Hagar Cohen: Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, I'm Hagar Cohen.
It's Monday night, and there's an air of excitement at this up-market Sydney restaurant. The event is a book launch, and at $200 a head, it sold out in a matter of days.
Vox pop: We move very quickly. When the alert came through we booked and paid and made sure we got our spot.
Hagar Cohen: This event is to promote the latest book from celebrity chef and author Rick Stein. Called From Venice to Istanbul, the book is based on his TV show and overseas travels.
Rick Stein: Generally how I work is that I make a TV series and write the book at the same time, and they sort of intertwine. So sometimes the TV drives the stories…
Hagar Cohen: At the launch this evening there's champagne on tap, and people are queuing to get their own copy of the book.
Vox pop: I've got all the books, I've been cooking from all the books for a very long time. They're great. I've loved Rick Stein for a very long time.
Hagar Cohen: This book is only one of 7,000 new titles released into the Australian market every month.
Sophie Higgins: There are an incredible amount of new titles every single month. It really is mind-boggling how many books there are in print every year.
Hagar Cohen: Sophie Higgins is the buying manager for Dymocks bookstores.
Sophie Higgins: We have an extraordinary period of growth at the moment. Physical books and physical stores are having a big resurgence at the moment. So it's a good news story for physical books.
Hagar Cohen: The good news is mostly reserved for established authors like Rick Stein. For the growing number of unknown authors, publishing can be a confronting experience.
Margaret Spivey has written her first book, a memoir about her abuse as a child in a state orphanage. She's deeply attached to it.
Margaret Spivey: That manuscript to me, it was like my baby. It was everything to me. It was the most precious thing, and it just held so much that was so much a part of myself. I truly believed that I had an important story to tell.
Hagar Cohen: There are businesses geared up for people like Margaret who are so desperately keen to publish. They're called vanity presses. They charge authors for publishing, and in return often make big promises about how much money the authors could earn.
Margaret Spivey says her publisher convinced her to sign a contract by flattering her.
Margaret Spivey: That we are privileged to have such a wonderful book to publish, that you have written this marvellous masterpiece.
Hagar Cohen: She paid $12,000 to publish her book five years ago. Since then she hasn't received any money in royalties or any information at all about how sales were going.
Margaret Spivey: I haven't received one cent. I don't how many copies were sold, I don't know anything. And I could not get any information.
Hagar Cohen: Margaret Spivey is one of the growing number of authors who feel they've been scammed by their publisher.
Angelo Loukakis: Every week we would hear from somebody at least once or possibly twice or three times in a week.
Hagar Cohen: So the scams in the vanity press sector seem to me quite widespread.
Angelo Loukakis: Oh yes, and worldwide.
Hagar Cohen: Angelo Loukakis is the executive director of the Australian Society of Authors.
Angelo Loukakis: Certainly we have a list of people whose agreements and whose activities, once we get to review them, are suspicious or actually corrupt.
Hagar Cohen: These agreements are scams. Well, sort of.
Steven Lewis: I am reluctant to use the word 'scam' because you are getting what you paid for. To give you a really good example, I read a book from…it's about 100 years old, I was skimming through it the other day, and it was talking about scams basically that appeared in newspaper advertisements, like double your money, and you would send off your dime to get back this thing on how you double your money, and basically you would get a tip in an envelope that says 'fold your money in half, and then it's doubled', ha ha. You got what you paid for, but it's not what you thought you were getting.
Hagar Cohen: Steven Lewis runs workshops on how to publish for first-time authors. He warns them about the tactics of vanity presses.
Steven Lewis: When they promise you that your book will be available in 10,000 bookshops, when they promise you that they will do marketing and press for your book, that's all feeding in to the emotional need of the author to have that book read. I have yet to see any of the vanity presses that I've looked at have a caveat on their website that says 'you've got a one in a million shot of getting covered in traditional media, you have a one in a million shot that this marketing is going to turn your book into a bestseller'.
Hagar Cohen: So that's the truth, so you've got a one in a million chance of getting reviewed in the mainstream media?
