Scribe Publications: Henry's Blog

Territorial rights and wrongs (aka perfidious Albion)

2008-03-25T10:55:44Z

There’s been an undeclared guerrilla war going on for several decades between UK publishers and Australian publishers. Like most wars, it’s being fought for the financial gains that go with territorial rights; unlike most wars, however, the aggressors have never tried to clothe their naked self-interest with ethical rhetoric. They’ve simply planted their flags in foreign lands because they can.

The problem starts in the United States, the home of much of the best writing in the English-speaking book world. When US publishers or literary agents seek to sell English-language rights to their authors’ books, they usually look first to the UK, which has a domestic market of 60 million people — and access to many more. Although the UK is very choosy about what it wants, this is where the big bucks are.

The trouble is that UK publishers have almost always insisted, when they acquire domestic rights, that so-called ‘Commonwealth’ rights — that part of the globe which used to be coloured red — be included. They’ve even tended to refuse to consider buying rights in books that originate in Australia.

Why? Because Australia is a highly profitable market for UK publishers. They usually don’t have to pay for the Commonwealth component when they acquire the rights; they get to pay the authors what are called ‘export royalties’ (which are around half of what are known as ‘home royalties); and they sometimes sell more copies here than they do in their own country. They don’t even have to publish the books here — simply distributing moderate quantities is still money for jam. The disproportionate profits go straight to their bottom lines, and help prop up their own ailing industry. This is rent-seeking and coupon-clipping on a grand scale.

It’s a wonderful rort, and it’s been going on for a long time. And the UK publishers protect it fiercely: if Australian publishers want to acquire rights to such books from the US (which requires what is known as ‘rights splitting’), the default position of UK houses is that they will then refuse to offer for UK rights. This is blackmail, to put it bluntly, and it usually works. Faced with the prospect of potentially losing a largeish UK deal over a small-to-middling ANZ deal, US publishers and agents — and their UK rights agents — have tended to fold and to cede the territory.

The UK houses are unapologetic about their behaviour. If pressed, they will simply aver that Australia is very important to them financially. This is certainly true, but that doesn’t make it edifying or defensible. It’s akin to nineteenth-century plantation owners claiming that slaves are essential to the profitable operation of their enterprises.

In recent years, despite the continuation of neo-colonial rule from London, an insurgency has emerged: Australian publishing has developed a rights-buying culture. Many houses, large and small, now look to acquire local rights in US titles. (Our own company has been prominent in this area.) Often, the books they’re interested in are of relatively little interest to UK houses; but, equally often, the UK refuses to abandon its hard-line position, because it doesn’t want to set an unwelcome precedent.

Every day of every week, Australian publishers offer for US books, only to hear that the publishers are holding out for a UK deal, or that the UK has already ‘pre-empted’ (made a knock-out offer for UK and Commonwealth rights that includes Australian rights). Sometimes the wait lasts for months — and there’s no UK bid forthcoming.

The galling thing is that Australia often understands US books better than UK publishers do — and that, when Australian houses do manage to acquire local rights, they often publish the books with verve and commercial success. They print substantial quantities, publicise the books professionally (sometimes bringing the author out for a publicity tour), and often create a market for an author that would otherwise never have existed. And they do this while paying a market price for the rights, and higher, domestic royalties to the US publishers and their authors.

Word of these successes has started to seep out more and more in the US publishing community. More US publishers and agents are nowadays prepared to split rights, and some UK houses, under this market-place pressure, are being forced to give ground: they will now acquire some books even after Australian rights have gone, and sometimes they find themselves forced to pay domestic royalty rates as the price of retaining their entitlement to Australian rights.

Nevertheless, it remains the case that most UK publishers regard themselves as entitled to Australia as a territory, and refuse to cede the ground. I’m convinced that they don’t understand the bitterness and deep resentment, bordering on fury, that this stance is arousing in Australian publishing. It is a refrain I hear constantly, whether I’m talking to colleagues in multinational houses or to fellow independents. There is no question in my mind that the UK’s position is not sustainable.

I understand very well that the UK book trade is in a sorry state, and that UK houses have come to rely on Australia to subsidise their often-marginal domestic operations. (It may even be the case that, without this subsidy, they’d be forced to resist the punitive discounts that they’re having to offer large retail chains.)

But we must put out own interests first. As in all neo-colonial enterprises, UK publishers, by protecting their own financial interests, are holding up the development of Australian publishing and the Australian book trade in general. To the extent that they prevent Australian publishing houses from reaching their potential, they weaken the financial base of our industry, and even the prospects of local authors.

UK publishers are not entitled to Australia as a territory. It is our country, our market, and our industry. They should either pay for it on the same terms and conditions that we do — and then make professional use of the publishing rights they acquire — or else bugger off and let us get on with it.

Henry Rosenbloom

[A slightly modified version of this piece first appeared in the Age on 24 March 2008, under the heading 'Brits in the bad books'.]

How publishers think

2007-09-24T22:27:29Z

The first thing to say is that I’ve got no idea how other publishers think, but this is what’s on my mind.

Being a publisher of trade books (that is, books for general readers which are sold by the book trade) is essentially an exercise in risk management. Whatever your tastes, abilities, and interests, you know automatically that most of the titles you publish will either lose money, break even, or earn a modest amount of money. On the other hand — in my experience — if you try to tailor your list to books you don’t like or care about, but that you think will make real money, you usually end up doing even worse.

So you have to temper your enthusiasm or even passion for the job with a kind of world-weary acceptance that the market place will always have its way with you. As a general rule, the more books you publish and print, the more will be returned unsold by the book trade. The best you can do is to try to spread the risk so that you can’t be brought undone by a big mistake or a series of run-of-the-mill disasters. At the same time, you can’t afford to think or publish defensively, as that would limit your horizons and imbue the whole enterprise with the spirit of defeatism.

What this means in practice, for an independent trade house without a multinational parent or majority owner, is that you have to keep a lid on advances and print-runs, while backing your imperfect judgement relentlessly, and publishing and promoting your list as effectively as possible. To put the same point a different way, the fastest way to go broke is to believe your own publicity by paying too much for books and printing too many of them. Publishers never have the luxury of forgetting about their mistakes: they eat away at their profit-and-loss statements, clog their warehouses, and have to be remaindered or pulped after a barely decent interval has passed.

