This week we discuss transparency in publishing, fiction vs memoir and Britney Spears' publishing history. Our panel discussion features author, founder and publisher of Sutherland House, Ken Whyte; Co-Publisher and editor of ECW Press, Jack David; and The Rights Factory’s own Executive Editor Diane Terrana. Diane also weighs in on the line between fiction and memoir and TRF agent Kathryn Willms gives us an oral history of Britney and books.
This week we discuss transparency in publishing, fiction vs memoir and Britney Spears' publishing history. Our panel discussion features author, founder and publisher of Sutherland House, Ken Whyte; Co-Publisher and editor of ECW Press, Jack David; and The Rights Factory’s own Executive Editor Diane Terrana. Diane also weighs in on the line between fiction and memoir and TRF agent Kathryn Willms gives us an oral history of Britney and books.
Hello, welcome to episode 3 of Agent Provocateur. This week, we take a look at what 20 years of publishing books about Britney Spears can tell us about our culture, and maybe ourselves.
Kathryn Willms:She definitely has lipped-synched, but to me, that's somewhat symbolic. She literally has no voice. She's just this body on the stage that people use. And they comment on.
Sam Hiyate:Where's the line between memoir and fiction? Rights Factory Executive Editor, and author, Diane Terrana, helps us figure it out.
Diane Terrana:Okay. There isn't a lot of distance between the facts and the fiction, and by the way, that goat's never going to refute your veracity.
Sam Hiyate:First, we take a hard look at the pros and cons of transparency in book publishing. Hi, everyone. welcome to our panel on transparency. So this panel was started by an agent, Carly Watters from PS Literary, who, on Twitter, was talking about toxic positivity and publishing. And she went quickly from toxic positivity to transparency between publishers and authors. And of course, as agents we're in the middle of it all. And, it reminded me of when I had lunch with an author from Penguin Random House, when they first released their PRH Portal for authors about 10 years ago. And it was a funny anecdote because the editor said, when we thought, when we launched this portal, we thought every once in a while, the author might go on and see how many books sold that week or how many books were returned or whatever. But when they looked at the data, which came out pretty quickly after it was launched, they realized that several, almost all, the authors were logging in several times a day to see what was happening and that they were so keen on getting any data, any kind of sales information. And, and they thought this is something we didn't expect, you know, like, what is happening? And I said, well, authors have to wait two years for their book to come out to get any data. And then it's like every six months they get a sense of what's happening. So of course they're going to go on and there's all that pent up desire to find out"What's happening with my book." So from there, I'm going to start by introducing our panel today. We have Diane Terrana, Executive Editor and Author at the Rights Factory.
Diane Terrana:Thanks Sam. Great to be here.
Sam Hiyate:We have Ken White, who is a brilliant journalist and is now a publisher at Sutherland House.
Ken Whyte:Hi Sam.
Sam Hiyate:And Jack David, co-founder of ECW press.
Jack David:Hi Sam.
Sam Hiyate:Okay guys. So I'm going to start with, you know, looking back at this kind of portal data, I mean, is it vital information for authors to know how their book is selling, especially their book compared to other books? I mean, eventually they'll get an actual number from the publisher, but how important and how urgent is this for authors? Because I feel like this transparency thing is a kind of issue between authors and publishers sometimes. What do you think, Jack?
Jack David:Well, before I saw the PRH listing, I got a lot of calls from authors who said,"I'm checking my Amazon. And this afternoon I was 412, but this morning I was 442. So what happened, what happened in the interim?" Authors are curious about how their books are doing. And I think it's publisher's responsibility to give them that kind of information. The question is whether or not they have to reach for it or whether we give it to them without asking.
Sam Hiyate:That's a good question. Ken, do you have anything to add to this or comment on?
Ken Whyte:I think they do. I, as an author, want the information, and as a publisher, I try to supply it to my writers, but you have to be a bit careful about it because the information is not always what it seems. You know, you got a certain number of books in the marketplace. It doesn't mean that they're all sold. You might get returns. I think the important thing to do is to be transparent about the process and also to set expectations for the writer, tell them that you'll check in with them every week or every two weeks or every month or whatever the timeline is. But let them know what you're going to do and what you're going to tell them. And when the information is coming and how to handle the information, because as I say it, it can be a bit complicated.