Steven Lewis: One in a million might be generous. The fact that you have written a book, and it is now in an actual physical book form, is huge news in your house. It's not news once you get to the end of your front garden. Nobody cares.
Hagar Cohen: Every year, hundreds of thousands of books meet an undignified end as pulp.
Dennis Jones: So what you're seeing here is probably about eight or 10 or 12 pallets that are in fact going to the pulp machine. One of my friendly publishers said to me this week, 'Dennis, you know, you're the book murderer!'
Hagar Cohen: Publishing is tougher than it's ever been. The odds are stacked against first-time authors.
Louise Adler: Very difficult to get through all the barriers. There are a succession of gates and hoops and obstacles.
Hagar Cohen: As the CEO of Melbourne University Publishing, Louise Adler receives lots of unsolicited manuscripts.
Louise Adler: Most of us get anywhere between five and 50 manuscripts a week that are unsolicited. In the past we used to call the unsolicited manuscripts the slush pile, everybody has got a different name for them, and the person who reviewed the slush pile was called the 'poison taster' because it was very difficult. I myself have not found much in the slush pile.
Hagar Cohen: She agrees to assess Margaret Spivey's memoir about her childhood abuse, titled Defying the Gatekeeper. Louise Adler says it looks like a gut-wrenching read, but it's the kind of book that's very hard to sell.
Louise Adler: It's commercially challenging to publish this kind of material, that's the problem, is it's really hard to do it.
Hagar Cohen: This one is commercially challenging, you're saying? Why is that?
Louise Adler: They're very hard, the personal story of despair and triumph over hardship and suffering.
Hagar Cohen: Is that because there are so many of them?
Louise Adler: There are so many of them, often disparagingly called the misery memoir. And you feel for them. I often, because of my own background, get people who have written personal stories about their experience during the Holocaust and I think each and every one of them is worthy, but the audience for them is limited, and that's very hard because you think each of these stories is important and worthy, but our job is to find an audience and a readership, and that's a different question altogether than the worthiness and the importance of the individual narrative.
Hagar Cohen: So this one is probably a no for you?
Louise Adler: Yes, I would find that very difficult to do. Tragic as it is.
Hagar Cohen: This assessment would surprise to Margaret Spivey. Her manuscript had previously been rejected by 50 other publishers.
Margaret Spivey: You often hear authors talk about pasting their walls with the letters of rejection. So I'd get the letter of rejection, I'd put that aside and then I'd send it off to another one and to another one and to another one. But I believed so strongly in my story.
Hagar Cohen: So you were very driven to get that published, no matter what.
Margaret Spivey: Absolutely, my passion and my drive and my belief in that story was absolutely everything and I was determined it was going to be published.
Hagar Cohen: Then one day, Barry Dorr from Jojo Publishing rang Margaret. She says she remembers how on the phone he told her she's created a masterpiece.
Margaret Spivey: And we've no doubt at all that it will be a number one bestseller and it's really going to do well out in the marketplace.
Hagar Cohen: You were told that on that conversation?
Margaret Spivey: Yes, that was part of the conversation that we had.
Hagar Cohen: Later, the conversation turned to business: Margaret would get a book deal if she agreed to share the cost of publishing, to the tune of $12,000.
Margaret Spivey: There was an urgency in his voice that wasn't there previously. Along with that urgency was: well, we can't really afford to pay for all of it at the moment. If we publish it now, we can't afford to pay for it all, but if you're prepared to contribute half the cost, which was $12,000, then we could go ahead and get it published now and get it out in the marketplace, and by contributing half the costs, then of course you get equal share in all the profits and all the earnings from the sales of the book.
Hagar Cohen: Okay, so that proposal was put forward to you. What did you think?
Margaret Spivey: Initially I was a bit, wait a minute, where did this come from? But then I was so desperate to be published, having been so rejected by so many publishing houses, and I really was just so desperate to get my book published.
Hagar Cohen: Margaret Spivey's partner Jenny Gill was nervous.