Meanwhile, we’re continuously looking at many books and proposals from a wide array of sources — local authors and agents, and foreign publishers and agents — that demand a great deal of attention and, often, quick responses.

So a trade publisher has a lot to think about, including but not confined to the shape of his or her list, the state of the market, the performance of competitors, the wellbeing of their staff, the fate of their authors and, of course, the bottom line and the bank balance. There’s always a lot going on, and there’s never enough time to do everything that needs to be done.

This is what’s going on behind the scenes when authors submit unsolicited manuscripts or book proposals to publishers like us. It’s a fact universally acknowledged that an unsolicited manuscript has a very low chance of being of a publishable standard; that’s why it gets put, in the first instance, in what’s known as ‘the slush pile’. It’s very hard to justify putting scarce editorial resources into assessing such manuscripts. And yet — as numerous mistaken rejections by publishers around the world and throughout history have shown — it’s folly to treat them all as unworthy of consideration.

We've developed over time a system for coping with this dilemma. This is spelled out on 'Manuscript Submission', which you can reach by clicking on 'Submission Guidelines' on our home page.

First, we ask authors who meet our minimum qualifications to email us first before submitting. We do not read unsolicited material that arrives in the mail if the author has not emailed us first.

Second, if we ask to see sample material, we pay careful attention to the covering note and to the quality of the writing of the sample chapters, as well as to the content. Just as individuals notice and respond to body language when meeting somebody for the first time, an editor will immediately register how language is used by a new author. Punctuation, syntax, grammar, and tone all tell a story, for better or worse.

Proposals that are clearly inferior never get past this step. We reject them as soon and as briefly as possible, using uninformative language to convey the clear message that our decision is final. This, by the way, is what lies behind publishers’ apparently bland rejection letters which state that a proposal ‘does not suit our list’. This is an admittedly nonsensical formulation, but it does the job of conveying the message that the proposal has been rejected and that there’s no prospect of it being reconsidered .

As a general rule, the briefer the rejection letter, the harsher the publishing verdict behind it. Conversely, lengthy rejection letters usually indicate that the editor/publisher found genuinely likeable qualities in the writing, but not enough to overcome its weaknesses.

The worst kind of rejection letter, from a publisher’s point of view, is one that leaves room for a response by the author or her agent. This means fruitless correspondence is then entered into, and usually leaves both parties feeling even more unhappy. Sometimes, though, a retort is worth the pain. My favourite example of this was recently provided by an international publishing friend of mine, who rejected a proposal by a right-wing writer he despised. He wrote to the authors’ agent: ‘I would rather eat ricin than publish A.B.’ The agent replied: ‘A.B. tells me that she knows where to get you some.’

If we’re impressed by the sample material, we’ll ask to see the full manuscript, or as much of it as is available. At this third point in our sifting process, we come to the position I described at the beginning: trying to make a sound judgement and backing our instincts, while knowing that it’s impossible to be sure of the outcome.

Usually, at least two people, and sometime more, will be involved in this decision-making process. We try to make it a pre-condition for us deciding to offer for a manuscript that I or the acquiring editor love the writing. But love — in publishing, as in life — is not always enough. Sometimes you need good luck as well, or even just the absence of bad luck.

I should perhaps explain that, because of or despite what I’ve just written, we’re still expanding our list and acquiring more books than ever (although, admittedly, most of them are from published authors, both locally and overseas). Perhaps this is the triumph of hope over experience, but I still love acquiring good books and imagining how well we’ll publish them.

Henry Rosenbloom

We need to read about Kevin (twice)

2007-06-25T11:10:36Z

How’s this for a Guinness world record: we and another publisher have just published a book with the same title, on the same day, about the same person, with the same retail price. We’ve published Kevin Rudd by a journalist called Nicholas Stuart. Penguin have also published Kevin Rudd, in their case by a journalist called Robert Macklin. Our sub-title, though, is ‘an unauthorised political biography’; theirs is ‘the biography’. Is this coincidence, conspiracy, or cock-up? And what is the significance, if any, of the differing sub-titles?

To get an answer to these questions, sit back and relax while I tell the tale of the bringing of our book to market.

When Nick Stuart pitched his idea for this book to us in December 2006, very soon after Kevin Rudd had ascended to the leadership of the parliamentary ALP, it was cast as a conventional political biography, with an emphasis on the nature and source of Rudd’s political ideas. When we discussed his proposal and how he’d go about writing the book, one of the first questions I asked Nick was whether he’d have access to Rudd (as getting information and quotes from Rudd was obviously going to be a pre-requisite for a book of this kind).

No worries, Nick told me. He knew Rudd, was on good terms with him, and was sure he’d able to interview him for the book. With this out of the way, we talked about the very tight schedule the book would involve. The key publishing decision was picking a publication date; and this, in turn, was based on picking the earliest date on which we thought the election might be held.

We estimated that the prime minister would probably not go to the people before October (because of the time he’d need to try to wear the new leader down, and because he wouldn’t want to be accused of going too early). If we were right, and given our sense that we needed to have our book in the shops at least three months before the election for it to have maximum impact, we had to publish at the beginning of July.

In order to meet this date, though, we had to have finished copies in our distributor’s warehouse by late May. And in order to do that, we would have to send the files to our printers in early May. I calculated that, before then, we would need about a month to edit, typeset, and proof the manuscript (by way of comparison, most books would take several months for this process). So Nick had to deliver his manuscript in early April — in four months’ time, from a standing start, with no research or writing yet started. It was a very big ask, for him and us. But we both committed to it, with our eyes open.

Then a series of unexpected events happened. In the new year, I undertook a review of our sales and distribution arrangements, and eventually decided to move them from Pan Macmillan to Penguin. I decided that the change should take place at the beginning of July 2007, as it would be the beginning of our new financial year, would give added impetus to the launch of our July–December list, and would be the least-disruptive time for what is intrinsically a difficult procedure.

Before we’d decided, though, we read that the publishing arm of Penguin had also contracted a biography of Rudd, and that it, too, was going to be published in July (presumably, they’d gone through the same thought-processes that we had). This led to an interesting conversation, when I felt obliged to tell Penguin that one of the first of our books that their sales representatives would have to sell-in to the book trade would be competing directly with one of their own titles. To their great credit, they handled this inconvenient news with aplomb — and, indeed, their sales force went on to do a highly professional job of convincing booksellers of the respective merits of both books.