Diane Terrana:Yeah, and I'll jump in here as an author. I would say authors are more than interested. They're obsessed with their numbers. So if they can find a way to find them out, they're going to. I joined up to BookNet through the agency with a fellow agent at The Rights Factory and she was also an author. And I can just tell you, I spent way too much time on BookNet, looking at my sales and comparing them with every author I knew, and all the books that came out when mine came out. And to what end, I've asked myself after I finally got rid of BookNet, to what end did I even do that?
Sam Hiyate:Jack?
Jack David:I think the important thing is that you're getting a very skewed view from BookNet because you've got ebook sales, you've got audio book sales, in many cases. You've got special sales, you've got authors own sales. You've got sales that go out when somebody walks in the front door of our office-- and they're not getting all that information,
Ken Whyte:Or Amazon sales for that matter. I mean, they're very poor at tracking Amazon and for a lot of writers, that's half the business. It goes back to the point I'm making about having to be clear with writers about what numbers you're following and what they actually mean, because it's not always clear.
Sam Hiyate:Let's go back to Amazon. Sorry, Diane, what did you say?
Diane Terrana:I was just going to say though my, my question to what end still stands. So Jack, to what end am I as an author getting all this information?
Jack David:Curiosity? Trying to figure out whether you can pay your rent in April or not, who knows?
Sam Hiyate:It's a good point. Authors are always trying to figure out their place in the kind of literary firmament, compared to the other authors. Right? So there's that kind of ecosystem thing. I'm going to go back to Amazon though, which Ken talked about. So do we feel one of Carly's points was that she feels that Amazon may have access to all this data that they are just not sharing with anybody, publishers included. Are you guys feeling left out of that Amazon mountain of data?
Ken Whyte:Oh, sure. They know a lot more about buyers of our books than we know about buyers of our books. I'd love to have all of that information. But I don't think Amazon's ever going to give it up, because it's the basis of their business and having a proprietary hold on that data is really important to them. So, nice to have it, but don't hold your breath.
Sam Hiyate:Jack, any thoughts?
Jack David:We have a book called Happily Ever Older-- pitching a book now-- and this book came out the same time as a health book came u p from a writer at The Globe. So our author is at The Star, that author is at The Globe. She always wants to know how she's doing in comparison with that book. And I can tell her, but she, I'm pretty sure, i s selling a lot more out of special sales that he is based on his BookNet numbers. So, yeah, as Ken says-- as I will agree with Ken for once-- it's true, it's complicated.
Diane Terrana:If an author could find a way to get that data, obviously not the Amazon data, but the data you guys have as publishers, and could do something to up their sales, that would be very obviously beneficial, but I'm just not even sure how much authors who don't have huge platforms can do with the information to get out there and sell their books, anyway. I mean, you can do some book events. You can go to literary festivals if you are invited or get yourself invited. But because I was able to track some of that before the lockdown on my book, you know, I could see 10, 15 books, maybe 20 books sell from an event. And then the little thing go back down again. So what an author is able to do is pretty limited, unless they have a huge platform.
Ken Whyte:Two points on that. One is I think that it's really for us as publishers to educate writers and also our staff and our editors, people who work on the books, to be aware of sales stats and to care about sales stats. Because at the end of the day, that's what keeps us in business. And that's what gives them opportunities, gives them jobs. There can be a kind of a church and state attitude towards sales. You know,"I'm just here to create art. I don't care whether or not the unwashed public wants it or not." I think we really have to encourage people to like the sales side of it, to embrace the sales side of it and so on. As for what they can do about it-- it's true-- there are some authors without platforms who, can't do much at all. But every publisher will tell you, now that they're giving a leg up to any author who does have a platform, and they're also expecting authors to use their platforms to sell books. So, it's important information to have whether or not your book is selling, whether you're in a doldrums, so that you can make better decisions about how to use your platform. What events to do, what not to do, how to allocate your time in order to sell more books. More information's valuable, to that end, towards everybody making the most of an opportunity with a book.
Sam Hiyate:Jack, any thoughts?
Jack David:If an author is checking and gets really detailed information and finds out that they've sold 15 copies at McNally in Saskatoon, but they sold nothing in Regina. Then the author can make a move to try to try to change that and call up their local store, if they're in Regina and say,"What's going on here?" So yeah, it can be helpful that way-- they're acting as sales agents effectively.
