace McCleen (Chatto & Windus)

Signs of Life by Anna Raverat (Picador)

The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan (Virago)

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker (Simon & Schuster)

Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles (Harper Press)

Ivey works at Fireside Books, an independent bookstore in Palmer, Alaska; Joyce had a 20-year career in the theatre in the UK, including leading roles with the RSC; and McCleen grew up in a fundamentalist religion in Wales and had little contact with non-believers.

The chain hopes the books will perform as well as last year’s picks, which included an Orange Prize winner (The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht) and titles that made the shortlists of the Man Booker (Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English), the Guardian First Novel (Pigeon English) and the Costa First Novel (City of Bohane by Kevin Barry).  Not forgetting Sarah Winman’s When God Was a Rabbit which Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, was photographed clutching.

Publishers were asked to submit ‘great literary debuts and the chain received nearly 100 submissions.  A committee led by Waterstone’s Janine Cook read them and whittled them down to the final 11.  Cook commented:  “Is this a golden age of female writing? The presence of eight female writers out of 11 on our list might indicate so. Whatever their gender, this year’s Waterstones 11 have a lot to live up to given the success, both critically and commercially, of last year’s list, but I have no worries on that count – these are all truly wonderful novels.”

One wonders, though, what black writers like Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Andrea Levy and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie might make of the list.

Thalia's OYO e-reader and online sales account for 14% of sales at the chain.

It’s not just US book retailing that is under financial pressure. Over the weekend, France’s “leading culture and technology” retailer FNAC announced that with overall turnover down 3.2% in 2011, the company was imposing several cost cutting measures, including laying off hundreds of staff. Of course, this is a very modest number considering the company has 17,000 people and runs 158 stores: 85 in France and 73 elsewhere in the world (Belgium, Brazil, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland and Morocco). The company is “evaluating” its overseas operations, and Italy in particular is identified as “where the environment is no longer conducive to Fnac-owned stores.” Finally the firm is also repositioning itself as a family-friendly retailer and will develop more attractions for children — a group that is still, for the most part, very loyal to bound, physical books. The company is not touching FNAC.com and its online operations or sales staff in the stores.

In Germany, the CEO of Douglas Holding — the company which owns Thalia, Germany’s largest bookstore chain, at 295 stores — is fighting rumors that they’re ready to break up the company. Henning Kreke told Reuters, ”It is impossible to say at this stage what form a deal would take or even if it will come to a transaction,” he said. Still, the chain is suffering. It’s OYO e-reader went on sale last year and online sales now account for 14% of sales at the chain, but overall physical retail were down.  ”[Thalia] must find the optimum way of integrating our traditional stores with our online shops so that we can leverage the potential of the new megatrend, the e-book,” Kreke said, adding, the company needs to find a way to compete with the “extremely rapid development” of Amazon, which launched it’s Kindle in Germany last year. Were Kreke to take our most recent survey, he’d surely call Amazon a “highly disruptive” force in the market.

More from Douglas Holding’s most recent “balance sheet” press conference here:

In the books division, the Thalia Group, along with the entire traditional bookselling sector, was confronted with dramatic changes in customer buying habits. On one hand, more and more customers are buying books online, and, on the other, digital books (e-books) are gaining increasing importance. Both of these developments are creating major challenges for all brick-and-mortar bookstores. The Thalia Group has reacted quickly to its customers’ evolving preferences and has implemented a host of targeted measures. The online shops were expanded and new, user-friendly features added. A new e-reader, the OYO, was launched on the market and the number of available titles in the Thalia e-bookstore was increased significantly. Additionally, the bookstores have added attractive new products. These measures have enabled the Thalia Group to largely compensate lower revenue in the traditional retail bookstores by achieving considerable growth in its online business.

Overall, the Thalia Group increased its sales revenue in the 2010/11 fiscal year by 3.2 percent to EUR 935 million. While sales in the 295 Thalia bookstores in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland fell by 1.5 percent, online sales of the Thalia Group rose substantially by about 20 percent. Thus, online sales already account for about 14 percent of Thalia’s total revenue. In Germany, sales rose by 2.0 percent to EUR 704 million, with higher online revenues having a positive impact. Foreign sales were up by 6.8 percent to about EUR 231 million, mainly due to foreign currency effects and the opening of new stores.

With an EBT of EUR 5 million, the books division reported results that were significantly lower than the previous year by EUR 20 million. Even after the adjusting for the revaluation of buch.de shares, the result still fell by EUR 14 million. This decline resulted largely from the industry-wide shift of sales from brick-and-mortar retail bookstores to the Internet.

The latest edition of Iran’s Publication Database states that the number of bookstores in Tehran rose from 858 to 895 in 2010. Overall, 198 new bookstores opened in the county, 37 of which were in Tehran. Iran’s publication database is published every year to provide statistics on the list of booksellers, print houses, publication centers, lithographers, and paper sellers of the country.

One would expect Persian publishing to be doing well too, but as with anything in Iran, publishing is very tightly regulated, controlled and censored…so it’s tough to really know how the business is doing. Some of the strongest and most interesting publishing happening in Iran is done out-of-sight for obvious reasons.

LONDON: The news that Amazon.com is to publish the debut novel of actor James Franco, star of 127 Hours, is yet another warning shot across publishers’ bows.

According to the Bookseller, Amazon.com fiction editor Ed Park has acquired the novel Actors Anonymous from Franco’s agent, Richard Abate at 3 Arts. The move underlines precisely the view of Stephen Page, Chief Executive of Faber — ironically, Franco’s UK publisher — who said just before Frankfurt: “There are a lot of questions about the future, with people asking: ‘will publishing die?’ That, of course, is nonsense, but the manner in which publishing will happen will change, and I think the really interesting conversation to be had is around what publishers can do to add value in this new universe. In what will way will publishers have to transform to compete with these new entrants, and to what degree do publishers communicate the value they add to their authors?”