Nick got to work, we briefed a cover designer (an important part of which was our projected sub-title: ‘a political biography’), and we felt even more committed to the tough schedule we’d set. Now that there was competition, we certainly couldn’t afford to be late.

Then, a month or so later, I started to intuit that the fabled ‘access’ to the subject of our book was becoming tenuous. I don’t know what it was: some murmurings of Nick’s, and a realisation that I wasn’t getting any reports of interviews with Rudd. When Nick and I spoke about this, it soon became obvious that Nick was being given the runaround by Rudd and his staff, and that it would be wise for us to assume that he would be denied access for the duration.

At this point, I made a small instantaneous decision that in hindsight turned out to be crucial: we would call our book ‘an unauthorised political biography’. If Rudd was going to refuse to talk to Nick, and would instead be talking to the author of Penguin’s book, we had to make a virtue of necessity. We had to prevent any perception taking hold that our book might be inadequate by comparison because it lacked first-person quotes from Rudd, and we had to take the initiative by making it clear that our book was spin-free, neither endorsed nor supported by Rudd.

Nick had to change his plans considerably, and inevitably had to take longer than we’d allowed for the manuscript to be written. In the end, we received it in late April, and we had just 13 days to edit, design, and typeset it, have it corrected by Nick, and proof-read by us. Somehow, working night and day, we managed to do it, and the book reached the warehouse in time.

(Later, as if to vindicate our sub-title change, when both books were launched in late June, Rudd attended the Macklin launch, and signed copies of it alongside the author; and several early reviews of the two books pointed out that, having been denied access, Nick had been forced to dig deeper and to talk to a wider array of sources.)

The marketplace will decide which of the two books is better or more interesting, and both sets of authors and publishing houses are, of course, waiting for this verdict with bated breath. It is an unusual situation, unparalleled in its details, and I tell the tale of it here to demonstrate just how uncertain and weird current-affairs publishing can be.

There is another important point to make. I still don’t know why Kevin Rudd refused to talk to Nick. He claims that it was because he was too busy, but this is implausible — to put it mildly. I suspect it was because of his now-well-known desire to exercise control over his media image and the messages that come out of Rudd Central. If this is the reason, it is understandable but mistaken. Hagiographies are not appropriate for prime ministerial contenders, and playing favourites always causes collateral damage.

The result has been that a well-disposed author and a politically sympathetic publishing house has, in effect, provided ammunition to those who are wary of or hostile to Rudd’s leadership. Already The Australian has used snippets from our book as part of its anti-Rudd campaign.

A few years ago, the then reviews editor for The Australian, the late James Hall, looked at my list of forthcoming titles and asked me, in his quiet, sardonic way, ‘Still trying to overthrow the Howard government, Henry?’

I was then, and still am. No political event could give me greater pleasure. I just wish that Kevin Rudd realised who his friends are, and didn’t allow his mania for control to play into the hands of his enemies.

Henry Rosenbloom

Sales, Returns, Reprints, and Bookscan: go figure

2007-04-09T10:43:30Z

If you’re a regular visitor to our website, you’ve probably noticed a recently introduced new feature on our home page, headed ‘Recent Bestsellers’. When you click on this tab, you’re presented with a list of our previous month’s top-12 bestselling titles, listed in order of their sales.

If you’re a thoughtful or inquisitive visitor, you may have wondered what the word ‘bestseller’ means in this context. The answer, it turns out, is that ‘it depends’.

I hasten to say that it doesn’t depend on whimsy or wishful thinking or my subjective judgement. It depends on what you and I understand by the word ‘sales’.

Let me explain. First of all, this is what the list isn’t based on. It doesn’t include any sales we make outside Australia (for instance, in New Zealand), as that would distort the picture we’re aiming to present of our domestic sales rankings. And it doesn’t include direct sales we’ve made to organisations, authors, or individuals, as that would distort the figures for sales that have occurred in the book trade (which are known as ‘trade sales’).

More importantly — and perhaps surprisingly for many readers — the list isn’t based on the number of copies of our books that we’ve ‘sold’ to bookshops. That’s because these aren’t ‘sales’ in the sense understood by ordinary people. These are, rather, invoices for books ordered by bookshops in the hope/expectation that they’ll sell them to the punters who wander into their stores. Any books that aren’t sold are eventually returned (bookshops have to keep them for three months, and usually have up to a year after publication to return them), and the shops are then credited for them.

So, for example, a shop that orders six copies of a new title in March may return three copies in July and one copy the following February, and our initial apparent sale of six becomes a real sale of two. The trouble is, we don’t know in March what our real sales will eventually turn out to be.

That is, we didn’t know until Bookscan came into existence. Bookscan is a private company that tracks trade sales for its subscribers. These are real, weekly, through-the-till sales — not pretend sales, not subject-to-return sales, but bye-bye, have-a-good-life sales. We started subscribing to Bookscan on 1 January 2007, so we now know our real sales. And that’s what our ‘bestellers’ list’ is based on: each month’s sales as reported by Bookscan.

End of story, you might think. I wish it were. The trouble is, Bookscan doesn’t have complete coverage of the book trade: it’s very accurate for large groups (such as Big W) and the chains (such as Angus & Roberston), but it misses out completely on airport bookstores through Newslink outlets (a situation which I’ve heard may soon change), and only has about 25 per cent coverage of the independent bookselling sector. Unfortunately, this sector is where independent publishers like us have their heartland, and where we sell a disproportionately high percentage of our books.

Now, the people behind Bookscan are not stupid, so they deal with the gaps by making allowances for them. This means their ‘sales’ figures are guesstimates, but they’re meant to be highly accurate guesstimates. Booksellers rely on them to keep a check on what’s selling around the country (and what’s not), so it’s a great help to them in making decisions about what to order and re-order. This has been a controversial effect, as it’s led to booksellers reducing their initial orders (and risks), and adopting more of a wait-and-see policy with new releases. This lowers the aggregate initial order for a new title, making it harder for publishers to meet their initial budgets, and anxious about meeting them at all.

Publishers, especially the large ones (who get a comprehensive and sophisticated range of data), also rely on Bookscan to see what titles and genres are selling, where they’re selling, and how their competitors are doing. They also rely on Bookscan to judge whether to reprint successful titles, and to help them decide how many to reprint.

This is where we come to the final twist in the ‘sales’ tale. In the short time I’ve been using Bookscan, I’ve found it frankly useless as an aid to decision-making about reprints. At this point, a case-study is necessary to demonstrate the problem.