Jenny Gill: We didn't have $12,000. We had very, very low incomes, both of us. And the only way we could do that was to go and get a loan from the bank and increase that to our mortgage. That's what we had to do. I was nervous. It's a lot of money when you don't have very much. But you're just so excited that it's actually going to happen for her because I've been watching her write this thing for 20 years, and how much it meant, so I was just excited that at least it'll get published. It'll happen.
Hagar Cohen: A few months later, just before the book was released, Jenny and Margaret flew down to Melbourne where they met the publishers Jo Costello and Barry Dorr.
Margaret Spivey: When we went to Melbourne and we met with Barry and Jo, and I remember Jo, she got out of the car, and she said, 'I've just got to hug you. I have never read such a wonderful book. You're an extraordinary writer, such an amazing author, I feel so privileged to have met you.'
Hagar Cohen: Did she hug you?
Margaret Spivey: She did. She absolutely hugged me and praised me about my writing. It was all poured on. We went back to their unit and they showed us all these books that they had published, talked about some of the people they had published, including Pauline Hanson, and other names that they were pulling out.
Hagar Cohen: While in Melbourne, Margaret and Jenny were invited to a fancy restaurant to celebrate.
Margaret Spivey: We went to this really nice restaurant, and he was ordering the bottles of wine, having a nice meal, it was really poured on.
Jenny Gill: And I remember he just said, 'What would you like,' and we were ordering and then there was the alcohol, and then, 'Would you like desert?' And then we went back to their apartment and I was thinking this has to be okay, because they're doing really well, so they must be really reputable because they seem to be really financially really well off.
Hagar Cohen: Affectionately called the publisher's lunch, these kinds of meetings are common in the publishing world says the CEO of Melbourne University Publishing, Louise Adler.
Louise Adler: The publisher's lunch is a form of courtship. It's a very well-known part of the courtship process. Certainly in the UK and the US and in Australia, most publishers wine and dine their authors.
Hagar Cohen: It was two years after being wined and dined that Margaret and Jenny discovered they'd actually paid for that meal. It was written on a statement that arrived from Jojo in the mail.
Jenny Gill: I couldn't have imagined that this was going to be on the statement, that everything we did that night was going to come out of the money that we'd invested.
Hagar Cohen: That you actually paid for that meal?
Margaret Spivey: Yes. I realised then it's over. This is not going to work.
Hagar Cohen: I asked Louise Adler who picks up the meal tab when she takes authors to lunch.
Louise Adler: Well, the author's definitely not going to pick up the tab.
Hagar Cohen: When you pick up the tab, does that then go on to the account of the author?
Louise Adler: No. It's our cost, it's a cost of doing business. It's certainly doesn't get put on the author's...you know, 'here's an advance and unfortunately on your royalty statement there's also the last lunch I took you to two years ago'. It wouldn't happen.
Hagar Cohen: So what do you think about publishers who do do that?
Louise Adler: I've never heard of it.
Hagar Cohen: It's unheard of?
Louise Adler: I've never heard of it.
Hagar Cohen: Why does it sound so..?
Louise Adler: Off? It sounds very off to me!
Hagar Cohen: This is just one of Jojo Publishing's questionable business practices.
Background Briefing spoke to over 30 Jojo authors. Each invested somewhere between $9,000 and $35,000 of their own money, after being told their books would be popular and they would get a chunky 50% share of the profits.
Only two of those authors received any money in royalties, but that was after their lawyers threatened Jojo with legal action. One received $1,000, and another just $200. The rest, not one cent. And none of the authors received the detailed statements they were promised showing how their money has been invested. They don't even know how many of their books were printed, or if their books ever sold at bookshops or anywhere else. One author was surprised to find out that her book was listed as a bestseller on Amazon for three months in a row.
Jojo Publishing's Barry Dorr declined our request for an interview. In response to a series of question he wrote:
Reading: We have had over 250 authors without the 'disappointment and anger' you seem to think is occurring with a 'long line of authors'. Due to risk factors, not all authors can fit into the model of receiving an advance and royalties.
Hagar Cohen: By contrast, Melbourne University Publishing doesn't charge its authors to publish. Louise Adler says they usually receive an advance and 10% of their book sales in royalties. The amount authors make varies, but she says they always get paid.
