Wonder, Copyright, Remembering Gregory J. Sinclair, and the end of the line for Small Press Distribution
‘Good company, good wine, good subtitles can make good people ’ ~ Henry VIII (sort of)
Being the 15th edition of Assorted Nonsense, the official newsletter of Donovan Street Press Inc.
By what means does art produce its sense of wonder?
The idea that there’s magic about, a suggestion that there’s more to life than mundane reality. Is it because there actually is more to life than meets the eye, something mysterious and wonderful beyond the curtain, just out of sight?
Or is it all just an illusion, a by-product of chemical processes in the brain?
Does it matter?
For what it’s worth, the fact that I feel that sense of wonder, of magic, means that for me it is real. Internal chemical processes may be complicit, but is it really all that surprising that biological beings should require a biological means to access wonder?
One day I shall pull that curtain back (in all its plush velvet glory) to reveal what lies beyond. And as with all the best stories, what I find is certain to be both surprising and inevitable.
Who Owns This Sentence?
A History of Copyrights and Wrongs
A few years ago I was part of a group writing and performing murder mysteries. It was a lot of fun, especially cuz we wrote the murder mysteries ourselves, always elaborately plotted and characterized. I still have some of those scripts tucked away somewhere.
A question arose early on: How do we protect our work? There was a notion going around at the time that the best way to protect your work was to stick it in a big yellow envelope, mail it to yourself as registered mail, and then never open it. Then you had proof that you had written it on a certain date, if ever you needed to prove it.
Not sure I knew anyone who actually did that. I didn’t.
Now, I’m no expert on copyright so I won’t even pretend to educate you on the matter other than to send you here, which will tell you all you need to know about how it works in Canada today. (And if you live in the US, go here.)
And if you want to know the crazy history of copyright, I highly recommend the cleverly titled Who owns this sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrong. As the book jacket copy says, it’s:
…a fascinating and original history of an idea that now controls and monetizes almost everything we do.
Who Owns This Sentence? is an often-humorous and always-enlightening cultural, legal, and global history of the idea that intangible things can be owned, and makes a persuasive case for seeing copyright as an engine of inequality in the twenty-first century.
I found this book on the shelf at Tidewater Books in Sackville, NB and couldn’t resist picking it up. Two picky little things before I go on to praise it. Although quite accessible over all, it’s occasionally just a hair dry, maybe not surprising considering the subject matter. I imagine you have to be interested in books, publishing and copyright to find it your cup of tea. But if you are interested in any of those things, you will be rewarded.
The second picky little thing is that there is something about the prose that makes it unnecessarily opaque. Not always, just every now and then. I sometimes had to read a sentence two or three times before really understanding it… if I managed to understand it even then. Maybe it’s because the mother tongue of one of the authors is French, meaning that he was writing in a second language (in which case I should really be complimenting him on his command of the English language instead of quibbling with his choice of phrasing). Or maybe it’s because copyright is just a complex subject. (Or more likely, as a friend of mine once suggested, I really just need to be two or three IQ points more intelligent).
Anyway, quibbles aside, the book really is a tremendous tour guide through the history of copyright and related subjects. And it’s more than just a history: it also makes a resounding case that we’ve taken the whole idea of copyright too far. Initially this happened accidentally, in a series of unrelated legal rulings influenced by heavy lobbying, helped along by unfortunate choices of wording in legal judgments. But gradually it dawned on people that there was a lot of money to be made in intellectual property. And by lot I mean A LOT.
Copyright used to be about protecting authors and their work. Now it’s about a handful of corporations turning ideas into property and extracting as much money from that property as they possibly can for as long as they can.
The book “Who owns this sentence” will tell you how all that came about.
Remembering Gregory J. Sinclair
A couple of days ago I heard that Gregory J. Sinclair had passed away. Really, this has been a terrible year for CBC’ers. First we lost Tim Lorimer, highly respected CBC Radio Technician (today would have been Tim’s birthday). Then we lost James Murray, highly respected CBC newsman for both radio and television. Both friends of mine departed from this world way too young. And now the same can be said for Greg Sinclair.
Greg Sinclair was a CBC Radio Drama Producer when I worked with him. An audio specialist. I met Greg early in my career. He was friendly right from the get go, a friendliness that never deserted him the entire time we worked together. I spent a decade working closely if sporadically with him in the CBC Radio Drama department. I worked with many brilliant, creative people; Greg was right up there with the best of them. In fact, he may have been the best of them. He surprised me constantly with his creativity. I mean genuinely surprised me. Like, I didn’t know we could DO that kind of surprise. I wrote on Facebook the other day that I learned more about making radio plays from Greg than anyone, which is saying an awful lot considering the calibre of people I worked with.