The example I have in mind concerns Ghost Plane by Stephen Grey, a superb book that we published on 19 February. (This title is no. 2 on our March bestsellers’ list.) We printed a relatively modest quantity of 2500 copies, as I knew it would be a difficult book to sell with a non-resident author (Stephen is a UK resident, and the book was originally published in late 2006 in the US and the UK). There’d also been a book (which I thought was inferior) on the same subject published in Australia in late 2006, and I was worried that there’d be limited media interest left for our title.

As it happened, a number of things clicked, and we decided suddenly to bring the author out for a quick tour, during which he scored a number of high-profile media interviews. The book was also reviewed favourably and prominently, and it started to sell fast.

Or we thought it did. By 6 March, after several days of heavy ordering from the book trade, there was almost no stock left in our distributor’s warehouse, and I knew we had to reprint. I consulted Bookscan, and its most recent report told me that we’d sold a total of 368 copies by the week ending 24 February. (A few days later, it reported cumulative sales up to 3 March of 482 sales.) So the trade had gobbled up 2500 copies really fast, but Bookscan told me that less than 20 per cent of that total had really been sold.

If I had listened to Bookscan, there would have been no reprint then — or, maybe, ever. Instead, I pressed the button for another 2500 copies. By the time the reprint arrived (very quickly — on 16 March), there were over 900 back-orders logged from the trade. And as I write this blog, there are only 120 copies left from the reprint in the warehouse, and we’ll be out of stock again within days.

But get this: while we’ve now invoiced 5000 copies, Bookscan reports cumulative sales of this title of 1714 copies (as of 31 March). If Bookscan is right, we shouldn’t have reprinted at all; or if we felt we had to, we should have reprinted a much smaller quantity. If the bookshops knew what they were doing (and if we were right by responding to and anticipating their heightened demand), we’ve done the right thing by the book and its author.

Of course, Bookscan may turn out to be correct: all of the reprint and some of the initial print-run may end up being returned. But, intuitively, that doesn’t feel likely. Certainly, if it did happen, not only would I weep and moan, but it would highlight once again just how difficult it is in the book world to know when a sale is really a sale.

I’ve talked about this case with Bookscan, and they’re confident their figures are right. I suppose we’ll all know the answer in a few months’ time. But, in the meantime, there’s a new question: what do we do about another reprint?

And as for our bestsellers’ list, you can be confident that it’s right. Sort of.

Memo to Mr Howard: it's personal

2007-03-03T21:32:15Z

Disgusting, disgraceful, despicable — you pick the adjective you want to use about John Howard and his government. Personally, I’d use all three, and then some.

A few weeks ago, Mr Howard was reported as saying he didn’t detect a mood in the electorate to change the government. I’ve got news for him: whether that’s right or not, there’s a mood to get rid of him. Personally.

And for very good reason. This is the mild-mannered gentleman who’s made an artform of lying through his teeth throughout his political career. Look at just the highlights of his litany of deceit: core and ‘non-core’ promises (announced after he’d won an election); the children overboard’ who weren’t (and whose refugee parents have never been apologised to); the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that didn’t exist, and a war we signed up for that we should never have gone near; and the abandonment of David Hicks to the tender mercies of the US army, only to have the damp squib of a single, pathetic, retrospective charge being proffered against Hicks after he’s endured five years of hell [for my view on the Hicks’ case, see my previous blog].

There’s also the small matter of global warming that Howard never believed in, but is suddenly keen to be seen to be doing something about, now that everybody else is worried about it. Typically, his solution is the catastrophic one of nuclear energy — a nice political squeeze on the opposition, but a disaster for us all if we ever went down that path.

This is the politician and, latterly, the prime minister, who’s been wrong on every major problem he’s had to decide about. He was wrong on Vietnam (and still is); he was obdurately opposed to putting pressure on the apartheid policies of the South African government; he opposed Asian immigration to Australia; he refused to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol; and, infamously, he committed Australia to the war in Iraq for bogus reasons. Even his supposed support for the independence of East Timor was not what he intended at all.

This is the prime minister for whom no policy backflip is too strenuous if it serves his partisan political purposes. This is the prime minister who’s waged a relentless, Nixonian war on his perceived enemies and opponents in the media, the ABC, the universities, and community organisations. This is the prime minister who, for his own hidebound reasons and in his typical deceptive way, has made every working Australian anxious about their — and their children’s — wages and conditions, This is the prime minister who forgets no slight and tolerates no dissent within his own party.

How ironic that this quintessential social conservative should so betray classic conservative values. The party that once stood for the liberty of the individual, the rule of law, due process, federalism, and the importance of continuity has now been laid waste by Howard and his cronies. Howard now presides over a political fiefdom that rewards servility and punishes opposition. He and his News Limited cheer squad stigmatise and sneer at all those who disagree with him — no matter how principled they are — and no matter how much his stance trashes traditional Liberal values. No instance better exemplifies this hubris than his — and his ministers’ — appalling handling of the David Hicks case.

And lately there’s been the small matter of the Kevin Rudd problem. For the first time in his prime ministership, Howard faces a leader of the opposition who’s energetic, disciplined, calm, decent, and smarter than him. Rudd also happens to be conservative, Christian, and ambitious — which is a difficult trio of core attributes to smear.

The immediate result has been a significant lift in Labor’s poll results and prospects, and in Rudd’s personal standing. I think what this is telling us is that the electorate has been waiting for an ALP leader they can trust and believe in, so they can finally do what they’ve wanted to do for years — get rid of Howard. The odd thing about this politically is that it’s purely personal: a significant majority of the community can’t stand Howard. I suspect they would support a Liberal Party with a more centrist, honest leader.

Howard’s response to this serious threat has been classic: he’s been rattled by the competition, and then had to resort to focus-group polling to aver that Rudd is ‘a bit full of himself’. Then, when news broke of Rudd’s meetings with the disgraced ex-con and former premier of Western Australia, Brian Burke, he set loose his bovver-boy and heir-apparent, Peter Costello. The treasurer, who loves a stoush, has gone in boots-and-all. ‘Anyone who deals with Mr Brian Burke is morally and politically compromised’, Costello thundered in parliament on Thursday. Two days later, Costello’s over-the-top vaudeville act had caused collateral damage to his own side: the erstwhile human services minister, Ian Campbell, had to resign after admitting that he’d met Burke in his (Campbell’s) office.