Louise Adler: It would never happen that an author would get nothing.
Hagar Cohen: And how do your authors know that the 10% is 10%?
Louise Adler: How do they know? Well, you get sales figures. There's no hiding this, of course…
Hagar Cohen: You do. So you're accountable.
Louise Adler: We are completely accountable, absolutely transparent. You would have no credibility with your authors or within the industry if you weren't absolutely transparent. You have a contract, you have to honour your contract. It's a commercial contract that's entered into. The conventions are that you get a royalty statement every six months or every year and that will show you you've had X advance, your book sold Y copies, so your income this six months has been X. That's it, it's pretty straightforward.
Hagar Cohen: So it's open books, it's really important to show your authors exactly where the money has gone into.
Louise Adler: Correct. It's really a relationship and if the relationship falls apart, the book does not go well.
Hagar Cohen: Jojo is a small book publisher based in Melbourne, but their hundreds of authors are Australia-wide. It calls itself a traditional publisher and is a member of the Australian Publishers Association.
In an email, Jojo's Barry Dorr wrote:
Reading: We commenced JoJo Publishing because we saw a need for thousands of authors who could not find a publishing house and had to resort to self-publishing their dream. Our publishing venture has provided authors with the opportunity to have their books published, distributed and marketed in ways they would not have otherwise had.
Hagar Cohen: But Background Briefing has discovered a long trail of authors who now believe Jojo is running a scam.
A short time after Allan Robert's book was released, Jojo's director Barry Dorr stopped communicating with him.
Allan Roberts: G'day Barry, it's Allan Roberts, The Hard Way Home. I was just wondering if you could give us a buzz when you've got time, please? Yeah, just want to have a bit of a catch-up on…see where a few numbers are at with the book. All right, thank you. Bye.'
Hagar Cohen: Not answering?
Allan Roberts: No, straight to the message thing, it has been hard to get hold of him.
Hagar Cohen: Allan Roberts travelled the world on his motorbike, and wrote a book based on his diaries.
Allan Roberts: I rode it around the world. I did over 100,000 kilometres.
Hagar Cohen: In the book deal he signed, Jojo committed to giving him a statement every six months showing records of the books sales and expenses. It never happened.
Allan Roberts: So maybe at about the seventh or eighth month mark of my book being released, I dropped an email to JoJo, just a friendly one saying; 'just wondering if I could get an update on sales and how my book's going' and I got nothing back. Over the next five to six months, I think it was, I'd wait anything from four to six weeks and send the same email. Then I started adding in the email; 'just wondering how many books are sold and are there any royalties owed to me?'
Hagar Cohen: So all those emails that you sent every four to six weeks were completely ignored, you received no response to them?
Allan Roberts: Yeah, I got zero response. Every time I'd write it, using similar language and similar words, but after about the fourth time, I would forward old emails and say, 'please see below, sent to you on this date'.
[Audio: school bell]
Paul Greenway: Thank you! Right, can I have your attention please. I did mention this yesterday, I'm taking this lesson, and I'll explain what I'm doing.
Hagar Cohen: This high school relief teacher in Mannum, South Australia, is another of Jojo's authors. Paul Greenway is about to run a class on book publishing.
Paul Greenway: You two outside now.
Student: That wasn't me!
Paul Greenway: I don't care, out!
Hagar Cohen: Once the class settles, he talks to his students about his experience as an author.
Paul Greenway: I used to be a writer, and I've written some guidebooks, a company called Lonely Planet you might have heard of, they're still famous, not as famous as they used to be. But I was sent all around the world writing guidebooks, and that was a job for about 10 years. Then I came back, got too old to write for backpackers, and I wrote a book. It's not a job where you make a lot of money, although some people do make a lot of money. The option, and something I would suggest that if an idiot like me can do, you guys can do, is self-publish. Is there any question about publishing or writing? Who's got a question for me? Clare, you've got to have something...yes?
Clare: How long does it take you to write a book?