At first glance it would seem as if here is one author who feels his existing publisher isn’t adding value. Perhaps Faber didn’t offer for it, or felt it was too American? But nonetheless the principle remains: here’s yet another author bypassing traditional houses because he thinks he can be better served elsewhere.

The situation is worrying for all traditional publishers. As Hachette CEO Tim Hely Hutchinson put it: “Publishers have got to prove all the time that they are worth their share of the revenues. We can’t take it for granted that people will use our services.”

Random House UK must be smarting from Deepak Chopra’s decision to go with Amazon for his memoirs. New authors have to balance the might of Amazon with the lack of exposure they will have in other outlets.

To what extent this practice will grow remains to be seen. Traditional publishers may find themselves in a position that mirrors that of Aron Alston in the story of 127 Hours — stuck between the rock of print overheads and the hard place of having no direct route to consumers. In the past, Amazon has reached down a helping hand (albeit with pretty sharp strings attached); now, the giant wonders if it needs to reach down at all. It can publish the content itself. Yet without the bookshops, where will it be discovered? Online? Will that, in the end, be enough?

Today the news broke that American college student Amanda Knox, recently exonerated of murder charges in Italy, had hired Robert Barnett, a partner at the DC firm Williams & Connolly, to serve as her representative to publishers in negotiating a book deal. Often, he’s been confused with being an agent, but he’s not…he’s a lawyer and proud of it. The influential negotiator made this point very clearly to me several years ago when I had the opportunity to profile him for Bloomberg News.

Robert Barnett, attorney not agent

Lawyers who negotiate book contracts are not unheard of and in this day and age of authors finding they need to rely on themselves more and more, hiring a lawyer might not be such a bad option. Why? Well, as I wrote in 2007:

At $900 an hour, Barnett’s attention doesn’t come cheap…and Barnett’s fee arrangement isn’t right for everybody.

But when it’s a question of a multimillion-dollar contract, Barnett’s hourly rate can offer a client a massive savings over an agent’s commission. In an example Barnett cited, he billed a client $150,000 for negotiating a $3-million book contract — a substantial discount from the $450,000 to $600,000 an agent would customarily charge.

That’s a significant savings. Plus, lawyers have one undeniable advantage over your typical agent: they can intimidate even the most intimidating.

While authors might save money, publishers don’t. Sonny Mehta, chairman of Knopf Publishing Group, a subsidiary of Random House, paid $12 million for the privilege of publishing Bill Clinton’s memoir My Life, which Barnett represented.

Replying to an e-mail query, Mehta — who has a reputation as one of the most intimidating publishers in New York — said that the upside of working with Barnett “is that when he calls about a client, it’s always someone you will want to take a meeting with. The downside is that he’s an expert on valuation, and as such I can never quite negotiate the deal I’d like.”

An annual three-day public literary event is about to kick off in Brittany at the Maison des Ecrivains Etrangers et Traducteurs, (MEET) which roughly translates into “Foreign authors and translators’ house.”

Each year MEET invites writers from around the globe to discuss a theme. This year’s topic is on memory and truth, and the guests of honor are writers from Cambodia and Puerto Rico.

Patrick Deville, MEET’s literary director, whose novel Kampuchéa was published by Seuil last year, recently spoke to the French magazine Telerama about a Cambodian literature that is slowly rising from the ashes after being very nearly wiped out during the Khmer Rouge regime. While he was doing research for his novel in Cambodia, Deville met Phoeung Kompheak, a young author who publishes in Khmer and French under the pen name Nantarayao Samputho and together they chose two other writers, Neng Kanitha, Kao Seiha, who will be present this weekend in Brittany.

Although Cambodia had a rich literary history, young writers today, said Deville, have to start from scratch, in a country with a book industry that is in its infancy.

MEET just published a bilingual anthology of texts on memory and truth by writers from a variety of countries including Cambodia and Puerto Rico.

By Roberta Campassi, PublishNews

Steve Jobs is not among us anymore, but is still a phenomena. The electronic version of his biography written by Walter Isaacson is breaking sales records in Brazil and has already become the top-selling e-book ever in the country just two weeks after its release.

“It’s the bestselling e-book in our history,” says Marcílio D’Amico Pousada, the CEO of Saraiva, the largest book retailer in Brazil. Not only it is selling well, but also the format is selling more than usual. The e-book sales correspond to 22% of all print copies sold, according to Pousada, which is well above average in the Brazilian digital book market.

At Livraria Cultura, the second largest bookseller, digital sales of Steve Jobs correspond to 10% of physical sales. Mauro Widman, the company’s digital books coordinator, says average percentage is less than 5% for other e-book titles. “It will soon become our bestselling e-book ever.”

To Carlos Eduardo Ernanny, owner of Gato Sabido, an independent online book retailer, the digital version of Steve Jobs is the “first e-book phenomenon in Brazil.”

Companhia das Letras, the publishing house which published the book in Brazil said it had sold 3,000 digital editions of the book in the first week after its official release on 24th October.

The success is explained, according to the book retailers, by several things: the simultaneous launch of both the physical and digital versions; the lower price (the e-book price is R$32.50 vs. R$49.90 for the print copy); the fact that it can be more comfortable to read the 624-page Brazilian edition electronically, and the media frenzy following Steve Jobs’ death on October 5, which made timing for the book more especially apt.