Rudd, in the meantime, has admitted an error of judgment, has been straightforward about it, and has stayed calm. This latter quality is like pure gold, and I sense that it is this feature above others that gives electors the confidence to feel that they can trust him to act reasonably on their behalf.

As for Mr Howard, he has besmirched his office, reduced his party to a shell of its former self, and made ordinary Australians feel bad about their own country. To put it mildly, he has overstayed his welcome.

As Oliver Cromwell said to the rump parliament in April 1653, ‘You have been sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of god, go!’

Henry Rosenbloom

My Australian of the Year: David Hicks

2007-01-27T17:20:58Z

Tim Flannery has just been named Australian of the Year by the official body established to perform this task — and an excellent choice it was. Dr Flannery has done an invaluable job in alerting people around the world to the threat of global warming; and his book on the subject, The Weather Makers, has been a deservedly huge success for Michael Heyward at Text and the publishers around the world to whom he sold the rights.

But, for my money, David Hicks is our alternative Australian of the Year. Hicks has put up with five years of torture and persecution at Guantanamo Bay, courtesy of his own government’s indifference and its craven subservience to its US master. Imprisoned for years without a charge, oppressed without a qualm, he has been a living symbol of post-9/11 realpolitik. With almost no help from outside, and against the massive power of the US state, he has endured. So far.

It originally took two-and-a-half years for Hicks to be charged, after he’d been caught in Afghanistan in December 2001. His alleged crimes: conspiracy, attempted murder, and aiding the enemy. The US claimed that he’d trained in al-Qaeda camps, guarded a Taliban tank at Kandahar airport, and travelled to Konduz in northern Afghanistan to join Taliban forces engaged in combat against US-led forces. They said he intended to kill coalition combatants in Afghanistan between September and December 2001, and that he aided al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the context of an armed conflict with the United States. Other reports have indicated that Hicks is anti-Semitic — which, to me, as the son of Holocaust survivors, is particularly offensive.

But if Hicks did indeed think or do any or all of these things, I’d say he was a dickhead or a ratbag at best, and a vicious little bastard at worst. But what are we really talking about? Anybody who signed up to support the Taliban is a lunatic, but so what? There’s a lot of nasty intent asserted here, but no violent action. And it should be noted that none of this alleged behaviour was illegal in Australia at the time. Yet even these relatively modest charges (for someone who was deemed to be amongst ‘the worst of the worst’ held at Guantanamo) had, of course, to be abandoned under the since-discredited military commission process. And any replacement charges that Hicks faces will still rely on evidence that was gathered under torture, and will be laid under a modified process that has few of the safeguards that Australians associate with ‘a fair go’. And then the new process will presumably be subject to constitutional challenge as well.

And so it has gone on, year after year. Throughout his living hell — the solitary confinement, the interrogations, the long imprisonment, the denial of hope and contact with the outside world — Hicks’ own government has behaved with unspeakable indecency. For most of the time, they’ve ignored him. Some of the time, they’ve defamed him. And lately, as a public campaign to have him either treated decently or repatriated has got under way, the government has tried to act as though it cares.

The prime minister, John Howard, has pretended that he’s given the Americans a deadline to charge Hicks (without explaining what the ‘or else’ implied in his ‘threat’ might be, and only after the Yanks told him they’d beat the date). Alexander Downer, the most undeservedly self-satisfied foreign minister in Australia’s history, recently went out of his way to claim that Hicks’ mental state was fine (and then had the gall to be irritated because people were appalled to hear that his unacknowledged source was a US consular official who’d spent a few minutes in Hicks’ company without talking to him).

The fact is that Hicks’ treatment is unconscionable by any standards — whether you’re a conservative who believes in due process and the rule of law, or a liberal who believes that torture is unacceptable in any situation. Hicks may have been mad, bad, and dangerous to know, but nothing that he is alleged to have done or thought or said could justify what has been done to him.

Enough is enough. The long delays, the psychological and physical torture, and the tainted process have all added up to an intolerable situation that can only be remedied by Hicks being sent home.

Ironically, Hicks looks better as the Australian government’s treatment of him looks worse; that’s what happens when you abandon principle and decency for a higher political cause. The result is that powerless, voiceless David Hicks has proven he is a genuine little Aussie battler (and not the ersatz kind that the Australian government pretends to represent). If Howard wants a martyr to a lost US–Australia cause, he’s going about it the right way. In the meantime, we should all drink to the alternative Australian of the Year.

Henry Rosenbloom

Bah, humbug

2006-12-13T14:19:19Z

I hate Christmas. Let me rephrase that: I love Christmas.

The whole book trade lives and dies by the results of the three months-or-so before Christmas. If publishers and booksellers don’t make money in this period, they don’t make it for the whole year. Whatever doesn’t sell then, never does; and even what apparently sells comes back in returns from booksellers over the next several months.

Just to add to everybody’s anxiety levels over the stakes involved, Christmas as a retail activity seems to be happening later each year. This can make the suspense, difficult to deal with at the best of times, hard to bear. That so much should hang on so little, over such a short period of time, is awful; that such crass concerns should be held hostage to what should be a celebration of family values, human decency, and religious beliefs is absurd.

Nevertheless, publishers’ lists reflect this reality. All large publishers hold back their best titles for the pre-Christmas period — a time when weekly turnover in bookshops far exceeds their sales in any given week of the first six months of the year. This is even after allowing for mini-seasonal peaks such as Mother’s Day, Anzac Day, and Father’s Day.

Bookshops sometimes complain about this behaviour by publishers (arguing that more and better books should be published earlier in the year), but the truth is that it’s rational behaviour by them. Any large publisher who puts out too many big books between January and June is at grave risk of doing both her authors and her publishing company a significant disservice.

Conversely, any publisher who releases a serious book between November and December is likely to regret the decision. The seasonal avalanche of celebrity bios, blockbusters, brand-name authors, summer reads, and sports books crushes everything in its path.

That’s why I feel deeply conflicted about Christmas (it’s not just because I’m a deracinated Jewish atheist, in case you wondered). The way that Christmas forces us to skew our publishing programme always makes me fret. We’re obliged to publish many of our good books at a time when bookshop activity is relatively light, and then we’re forced to subtly change the nature of our list and to get out of the way of the gorillas when activity surges.