Paul Greenway: Good question. Two months to do the first draft. I did ten drafts. That's a long time because nobody pays you while you are doing that…
Hagar Cohen: Paul Greenway's book is called Bali & Oates. It's a satirical thriller about a terrorist plot to kill the Australian Prime Minister on a visit to Bali. Later at the local pub, he told me how the idea for his novel came about.
Paul Greenway: The idea for the book just came into my brain. I have these little people that live inside my brain sometimes. They just come, these weird and wonderful scripts and ideas and dialogues just come into my brain and I just thought, well, I've got to write this down, I've got to write a book.
Hagar Cohen: That sounds a bit crazy.
Paul Greenway: Yeah, there's a fine line between genius and eccentricity and stupidity and lunacy and all that sort of stuff.
Hagar Cohen: Paul Greenway tried his luck with 70 publishers. Five of them responded, only Jojo wanted to publish.
Paul Greenway: It could be the fact that it wasn't a very good book. I like it. It's a specialised taste, not everyone enjoyed it.
Hagar Cohen: He was very happy it would be published. He received a letter of offer, where Jojo undertook to release the book into shops through a network of national and international book distributors. Paul Greenway could barely hold back his excitement when he was told that his book had been released. He went to town expecting to find his book being sold next to popular new releases. To his amazement, he couldn't find his book anywhere.
Paul Greenway: As soon as the book was printed, I was prowling through the bookshops in Adelaide, expecting it to suddenly be on the New Releases shelves of Dymocks. It would be next to John Grisham in the Big W book shelves. But after a couple of months, I realised that it wasn't getting the distribution that I had hoped because it simply wasn't in the bookshops and people weren't able to buy it because it wasn't there.
Hagar Cohen: But did you expect it to be just in bookshops in Adelaide or...
Paul Greenway: No, national. I expected it to be in all the major bookshops all around the country. That's what national network of distributors means.
Paul Greenway: You assumed that your books will be available in all major bookstores around Australia.
Paul Greenway: Yeah, just like any major book, I mean I'm certainly not a major publisher and I'm not a major writer, but you go into a bookshop and you see New Releases and you expect maybe five to ten books to be there under New Releases on the bookshelves and available.
Steven Lewis: The promise that I've seen repeated is that your book will be available in X-thousand bookshops.
Hagar Cohen: Steven Lewis is a publishing and marketing consultant who runs workshops for first-time authors. He explains what a 'national and international book release' actually means.
Steven Lewis: When I teach authors in the courses I will show them these websites, and ask, 'What do you understand that to mean?' And invariably they will say, 'Well, I understand that to mean that if you go into Shakespeare's in Paris, my book will be on the shelf.' And I'll say, 'No, what it means is that your book will have an ISBN, it will be listed in a catalogue available to booksellers, and if somebody walks into Shakespeare's in Paris and says, 'I would like to read Steven Lewis's memoir of his time in Hong Kong,' they will look that up in the catalogue and say, 'Yes, that's available, I can have that for you in a week, and we'll get that delivered.' So to promise that your book is available in 10,000 bookshops around the world is like Amazon promising that your book is available in every household in the world because every household has internet access, and they could log on to Amazon, and they could buy your book. It's completely bogus.
Hagar Cohen: What in terms of national release…what does that mean?
Steven Lewis: It would mean exactly the same. There is no way that this is going to happen, the vanity publisher, that this is going to happen, that you are going to be able to walk into a bookshop in Australia and pick up a hard copy—a paperback or a hardcover—of your book on their shelves, it's not going to happen.
Hagar Cohen: Why not? What stops them from distributing all those books into bookstores in Australia?
Steven Lewis: Traditional publishers take a real punt on you, as an author. They have a massive infrastructure. For a vanity press to do the kind of work that would be necessary to actually get your book onto a bookshop, they would have to charge you more than would be economically viable to them.
Hagar Cohen: So it's possible that you're told that 'your book will be released nationally', and in fact there will not be one copy of your book in any bookstore around Australia?
Steven Lewis: Yes, that's absolutely right.
Hagar Cohen: Steven Lewis.
It's not only first-time authors who signed up with Jojo Publishing. As a high profile expert in child protection, Professor Freda Briggs published 20 books in her field.