Sam Hiyate:So one of the things that's come to my attention just from watching the industry-- and the last maybe five years has been the most intense-- but I've noticed that publishers are recruiting more and more data people, data analytics, SEO optimization. So is the new world of publishing having access to this data and figuring out how to use data to sell more books. And if so, how can authors ride on that? I'll start with you Jack.
Jack David:It's not so much in our case, bringing the authors into that equation. But today we were having a meeting about how many, copies of a book to print. And we had so much more information than we had seven years ago, 10 years ago. We had where they were selling and we had how much it was going to cost. And we have what the author expected, and whether we could do the fancy cover or not. If we went POD-- all that kind of information, we just did not have before. So we're still making a lot of guesses about how many copies to print. I think we're just perhaps a bit more accurate now than we were. It's a better model, Sam. But, one of the books we were told by our sales reps that they thought that Indigo was going to come in for 600. That was their order. That was the projection. But when he actually got the order a couple of days ago, it was 99 copies.
Diane Terrana:Oh my god.
Jack David:So it still comes down to people talking to people and trying to figure out what's going on.
Sam Hiyate:Okay, I'm going to end it on this one question. Is there enough transparency? Because I think Carly's original thought was, transparency in publishing. And I feel like you guys are maybe special in that. Ken, when you said you would talk to somebody, maybe every couple of weeks about how their book's doing. That seems like Max Perkins level of publishing.
Diane Terrana:I was kind of shocked.
Ken Whyte:Well, we put together what we call a"welcome package" for Sutherland House authors and it lays out for them all of this stuff. What the expectations are on them in terms of using their platform, how best to use them, when to start using them, all that sort of thing and tells them what we're going to do. And how often we're going to communicate with them and who to communicate with about what, and we do it in time periods, you know, the few months before the book's launched and then tell them what to expect a few months after the book's launched. And we've done that mostly in response to author requests for transparency and, it's maybe a little easier for us because we're new and we're small. But I think that over time, as publishers get used to operating in a new environment, where the authors are a lot more involved in selling the books, it's going to become necessary, to have that level of transparency and back and forth between authors. And, I just published a book with Penguin Random House, with Knopf in New York. I haven't heard a damn thing from them. I've had one call since the book launched, six weeks ago.
Sam Hiyate:But, dude, you have the portal!
Ken Whyte:That's not really that helpful when you have questions about, what you could be doing and how you could be doing it, and how you could help their efforts. The portal is not a lot of good.
Sam Hiyate:Jack, any final thoughts or Diane?
Jack David:Yeah, if we're talking about transparency, I think we should talk about publisher relationships with agents and what goes on there.
Sam Hiyate:I'm here, I'm here-- talk to me. I'm here Jack, I'm listening.
Jack David:We've had experiences where, for example, and this doesn't involve you directly Sam, where the agent will say, I'd like my offers by the middle of August. And then we make an offer by the middle of August. And then they say, well, it's summer and not everybody's around. So let's extend it to September 10th. And we thought that was the final offer, but they just keep it open.
Sam Hiyate:Wait, by the way we've never done that to you. We wouldn't do that to anybody. We stick by our dates.
Jack David:So the point is that the agent should be transparent with the publisher, as much as the publisher is transparent with the author.
Sam Hiyate:That's a good point. Noted. Okay, everybody. Thanks so much, Diane, Ken, Jack, it's a pleasure to have you on. I hope you guys come back and great talk.
Diane Terrana:Yes. A pleasure gentlemen.
Ken Whyte:Thank you, Sam.
Jack David:Thank you.
Sam Hiyate:Few things in the publishing industry seem as subjective and slippery as the difference between memoir and fiction. Our own Diane Terrana has some thoughts.