Because of this, our sales figures tend to be more evenly distributed than those of our larger peers. We have fewer bestsellers, but a relatively more reliable spread of sales over the year. We published our biggest-selling new title of the year in May — The Longest Decade, by George Megalogenis. Among other notable titles (in terms of awards and/or sales) that we released in the first half of the calendar year have been Asbestos House, by Gideon Haigh (February); Good Health in the 21st Century, by Dr Carole Hungerford (April); and Fear and Politics, by Carmen Lawrence (June).

Our version of a commercial Christmas book is almost laughable by comparison with the big boys’ output: to take this year as an example, we’ve produced a couple of cartoon books: Best Australian Political Cartoons 2006, edited by Russ Radcliffe, and Make Cakes Not War, by Judy Horacek; the paperback edition of Julian Burnside’s Wordwatching, and The Science of Happiness, by Stefan Klein. (I’m happy to add that all four titles are selling well.)

Just to test conventional understanding, we also published Inside the Global Jihad, by Omar Nasiri, in late November — apparently successfully.

The point (or the trouble, depending on your point of view) is that we can’t bring ourselves to trash our own brand. We’ve learned from bitter experience that we’re incapable of publishing books cynically and well, and that if we have to meet the market we must do it on our terms.

So we’re going to keep publishing good books over the whole year — and, if I say so myself, 2007 is looking like the best publishing list we’ve ever had — and we’re going to keep assuming that intelligent readers don’t disappear in November and December.

Astute readers will notice that this stance is a combination of principle and pragmatism. What can I say? It’s the Christmas season, after all.

Henry Rosenbloom

Buckley’s Hope 25th-plus anniversary celebrated

2006-11-20T17:42:28Z

A very unusual publishing-related event took place recently in Melbourne.

To explain its significance, a little history is needed. In 1980, Scribe published three books: Buckley’s Hope, by Craig Robertson (a fictional recreation of an epic encounter between white and black, before and then during the European foundation of Victoria; Come Spring, by Maria Lewitt (the first piece of Holocaust literature to be published in Australia, written as what we dubbed an ‘autobiographical novel’; and The Murders at Hanging Rock by Yvonne Rousseau (a series of individually plausible but mutually contradictory hypotheses about what might have happened within the fictional world of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock).

The first two titles are still in print (which is almost miraculous in publishing terms), and on Sunday, 12 November 2006 the author of the first book finally realised his long-held desire to organise an anniversary celebration of the publication of his book. In truth, it was originally meant to have been a 25th anniversary celebration last year, in December 2005, but it had been slightly delayed.

About sixty people turned up to what turned out to be a significant event, held at the Trades Hall bar in Carlton. The author, Craig Roberston, spoke about the background to the book (see his speech, below); I spoke about my sense of the book’s importance; Barry Hill also spoke about the Buckley story, and read three poems from his work Ghosting William Buckley; Jan Wosititzky performed an extract from his current show, The Go-Between: William Murrangurk Buckley; and Gregory and Julitha, a duo from Victoria’s surf coast, sang their own songs about Buckley, and finished with Jan’s ‘Barraworn’ song from his show.

There was a special feeling in the room, because everyone knew that they were celebrating something intrinsically important. It wasn’t just the William Buckley story, but the undeniable fact that, by writing Buckley’s Hope, Craig single-handedly had rescued Buckley from obscurity.

Indeed, the anniversary afternoon was a snapshot of the way in which his book has stimulated an outpouring of artistic responses in forms as various as poetry, painting, writing, and drama. But the Buckley tale has never ‘taken’ in the wider culture the way it should have, probably because it’s an account of a white man who went native for 32 years. A film option has been taken out, so maybe there’s still hope.

The William Buckley story should be taught to every school child. In the meantime, I have vowed that, at least while I'm running the company, it will never go out of print.

Henry Rosenbloom

Author Craig Robertson celebrates the anniversary of Buckley’s Hope with Henry and Margot Rosenbloom.

Download Craig Robertson's speech as a pdf: Download

Frankfurt with the Lot

2006-10-11T08:09:09Z

For me, this year's Frankfurt Book Fair started and ended with Cate Kennedy.

Before that, however, I misplaced my voice somewhere between the airport and my hotel, and was never to find it again for the duration. By day one, I sounded like Donald Duck, had a full-blown cold, and had over 60 appointments to deal with. Somehow, it was all right on the night. At one stage I found myself apologising for the thin timbre of my speech, only to hear an equally surreal rasping noise reassure me that my interlocutor had the same problem. The Frankfurt Flu, as it's often known, tends to afflict about a third of participants by fair's end each year. It seems to be due to a combination of long-haul air travel and breathing in each other's air in vast caverns at the fair.

For those who've never been to Frankfurt, it is an enormous set of halls housing publishers and agents from around the world who get together to try to buy and sell rights to their books. There are also publishing suppliers touting their services. Agents and publishers get together at a succession of half-hour meetings that can last from nine in the morning to six o'clock at night. And there's drinks at various bars, dinners and drinks, and drinks and drinks later at night for those who have the stamina and networking skills.

I had interesting talks (believe it or not) with a few old friends and new ones, incuding a fascinating perambulation with my fellow blogger, Richard Charkin, the head of Macmillan UK. Richard is extremely gloomy about the state and fate of the UK book trade, and is particularly doleful about the prospects of large publishers like his. Later on, though, my old friend Andrew Franklin, the brilliant owner of the UK's Profile Books (and small publisher of the year for the third time), was positively bubbling with enthusiasm, and claimed that publishers always complain, that the UK economy was doing well, and that the UK book trade was quite OK. (Andrew had just received an order from Tesco for 20,000 copies of one his titles, which may have affected his mood somewhat.) It struck me, once again, that success makes an agile independent trade-publisher feel more satisfaction with the state of publishing than heavyweights often do.

Which brings me to Cate Kennedy. On the eve of the fair, we sold North American rights in a two-book deal (her short-story collection, Dark Roots, and a novel that Cate has just started working on) to Elisabeth Schmitz at Grove/Atlantic. Elisabeth is highly regarded within the world of fiction publishing, and her judgement and enthusiasm carries great weight.