So your wall is basically decorated with photos with politicians and awards and recognition.
Freda Briggs: Yes. I also got the Order of Australia.
Hagar Cohen: So there's a whole shelf here full of the books that you published. Not including that one on Nepal, I'm assuming?
Freda Briggs: No. They start there.
Hagar Cohen: Her last two books were published by Jojo. She paid $24,000 upfront.
Freda, you're an accomplished academic, accomplished child protection expert, accomplished author of 20 books. Why did you go with JoJo?
Freda Briggs: Because the company that I'd been involved with for 16 years, I think let me down. And so what do you do then? I was told by a doctor that JoJo accepted books on child protection because she'd had one published. I approached them and they said, 'Yes, let us have it.' And away we went.
Hagar Cohen: But why would someone of your reputation have to pay to publish?
Freda Briggs: Well, I'd never heard of this before but I discussed it actually with my financial advisors, but I didn't go to a lawyer. And they said, 'Well, it sounds a good deal.'
Hagar Cohen: But it wasn't.
One of her books, Smart Parenting, did attract a lot of media attention, but that was thanks to an independent PR agent who promoted the book for free.
Freda Briggs: She arranged 21 media interviews advertising that book. Not them.
Hagar Cohen: But the book at that time wasn't in bookstores because Jojo had just changed its distributor.
Freda Briggs: There wasn't a single book in the shops. I was angry. Because it's inexplicable and it just looked like a scam.
Hagar Cohen: Like others, Freda Briggs didn't receive statements or royalties, and Jojo kept ignoring her requests for information. So she hired a lawyer.
After legal threats, Jojo finally sent her some information. She was shocked to discover that she'd been charged over $7,000 dollars for marketing even though she had her own PR agent. More surprising was the $2,500 Jojo charged her for them to go to the Frankfurt book fair for two years in a row.
Freda Briggs recently got in touch with other Jojo authors and discovered that a number of them had also paid thousands of dollars for those same trips to Frankfurt.
Freda Briggs: We'd all been told that we'd contributed to them going to Frankfurt to the book fair. There's no evidence at all that they sold a single book, least of all a single book of mine, so that it began to look a bit suspicious. It gives you a lovely holiday, doesn't it? You can go to the south of France, or...
Hagar Cohen: In the statement actually it says that you've paid in part for their travel to Frankfurt, their accommodation, and other expenses.
Freda Briggs: Yes. And of course the contract seems to allow them to do this, because they put it down as legitimate expenses.
Hagar Cohen: But as an author do you expect to pay for these kinds of things?
Freda Briggs: Never has it happened before.
Hagar Cohen: In Sydney, author Wendy Bull also received statements from Jojo, but again, only after her solicitor threatened legal action. Like others, Wendy paid for the book fair in Frankfurt, Germany, and she was charged for things like printing, copying, emailing, taxis, and the list goes on.
Wendy Bull: The international book fairs in Germany, their phone calls, so I was charged for their phone bills, stationery. Goodness gracious, if I'd charged my clients for the stationery I think they would have laughed at me, but I was charged for so many ridiculous little items, and they weren't so small actually, but yes, I was absolutely disgusted.
Hagar Cohen: This isn't normal practice in the publishing industry says Louise Adler.
You probably go to the Frankfurt book fair, would you charge the author for that?
Louise Adler: Never! The trade fairs are opportunities for us to look at buying books from…international books for our local market, and attempting to sell our books internationally. So that's a cost to the business. That's our responsibility.
Hagar Cohen: Mobile phone calls, taxis?
Louise Adler: That's hilarious!
Hagar Cohen: Is that ridiculous?
Louise Adler: Totally ridiculous!
Hagar Cohen: Background Briefing asked Barry Dorr to justify the amount of money he charged authors so that Jojo could attend the Frankfurt book fair. He didn't reply.
The Australian Society of Authors sifts through complaints about vanity presses all the time. Angelo Loukakis is their executive director.
Angelo Loukakis: Yes, we do get complaints. They are regular. Every week we would hear from somebody, at least once or possibly twice or three times in a week.
