Written by Mrs. Bach: Probably “Pure Rubbish”!

In 2011, no less esteemed a firm than HarperCollins published Written by Mrs. Bach, a book that presented the view of Martin Jarvis, a professor at Australia’s Charles Darwin University.  Mr. Jarvis maintained that Anna Magdalena Bach, not Johann Sebastian Bach, who composed the Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello.  His bizarre conjecture has since been produced as a documentary film!

Needless to say, any number of experts have raised serious questions about both the research and the conclusions reached.  Indeed, cellist Steven Isserlis was outspoken:  “Anna Magdalena Bach did not write the Bach suites, any more than Anne Hathaway wrote Shakespeare’s plays, George Henry Lewes wrote George Eliot’s novels, or Freddie Starr ate his friend’s hamster.”  The Isserlis piece appears in The Guardian (29 Oct. 2014):  http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/oct/29/why-bach-wife-cannot-take-credit-for-his-cello-masterwork.

What bothers me is that such an apparently ill-founded hypothesis has made its way into print and subsequently to film.  How?  Are today’s publishers so desperately thirsty for what might once have been deemed a National Enquirer scoop that they must jump over such a wild hypothesis?

An Exception to the Rule?

Rachel Donadio recently wrote an article about Elena Ferrante (cf. The New York Review of Books 1 December 2014).  This piece is of interest because it ran contrary to so much of the prevailing trend in publishing.

These days writers are often encouraged to spend more time marketing themselves than they spend writing.  Many editors are more concerned with a prospective author’s “platform” (i.e., Internet presence – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) and marketing plan than whether he/she can actually write.  Without “followers,” one is effectively assumed dead-on-arrival.

By contrast, “Ferrante is a pseudonym, has no public presence, has never been seen, gives her a strange place in Italy, a country obsessed with image, where if you aren’t on television, you barely exist.”  Wow! 

The feature is available at:  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/dec/18/italys-great-mysterious-storyteller/.

A Potentially Alarming Study

Caitlin Dewey's article, "Why You Might Want to Ditch Your E-reader and Go Back to Printed Books," published in the Washington Post on August 21st, cited a recent study on reading comprehension.  Although the results were certainly far from conclusive, evidence suggests that those turning the pages of "real" books understood the plot line considerably better than those reading the identical text on Kindle.  

The article did not provide actual numbers (which would certainly have helped!), and the sample was alarmingly small (only fifty people, total, with twenty-five each for the printed volume and the Kindle).  Still, the outcome is disturbing, and further study appears warranted.  

The text appears at http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/08/21/why-you-might-want-to-ditch-your-e-reader-and-go-back-to-printed-books/ .

Digital News: A Library Without Books!

Florida Polytechnic University, the state's newest college, has a library, but the few actual (i.e., hard copy) volumes it possesses are kept off-campus at a shared facility. Instead, the university offers students access to books via their computers, readers, tablets, and other such devices.  In what may be a harbinger of things to come, FPU is among the first U.S. schools to utilize a fully digital library.

The following article, published by Reuters yesterday (25 August), may be of interest to readers:  http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/25/us-usa-florida-library-idUSKBN0GP0W620140825.

Publishing News: It’s a “Big Five” (Post-Script to 31 December 2012)

The proposed merger of Penguin and Random House was indeed completed last July, and the result is Penguin Random House (“the world’s first truly global trade book publishing company”).  Meanwhile, the rumored talks between HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster apparently continue. 

The new Big Five – including Hachette and Macmillan – publish approximately two-thirds of the titles released in the USA each year.  The ongoing trend of consolidation is not good for writers (or agents, for that matter), since the new conglomerates effectively forbid (or at least severely restrict) their imprints from bidding against one another.  Advances (for all save the Chosen Few “name” authors) are actually diminishing, as are the opportunities themselves.

Obviously some authors will gravitate toward “small” presses, though more and more will self-publish.  The latter trend, in turn, is a mixed blessing at best.  With so many more books, including e-books, published each year, the writer’s true talent will lie not with his/her skills at turning a phrase, but rather with the ability to “market” (presumably through publicity campaigns, social media networking, etc.). 

Is There Any Need For Comment?

Below is an excerpt from Val McDermid’s review of The Silkworm, by Robert Galbraith (aka JK Rowling), 18 June 2014:

“Here are the self-published novelists and memoirists, gulled by creative-writing courses into thinking they're only rejected by traditional publishers because they're too talented, too challenging, too individual. Here are the editors, drunk and trepidatious; the agents, greedy and bullying; and the writers, driven alternately by ego and fear. Really, it's a miracle anything half-decent ever gets published at all.”

I think that touches a fair number of bases!

Whither e-books?

PricewaterhouseCoopers recently asserted that e-book sales will catch up with hard cover and paperback sales -- at least in the UK -- within the next four years.  The same source anticipated a substantial drop (more than 30%) for printed books during that same time period.

I suspect this prediction warrants an "unlikely" at best.  Digital book sales actually appear to have reached a plateau recently; the trend no longer points skyward.  Moreover, it is obvious that printed books are here to stay.  Nevertheless, the PWC prognostication is noteworthy, even if somewhat dubious.