Then, on the first day of the fair, I sold UK & Commonwealth rights to Toby Mundy at Atlantic Books in London. And, suddenly, everyone I met seemed to be talking about or wanting to know about 'the wonderful Australian writer, Cate Kennedy'. I gave copies to several European publishers, was asked to send copies by several others, and kept being congratulated on publishing Cate. I know that Elisabeth and Grove's owner, Morgan Entrekin, was spreading the word around the fair - even though they derived no financial benefit by doing so. In fact, when I met Morgan at the very end of the fair, he was sitting and talking to an excellent Danish publisher, praising Cate's work. As it happened, I'd just met with our Scandinavian agents, so I was able to tell him where to get a reading copy.

The generosity of spirit of Elisabeth and Morgan, and other publishers I met, kept me going when my voice and energy levels were hard to discern. In fact, I was struck by how much fellow-feeling there is amongst quality independent publishers around the world. They know each other, trust each other's judgements, and are unstinting in their enthusiasm for each other's work. It's been a wonderful experience to be accepted in this fellowship, and I think it will be a great help to our authors as time goes by.

And, of course, one good turn deserves another. This year, like last year, I couldn't resist buying a book from one of US publishing's great men - Peter Mayer. Peter, who used to run US Penguin, is the owner of The Overlook Press in the States and Duckworth in the UK. In fact, I bought more than one book from him: Christopher's Ghosts, the next novel by Charles McCarry, the US's great spy-thriller writer (along with some of his best backlist titles), and an amazing spoof/hoax title called The Art of Funerary Violin - a kind of Molvania of violin history that was front-page news at the fair, and was reported on in The Guardian and The New York Times.

For the next few weeks, proposals, manuscripts, and finished books will be pouring into our office for possible acquistion by us. And we'll be sending the same kinds of materials to agents and publishers interested in our authors' works. That's Frankfurt. A little bit of selling, and a little bit of buying. And a few frankfurts. And a few drinks. Frenzy, friendships, and flu. If I can just find my voice, I'll do it all again next year.

Henry Rosenbloom

How Equinox was brought from London to Melbourne

2006-09-25T05:39:36Z

If visitors to this website care to click on the title page for Equinox they’ll get an audio-visual introduction to a book that has a fascinating pre-publication history. The bottom line, as it were, is that rights to this book were sold to around 25 territories prior to publication, often for record sums, by the author’s UK agency, Blake Friedmann.

I first heard about Equinox at the 2005 Frankfurt Book Fair in quite strange circumstances. I had turned up for a meeting with the author’s agent, at which I was promptly offered a glass of champagne. This was a very unusual start to business-as-usual, and I didn’t think it was just because they were thrilled to see me; so, being mildly inquisitive, I asked what the celebration was about. I was told that they were selling a book for record sums at the fair to European publishers, with auctions for even more territories also under way. I asked about the book, and they told me it was a thriller. Being a competitive animal (and obviously knowing nothing about the book), I immediately asked whether they’d consider splitting ANZ rights. They seemed surprised by this suggestion, but the agent I was talking to said it was possible, and then dug about in her folders and dragged out what I think was their last A5 reading copy for me to take away with me. This copy contained the first half or so of the manuscript (the balance was meant to be finished by the following January).

I then went on with my meeting, and for the time being thought nothing more of Equinox. I think I assumed that, if it was sold to an Australian publisher, it would go to a multinational.

After Frankfurt, I had a break in Italy for a week or so, and chanced upon a copy of Dan Brown’s Angels And Demons in the hotel we were staying at. I had never intended to read any Dan Brown, ever, but I felt drawn to doing so this time. To my astonishment, I thought the book was well written, intelligent, and well done. Then I thought I’d better read the Equinox manuscript. I did so, and felt the same things I’d felt upon reading the Dan Brown: it was not even vaguely the kind of book I would normally read, but it was very hard to put down (in both senses). Strangely enough, that was what I’d felt in 1999 when I read the first sample chapter of the manuscript that became Shantaram.

When I got back to Australia I had a lot of post-Frankfurt things to do, and some time passed before I thought seriously about Equinox again. I assumed that the ANZ rights must have already been sold, so I asked the agent tentatively what the story was. When I was told that rights were still available, I was astonished. I quickly made an offer, and then found myself in an auction. I won the auction with a bid of $40,000, against — I later learned — HarperCollins. This was either a very good or a very bad thing, depending on your point of view.

There was yet a further twist to the story. When I was first given the reading copy in Frankfurt, the author’s name was pseudonymous, and there was no mention of an Australian connection. It was only later, back in Australia when I enquired about the availability of rights, that Michael White’s name and identity were revealed to me — and the fact that he was now an Australian resident (and citizen). This concentrated my attention considerably: all of a sudden, we had the prospect of publishing a well-known author, living in Australia, who we’d be able to tour and promote. Without knowing of these prospective benefits I may not have bid at all — and I certainly wouldn’t have bid as much.

Later, we brought Michael over to the Pan Macmillan winter sales conference, I started talking to selected media about him months in advance of publication, and we produced over 10,000 chapter samplers for the trade. None of this would have happened if he’d been a foreign, first-time author.

I expect Equinox to do very well — so well that our initial print-run is 12,000 copies. It’s our lead title for the year, and we’re throwing the kitchen sink at it. I suspect that it will appeal to readers of thrillers in general, and Dan Brown fans in particular — especially given my own experience. And I’ve since learned that Michael is a friend of Dan’s. So the auguries are good.

One last thing: I’ve been amazed by the number of people who’ve been excited to hear that Michael used to be a member of a UK band called the Thompson Twins. I’d never heard of them. In fact, the only thing I can remember about pop music in the 1980s is that most of it was crap. Go figure.

Henry Rosenbloom

The Farce of the Final Eight

2006-09-19T02:11:53Z

If you’re reading this from outside Australia, I apologise from the start for being parochial and incomprehensible. If you’re reading this from within Australia, I apologise for my completely un-Australian thoughts.

The AFL semi-finals took place last weekend, and the big news seemed to be that that they resulted in the two remaining Victorian teams being eliminated. This led to dark mutterings about the need to restore the natural order, opposed by enlightened rejoinders — some from within the elevated ranks of those who have engineered this development — that all we are seeing is the national competition working, and that we should all get used to it. I happen to think this is self-serving bullshit, but it’s not my biggest concern.

What most commentators seem to have missed is that the semi-finals merely re-affirmed the fact that the top four sides after 22 home-and-away games were indeed the top four sides in the competition. They’re now allowed to play each other for the premiership, while the bottom four in the ‘final eight’, as they’re called, are no longer required to report for duty. I don’t know how many times this has happened in the last ten years or so, but it feels like it happens most of the time.