Hagar Cohen: So the scams in the vanity press sector seem to me to be quite widespread.
Angelo Loukakis: Oh yes, and worldwide.
Hagar Cohen: So who are those publishers, vanity presses?
Angelo Loukakis: There are many of them, I can't name them but certainly we have a list of people whose agreements and whose activities, once we get to review them, are suspicious or actually corrupt. Many of them, the majority of them, most of them perhaps operate within the strictest terms of commercial activity. They are not necessarily criminals. They are offering services, they are putting an agreement in front of a customer or client, if you like. And when these things are tested elsewhere, by fair trading or consumer affairs bodies around the place, while they're unethical they aren't necessarily criminal.
Hagar Cohen: Angelo Loukakis would not comment about Jojo in particular. But the Society has received a number of complaints about the Melbourne publisher, and they are now considering their options.
Barry Dorr from Jojo Publishing told Background Briefing in an email that:
Reading: Our approach to publishing is fully transparent and discussed at length with new authors and it is well documented. We make sure authors know they can approach us at any time, with any problem. To suggest otherwise is simply not true. Sometimes, a book will not sell well, especially in today's books environment, through no fault of anyone. That is something no book publisher is immune to. If they have a business arrangement with us and make a loss, then we make a loss too. There is nothing hidden or opaque here.
Hagar Cohen: In another email to respected literary agent, Irina Dunn, Barry Dorr explained why her client, a Jojo author, had never received any statements. He wrote:
Reading: Owing to personal matters that transpired shortly after our last phone conversation we have virtually been incommunicado since then. We are now back on deck and endeavouring to clear the back-log.
Hagar Cohen: Irina Dunn wasn't impressed. She replied by email:
Reading: Although I hope JoJo is not in serious trouble, I wonder if the reason for your problem is in a failure of communication on many levels. Frankly, I am appalled at the way you have treated the author. I shall be advising people not to publish with JoJo in the future, and will not retract from this position until you fulfil your part of the contract.
Hagar Cohen: Irina Dunn's client never received the promised statement.
Author Wendy Bull would like to know whatever happened to her book The Big Day. It's about her career as a marriage celebrant, and it has funny stories about wedding ceremonies gone wrong.
She was promised 5,000 copies. But when she went looking for her books at the shops, she found just one.
Wendy Bull: I only ever found one in Dymocks in Chatswood and I didn't find any anywhere else. I went into QVB. I even wrote to QVB in Brisbane and asked them were they holding any of my books, and they said, 'No, not at this stage. They hadn't been approached.'
Hagar Cohen: So as far as you know there was only one copy of your book in a bookstore.
Wendy Bull: Actually they sent it back in the end because it hadn't been sold. I found it on a back bookshelf in the middle of…it wasn't even under the particular area that I would have actually put this type of book. It was not in the right place.
Hagar Cohen: So it was in the back shelves, there was one copy, and they ended up returning it to the warehouse.
Wendy Bull: That's what they told me. I thought they would have, perhaps, put them on the new release shelf where they put on the new releases. I checked every day but I never saw it there.
Hagar Cohen: I'm at the largest bookstore in Australia, Dymocks in the Sydney CBD.
Sophie Higgins: This is the fiction floor. You'll find there's are thousands of fiction titles here.
Hagar Cohen: Sophie Higgins' job is to select and buy all the fiction titles for Dymocks' stores nationally. She explains how they're presented.
Sophie Higgins: The ones that are face out…you'll see a lot of authors wonder how they get their books to be face out, and that's volume. You need at least eight copies in store to be able to have the copy face out. So if it's two or three, they'll be spine out.
Hagar Cohen: We're standing in front of the prominently displayed bestsellers
Sophie Higgins: So a good example of a book that's done sensationally well across the book industry from an Australian author is The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion. When it was first presented to us by Penguin we had never heard of Graeme Simsion. So on paper, you think, okay, I don't know this author. There's no real book I can compare it to. Quirky Australian romance? But then we met Graeme Simsion, the publisher had a cocktail party for him. So we probably bought about 1,000, which is a large amount for a debut author. We were that confident, and also because it came from a publisher like Penguin, who I think distributed it via Text, it meant you knew they were going to put everything behind it.
