of all, the use of bold is simply unhinged. It’s like unnecessary quote sort of tactless. But if you’re looking to sell your book to Russians who already are stuffed on Bender, why didn’t you publish it in Russian? The whole point of translation is to introduce a book to a new audience that may not be familiar with the original. Who isn’t aware of Bender’s quintessential features. And although I hate to do this in a public place, I’m going to take a second here to explain a bit of elementary marketing. First, from the Russian Life website:
The edition as a whole was conceived as a way to introduce the English-speaking reader to Ostap Bender as he is understood in Russian culture, that is, as a household name whose quips and comebacks are still used in everyday Russian speech to this day. Thus our edition includes:
• an introduction by Alexandra Ilf, herself a respected scholar of Ilf and Petrov’s works;
• a translator’s foreword;
• a bibliography of scholarship on Ilf and Petrov available in English;
• the notes;
• an appendix deciphering characters’ names, which are “speaking names” in the tradition of Dickens and Gogol;
• a bilingual appendix of popular phrases from the novel.
First off, you know who’s a household name? Lady Gaga. Notes, bibliographies, appendices, and introductions a household name do not make. Sorry folks, but the above list appeals to academics only. For an author/book to reach a level of popularity, to even delusionally pretend to be on the “household name” level, it needs to reach an enormous general audience. A general audience that just fell asleep reading the words “bilingual” and “appendix.” No offense, Russian Life, but the Mel Brooks movie of The Twelve Chairs did more for Ostap Bender in the U.S. marketplace than ten million footnotes.
But while we’re on the footnotes, check this shit out:
9. “Giving the fig” in Russia is a mildly obscene gesture in which the thumb, positioned in that it sticks out between the first and second fingers, is brandished in someone’s direction; it means something like “take that!” or “you’ll get nothing from me!”
That’s one of their footnotes. Can someone explain to me what benefit the reader derives from ramming eyes-first into the phrase “giving a fig” and then having to flip to the back of the book and suffer through that dreadfully clinical description to get the gist of the passage they just read? This is why I hate footnotes—it makes for lazy translations that demand extra work from the reader. Which, FYI and back to Marketing Lesson 101, doesn’t help with reaching the whole “household name” goal.
OK, OK, everything above is a bit batshit, I know, I know, and I get what they’re trying to pull and where they’re coming from. And I really shouldn’t be making fun, or trying to bash a tiny publisher, but there’s a real sense of bitterness in these complaints that’s hard to ignore. Such as the bit where we’re criticized for using the edition edited by Alexandra Ilf (the same Alexandra Ilf who signed a contract with us for the rights to the book), whereas her preface is the GREATEST THING EVER.
But so be it. I can let that all go.
But not this. Seriously, even if none of the above was irritating or funny, I would’ve written this whole piece just to include this:
9. SIZE. Our edition is over 35% longer than the 315-page Open Letter edition. In order to include the Additional Materials noted above, our edition is 448 pages long, yet remains compact and lightweight.
10. PRICE. Our edition sells for $20, Open Letter’s edition sells for $15.95. But, as the Russia proverb goes, Skupoy platit dvazhdy (A miser pays twice.)
This is a joke right? Ignore the whole page-count/word-count fallacy and focus on the primary message: “35% more paper at a 20% higher price!” Is this the five-year plan of book publishing? Our book is better because it has more pages. Ever hear of page margins and the impact layout has on length? Or better yet, how about fact checking: our edition, which I have in front of me, is 336 pages . . .
OK, Russian Life, you win. I paid attention to you.
And now on with normal business.
The State of
Publisher-Reader
Relations
Back in September 2008, E.J. and I were talking about the presentation on the “state of publishing in the U.S.” that he has to give as a Frankfurt Fellow. I thought it would be funny—and totally unexpected—if instead of giving the usual doom and gloom speech,[1] he provided a vision of an ideal book culture, one overflowing with bookstores, book reviews, and sales dollars. Even for translations. One in which there were readers for every writer, midlist authors could live simply on royalties and government subsidies, publishers and editors would live glamorous lives on par with movie execs, and returns were a thing of the past. Along with “Reading at Risk” reports and articles.
Of course, this publisher wet dream will never take place. And even if it did, publishers would still complain about discounts to bookstores, about having to still increase their profits, and about the demands placed on them by their authors.
But after joking about this for a while, it occurred to me that this publishing paradise didn’t really include the reader . . . As a reader rather than a publishing professional, my vision (or exaggerated vision) of the ideal book culture is a bit different—all books would be available anytime anywhere (be it in the proliferation of independent bookstores or online) to satisfy my every instantaneous longing for whatever book comes to mind, there would be even more blogs and social sites where I could get trustworthy info about the type of books I like, and (in my most radical vision) all books would be essentially free.
Also not going to happen, but I think this is sort of representative of the big gap between publishing executives and actual readers.
I know I’ve mentioned this before, but the chain of information from publishers to readers is incredibly long and almost totally one-way. Here’s a theoretical example of this flow from start to finish:
Author sends manuscript to agent, who sends it to editors, who likes it and shares with publisher and other employees. They decide to buy the book based on a (partially) fabricated and idealized P&L sheet. The marketing department plans promotions for the book, the publicists start talking with review outlets (mainly newspapers and magazines and radio and TV—more on that in a second), the sales staff meets with buyers at bookstores. Once the book ships to stores, the booksellers (aside from the buyer, and especially at the chains) find out about this book for the first time, and then when a customer comes in, they clerk it.
(To digress for a moment—although this whole post is essentially a digression—by “clerk it” I’m referring to the growing number of bookstore employees who don’t really know a lot about literature or bookselling, instead they just clerk sales. They work cash registers and shelve books rather than promoting discoveries and sharing the “love of books” that supposedly got them into this low-paying field. Not to vilify the chain stores, but we all know the sequence of befuddlement that typically occurs when you ask about a book not on the best-seller list. I can’t reproduce the shock I had in a Borders last month when a woman was looking for The Shadow of the Wind and the bookseller/clerk