What nobody seems to want to talk about is that this result makes it obvious, again, that the ‘final eight’ is a farce. There are sixteen teams in the AFL, and every year half of them get to play in the finals. This means that aspirants only have to win 12 games — they only have to win one more game than they lose throughout the season — to make the finals. Is there any elite sporting competition in the world which basks in such mediocrity?

Many years ago, there was a ‘final four’ in a 12-club competition. That made sense logistically, and felt about right. But it didn’t last long once commercial interests took hold. Once the four started being stretched to five and then six, the game was up.

Of course, you won’t get any discussion about this in the media (especially in the TV networks that cover the sport). You won’t hear or read of footy fans complaining about it. None of the clubs are against it. And the AFL commission – they just love it.

It’s a virtuous circle: everybody’s happy. Just think about the benefits: the fans get to daydream about their side making the finals well into each season; the networks get to attract advertising for games that would be dead rubbers; the sponsors get extra mileage; the radio stations and the press get to talk and speculate endlessly about the importance of each game every round; the ground managers get to fill their stadiums; the clubs get to sell more membership tickets during the year and to offer hope every new season; and the AFL gets a fortune for broadcasting rights.

There’s also the small matter of extra finals, each with large-to-massive attendances, having to be played each year. And several of them get played in the late afternoon or evening, when the dew makes the ground slippery and conditions are often tough for the players, but there’s a prime-time TV audience watching all around the country. (And there’s continuous pressure from TV for the grand final to be played at night — what a lip-smacking advertising bonanza that would be.)

This is win-win-win, a beautiful, triple bottom-line.

The only trouble is, it’s a carefully confected bit of fairy floss. What’s worse, it feels like the worst parts of the Australian character coming together: a ruthless pursuit of material gain; a dumbing down of values and principles; a worship of ordinariness; and a triumph for patronising managerialism.

It’s emblematic of a culture that is self-satisfied and loves equalising downwards; in sport, it loves talking itself up as world-class, but won’t do anything hard that promotes excellence. Think what a revolutionary symbol it would be if the AFL made the finals a contest reserved for the best of the best — and not the best of the rest. It ain’t gonna happen.

The ‘final eight’ is a perfect, victimless crime. And no one cares about it, except for cranky individuals like me.

The same factors are at work behind the scenes of the national competition. The biggest motivation behind this concoction is the pursuit of national markets for the code and for its partners in crime. As part of this, the AFL rigs the rules so that no side can stay at the top (or will languish at the bottom) for very long. This reinforces all the commercial advantages of having a ‘final eight’. Again, no one complains, because they all benefit from it. Even the clubs — the most likely ‘stakeholders’ to complain — are bought off with financial bailouts and generous distributions of advertising funds.

The AFL has constructed a remarkable hybrid: a socialist, heavily regulated competition delivered to an arch-capitalist marketplace. Strangely enough, this has been modelled on the US’s National Football League. Funny how ‘free trade’ goes out the window when there are higher matters at stake.

Which brings us back to the lagging Victorian sides. This is not an accident of history; it is the direct result of the structure of the competition. With Melbourne’s grounds having been rationalised to the MCG and the atrociously surfaced Telstra Dome, each interstate side now has a substantial home-ground advantage: it gets to play at home for half its games, and its Victorian visitors suffer the known disadvantages of interstate travel. (The interstate teams have to travel as well, of course, but their away record is much better — maybe practice makes perfect.) Meantime, back in Victoria, the only ground that confers a home-ground advantage is Geelong’s, and they’re often not good enough to get the benefit of it.

As well, there’s now a paradoxical reversion to tribalism — the basis of the original VFL — which also favours the interstate sides. They recruit a higher proportion of their players locally than do the Victorian sides, and their fans relate emotionally to those sides, just like the non-national good-old-days of the suburban VFL. With only one side in Brisbane and Sydney, and two each in Adelaide and Perth, this is completely understandable — and unbeatable. In the meantime, the Victorian teams are becoming more like brands.

I don’t expect any of this to change in the foreseeable future. In fact, when the AFL adds a couple more interstate sides over the next several years, I’m sure there’ll be pressure for a ‘final ten’. After that, I reckon, there’ll be a really revolutionary idea: a finals series in which everybody gets another chance. They’ll probably call it the AFL Cup.

Henry Rosenbloom

You got an issue? I got a problem with that.

2006-08-15T06:18:15Z

I blame Bill Gates. Some time in the 1980s, Microsoft got sick of all its software problems being called ‘bugs’, and decided that they were really ‘issues’. This was like moving from the active voice to the passive: nobody was responsible, and there was nothing specific you could focus on. It was a spectacularly successful imposition of corporate doublethink, and it worked a treat. From then on, the word ‘issues’ spread like a virus around the world.

This suited the times. Nobody had problems any more. I even remember, a day or two before the company went broke, a spokesperson describing Ansett as having ‘liquidity issues’. Now you can’t move for issues: they’re like house flies in spring.

Sick people have ‘health issues’. Celebrity cokeheads have ‘dependency issues’. Corporate crooks have ‘regulatory issues’. Even wayward Aussie Rules full-forwards have ‘kicking issues’. Everybody with a problem has got ‘issues they’ve got to work through’.

Isn’t it interesting that, at a time when the planet’s situation is more dire than ever, and American hubris is fomenting more and more rabid Islamic terrorism, no one can cope with a spade being called a shovel?

It feels like the worse things get, the less we can cope with facing them.

This dovetails neatly with the corporate softening of language in general. I’m not talking about the problem of euphemisms (such as ‘letting go’ instead of ‘firing’), which have been around forever. It has more to do with the agendas of the real Big Brother: finding a way to make covert political tactics and ambitions sound acceptable. ‘Climate change’ is a serious issue, for instance, but is not as much of an alarming problem as ‘global warming’.

What does this have to do with book publishing, you ask? Not a lot, directly. But I can’t help thinking about it most days, as we look at piles of unsolicited submissions and manuscripts, most of them struggling to breathe life into a common language that has been systematically denuded of colour and movement.

The problem for serious book-publishers isn’t just the increasing incidence of time-poor readers, or competition from other media, or the attractions of other leisure activities. It’s also the fact that we’re dependant on a staple product – the English language – that’s being robbed of vitality by a Western culture that’s had enough of reality. Except, of course, on television.

Henry Rosenbloom