Greg was funny, human, personable, and extremely smart and talented. It’s nothing short of tragic that he’s gone. A Go Fund Me has been set up to support his family in his absence. I urge you to check it out.
Sales and Distribution
The more astute among you will have noticed that I started surveying sales and distribution outfits a couple of weeks ago. I would like to understand exactly how these companies work and who’s out there. There aren’t that many of them, so I’m tackling them one at a time. Two weeks ago we looked at a company called Ampersand Inc. Last week we had a gander at Canada Book Distributors.
This week we’ll tackle these folks:
Small Press Distribution (SPD)
Except… that it’s too late for SPD. Sadly, they are no more. After helping independent literary publishers distribute books since 1969, they announced their closure last month on March 28th, underscoring just how precarious this business of publishing is, especially for small presses.
So, who were SPD?
They were a nonprofit that distributed books for over 350 small presses, one of the last independent distributors in North America, and as I mentioned above they’d been in business since 1969. Why did this happen? According to a statement on their website:
“Several years of declining sales and the loss of grant support from almost every institution that annually supported SPD have combined to squeeze our budget beyond the breaking point. SPD lost hundreds of thousands in grants in the past few years as funders moved away from supporting the arts.”
SPD’s closure apparently took a lot of people by surprise, with some of their clients reportedly having placed orders with them as recently as 24 hours before they went out of business. Many of their clients still have thousands if not tens of thousands of books stored in SPD’s warehouse (which is now Ingram Spark’s warehouse… according to Publishers Weekly, SPD had just moved “300,000 titles from its old warehouse in Berkeley, Calif., to new facilities owned by Ingram Content Group and Publishers Storage and Shipping.”)
So now many of these small presses are probably owed money by SPD that they may never get back in total (if at all), and have tons of inventory tied up that will not be making them money sorely required to keep operating, some of which they may never get back. Not to mention the authors in question whose books may never get sold. These presses will be scrambling to unearth alternative distribution as quickly as possible, all the while wondering: how can I trust this new distributor?
This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened, nor will it be the last. And yet, people will continue to write books, and publish them, and attempt to distribute and sell them, not because it’s the safe or sensible or even sane thing to do, but because we’re crazy that way.
For those of you who read books, consider purchasing your books directly from small indie presses like this one or this one and this one so that they don’t have to rely on fragile distributors that eat into their profits. Also, pay for your books; don’t read them for free (unless you get them from libraries, which do pay for them).
And keep on reading.
Donovan Street Press Books (So Far!)
Adventures in the Radio Trade
"In dozens of amiable, frequently humorous vignettes... Mahoney fondly recalls his career as a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio technician in this memoir... amusing and highly informative." ~ Kirkus Reviews
A Time and a Place
“Entertaining, chaotic adventure.” ~ Publishers Weekly.
A note as well that the hardcover version of A Time and a Place now features the new cover, and is available at a much less expensive price than before.
Other Times and Places
“ …a lovely little collection of sci-fi and fantasy short stories, fun and well written.” ~ Charles P. Kelly
The Deer Yard and Other Stories
“Partly memoir, partly fiction, The Deer Yard is more than merely a good read …well-written, gentle stories, well worth reading.” ~ Ottawa Review of Books
Coming Soon
The Gates of Polished Horn by Mark A. Rayner
Re-Creative: the Podcast
Our podcast Re-Creative (hosted by the author of this newsletter, Joe Mahoney, and author Mark A. Rayner) is currently on a brief hiatus, but will resume shortly.
Appearances
I’ll be at the Mother’s Day Market in Richibucto Saturday May 11th from 9am until 2pm.
This has been the fifteenth edition of Assorted Nonsense, the official newsletter of Donovan Street Press Inc.
You saved me some time looking for that copyright information. I will look for that book.
At least, when it comes to publishing, the copyright is almost exclusively assigned to the creator. In other media, finding out who the actual "creator" is requires some detective work. There are so many cooks in those kitchens and they all want to take credit.
In the analog days of the music business, for example, it was far too easy for the people running the record companies to assign partial or whole ownership of songwriting copyrights to people who had nothing to do with writing the song, while depriving the actual writers of that.
And don't get me started about how ridiculous it is in the animation business. People who originate shows get "created by" credits justly, but they typically have no say in whether their creations get "rebooted" and otherwise abused or not, since the studios make the calls on that. And they shouldn't!