Diane Terrana:Hello authors, today, I'm talking about memoir versus fiction, and the line between the two. I first learned the difference when I was in grade four, a school librarian introduced my class to a book set in the early 20th century, a story based on the author's recollections of her childhood. It would have been called a memoir except for one scene in which a goat ate 100 buttons from her dress. That never happened, hence the book was a novel. Many authors, whose stories are close to their lives, struggle with the two genres. Some haven't yet decided which they even intend to write and some want to write memoir, but find their story doesn't quite work. Therefore they want to insert some fictional elements-- a clearer arc, stronger plot points, perhaps more dynamic scenes. These writers frequently say their stories are true, but they have rounded some corners, embellished the truth, taken liberties or written with an eye to truth, not facts. Really? As an editor, I'm going to focus on those corners. How sharp were they and how grounded are they now? Let's go back to the dress. The hundred buttons and the goat. Well, you say there was a skirt, it had some buttons and there was a goat sniffing around the hem. Okay. There isn't a lot of distance between the facts and the fiction. And by the way, that goat's never going to refute your veracity. But what if you tell me there was no dress buttons or goat. Instead, there was a sweater, a zipper and a hamster. So my question is why substitute at all? Let's just stick with the facts. We can tighten the story, shape it, and I'm sure truth will out. What if, however, there was no clothing, no fasteners and no animal. Well authors, that is fiction. I'm Diane Terrana, Executive Editor at The Rights Factory. Thank you for listening.
Sam Hiyate:The publishing industry loves nothing more than doing books about celebrities, but what we at the agency wanted to know, if you look at all the books published about a single celebrity and by celebrity, I mean, Britney Spears over the years, what can we learn? Not just about female celebrities-- pop stars in this case-- but about our culture at large. That's the question we've put to Kathryn Willms, Associate Agent at The Rights Factory, and here's what she came up with. So what's your connection to Britney? How did this start?
Kathryn Willms:I feel like I'm a woman of a certain age and I'm actually the same age as Britney Spears. And when you're a woman growing up in, my case BC, but if you're a woman of a certain age, you just have a natural connection to Britney Spears, whether you wanted it or not. And then, I just kind of followed her over the years. I wouldn't call myself a super fan, but I would say I'm invested, you know how sometimes you just get invested in someone because they've just been part of your life for, a long time. So I'm not part of the Free Britney movement. But I've been really fascinated, about what's been happening lately. And I kind of feel as somebody who identified as a feminist, even in high school, you know, Britney Spears has always been a complicated figure. And I feel like I've always defended her in certain ways when people said her music wasn't any good. My husband always says she can't dance, which drives me crazy. And my argument is that she chooses not to sometimes-- fair enough. But now that now we know that might have been a silent protest. And then I had a couple other thoughts about why the stories caught fire right now. And one is that I wonder if like all of us being under lockdown for a year and a half, if there's like a kind of--
Sam Hiyate:Kind of, it resonates with us. It looks like we're under our own conservatorship.
Kathryn Willms:Right? I kind of feel like in our case it was, governments, not our father, but, it does seem like there's a real surge in empathy, which I thought was really interesting coming at this moment.
Sam Hiyate:Good, good point. No, good point.
Kathryn Willms:So there's 13 books on Publishers Marketplace that use Britney Spears names. Yeah. So looking at this list, it's kind of fascinating and gives you a little glimpse of literally the last 20 years. So I had three kind of main takeaways. So the first one is: Britney is not taken seriously as an artist. In 2004, this is actually a phenomenon that's developed in 2004. She's mentioned in the description of a book by James Dickerson called Go Girl, Go: The Women's Revolution in Music, and her name is included alongside Billy Holiday's. So that was probably a high watermark for Britney. This is three years before she shaves her head and sort of becomes this person that has--
Sam Hiyate:-- is a little more unpredictable.
Kathryn Willms:Yeah. more unpredictable. And then after that, her personal life really takes precedence in her narrative. So in 2005, she was named in a book called Trainwreck, about the women that our society shuns. And then, you know, it's interesting, I think there's been a little bit of an attempt to sort of, think about her music again. Alice Bolin wrote a book about the female body, but she also wrote a book about"Hit me baby," Britney's first seminal hit. She has this article. She talks about,"Can pop music be smart," and looks at it as an ode to loneliness. So I wonder whether we'll come back around again and revision the music. But she's always been used as a vessel, to make political and cultural points. And Billy Corgan, when the Smashing Pumpkins broke up, said that they had to break up because it's hard to keep trying to fight the good fight against the Britneys. So definitely Britney has not gotten a lot of respect. Yeah, the good fight. My second takeaway is she's never been in control of her own narrative. And, as you said, Sam, you know, a lot of people around her have gotten book deals. Her mother wrote two books,
Sam Hiyate:Her sister,
Kathryn Willms:Sister, yeah. Her mother has one of her books called A Mother's Gift, which is the worst title. Makes me very unhappy-- her personal trainer. We have two biographies, including something called an authorized autobiography. Sam is that a thing? Can you even have an"authorized"?
Sam Hiyate:I don't think that is the thing, cause I guess usually if it's, unauthorized, it means you can go dig up whatever dirt and you don't have to run it by whoever-- the person that the book's about.
Kathryn Willms:And she's also part of two volumes of a book called Hollywood Exposed, about scandalous secret lives of superstars, like Angela Jolie, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Eddie Murphy, and Madonna. And that list cracked me out because it was a bunch of women and a Black man. Of course it is. But I think the point here is that Britney's voice is not represented at all, unless you count her book with her mom, which I would not. And you know, I think a lot of the women, the starlets of that day-- Jessica Simpson and Christina Aguilera, Mandy Moore-- have been allowed to grow past that and respond to some of the narratives that were written about them. And B ritney just has never really been given t hat choice and people have just used her in all sorts of ways. I think watching the framing Britney doc, there's a scene where she comes out to launch her latest, the Vegas residency, and she just keeps walking past the stage and she doesn't talk to anyone. And look, that just struck me because I know that Britney gets a lot-- there's a lot of discourse about her lip-synching and she definitely has lip-synched, but to me, that's somewhat symbolic. She literally has no voice. She's just this body on the stage that people use and they comment on. So I think that's one of the big takeaways. And the third one is, I don't even know if this needs elaboration, but we live in a sexist society. Some of the terrible things journalists asked Britney Spears in the mid two thousands-- about her virginity, her body, her mental health, her kids. Sarah Silverman, and called her kids"mistakes." It's just the worst stuff to look at. And, as you said, Sam, one of the books on this list is by Christopher Sihlar and it was sold by the title of The Grilled Cheese Madonna. It's about auctions, and one of the auctions was for Britney's pregnancy test.
Sam Hiyate:And what was it worth in the end?
Kathryn Willms:Honestly, I didn't look it up.
Sam Hiyate:Do you remember?
Kathryn Willms:Oh my God,
Sam Hiyate:It was five, apparently$5,000 US.
Kathryn Willms:So it's interesting I think that there's kind of been a reckoning of sorts. I think with Amy Winehouse and that documentary came out. And,I think there's been an idea that all of a sudden, we start to realize that these narratives really can hurt people in really fundamental ways. So in some ways, I think this is a really interesting time and I think the real question that we're left with is, she's kind of found her voice now. So, does that mean Sam, you'll be interested in this. Is there going to be a book? Is the real question.
Sam Hiyate:Like, a real one.
Kathryn Willms:Authorized, yes.
Sam Hiyate:Where she has found her voice, where she's taken control of her narrative. Cause I feel like that's the only happy ending to this story-- where she gets out of this conservatorship, it sounds like she's under the thumb of her family and this whole kind of empire that manages her money because everybody stands to lose so much if they're kicked out. There was one person that they said in that New Yorker article where he was making more than half a million dollars a year, just managing some small thing. That was his salary.
Kathryn Willms:Yeah. It's ridiculous. Absolutely. Yeah. So I'm kind of two minds about it. On one hand, Jessica Simpson wrote a book about-- she also sort of got painted in similar ways. It has a similar narrative, and we're in the book industry. So we're like always more books is good, but I also think, you know, Jia Tolentino makes an interesting point in an interview I heard with her, which is that, what you do when you take away someone's capacity is it's self-perpetuating and they can lose capacity. And I think, you know, my hope for Brittany is not so much that she takes back her public narrative as that she's allowed to drop out of the public narrative if she really wants to.
Sam Hiyate:If she wants. Yeah. It's her choice. All right. Well thanks so much, Kathryn-- that's a lot of Britney really quickly. I'm going to have to absorb it all. And thanks for coming on.
Kathryn Willms:My pleasure. I'm always happy to talk about Britney. I'm excited to see what comes next and I hope that there's a little happier ending for Britney here.
Sam Hiyate:Well folks, I'm sorry to say that's it for this week. Thanks again to all our guests and our brilliant producer, Andrew Kaufman. Tune in next week, when we pair wine writers and books with author and wine expert, Natalie MacLean, and we discuss the rise of graphic novels and comics with Publishers Weekly's own, Calvin Reid, and writer and artist Ho Che Anderson.