Hagar Cohen: Later in her office, Sophie Higgins explains she only buys 2% of the 7,000 new titles on offer each month. With so much to choose from, what makes a book stand out?
Sophie Higgins: To be honest, a lot of it has to do with trends. So say at the moment psychological suspense but in a kind of personal relationship thriller is really popular: think about Gone Girl, Before I Go to Sleep, Girl on the Train. So then if there are books that are similar to that…and publishers get on it quite quickly, those kind of trends. If there are books that are similar to that you'll probably take a quantity.
Hagar Cohen: And so it's about what's going to sell to you, that the number one criteria, isn't it?
Sophie Higgins: 100% absolutely, yes.
Hagar Cohen: She says authors with a track record of sales have the best chance of being stocked on the shelves.
Sophie Higgins: For those authors you check the sales of their previous book. You don't have to read the book, you just go and you check exactly what it sold in the previous title in 60 days and that's what you buy for the group. We find that if a book is going to work, generally it will do that within two months.
Hagar Cohen: And so what happens after those 60 days?
Sophie Higgins: Most books, if you look at the charts, will then get returned and never sell again unfortunately.
Hagar Cohen: So what happens to all those books that don't sell?
Based in Melbourne's outer suburbs, Dennis Jones is one of the main book distributors in Australia. His warehouses currently hold a whopping 800,000 books. Most will never make it to bookshops.
Dennis Jones: A lot of books don't make it to bookstores because the bookstores have got finite space. The booksellers, they are led by what is popular and what they have to be seen to be active with.
Hagar Cohen: What happens to all those thousands of books? They end up here in the warehouse?
Dennis Jones: We have a big warehouse with some books that just haven't measured up to the scrutiny of the market place, the scrutiny of the consumers.
Hagar Cohen: Shall we go to the warehouses?
Dennis Jones: Sure. We have two warehouses.
Hagar Cohen: And how many books do you have all up, do you know?
Dennis Jones: Vaguely about 800,000, of which we really only need maybe 600,000.
Hagar Cohen: The leftover 200,000 will never sell again. By January they'll all be gone.
Dennis Jones: Books are like…
Hagar Cohen: Oh, I see, that's a lot of boxes!
Dennis Jones: Yes, well, they're not durables. Books are a fashion item, if people don't like a particular book, you won't sell it. What happens with it? So we have a big legacy issue here of books where it's like cutting off your left arm, or the people or the publishers become bonded to the product. So what you're seeing here is probably eight or 10 or 12 pallets are in fact going to the pulp machine. One of my friendly publishers said to me this week, 'Dennis, you know, you're the book murderer!' Well, I'm not. Because we're feeding the books to pulp, so those books will be reinterpreted as…
Hagar Cohen: To more books that'll go to pulp again. I see the big sign 'Pulp'. So how many books are going to pulp now?
Dennis Jones: If it's 10 pallets it's typically 8,000 books.
Hagar Cohen: Once in how long?
Dennis Jones: Well, we try to do this as often as possible, we actually offer some people free pulp.
Hagar Cohen: Book distributor, Dennis Jones.
Margaret Spivey's memoir took 20 years of gruelling research and sleepless nights to complete. She would do anything to protect her books from being pulped.
She's got boxes of books collecting dust in her modest Blue Mountains semi.
Margaret Spivey: So if you just move here…
Hagar Cohen: So it's just under the stairs in a cupboard? Okay, so there's like five boxes…
Margaret Spivey: And there's more at the back of that and there's more further down.
Hagar Cohen: These days, she hands them out for free.
Margaret Spivey: So I've got all these books that I honestly have got no idea what I'm going to do with, but I'm going to keep them.
Hagar Cohen: Through the Department of Fair Trading in NSW, Margaret Spivey negotiated the return of hundreds of her books.
And currently, the Small Business Commissioner in Victoria is investigating a complaint against Jojo on behalf of another author.
And in Adelaide, Freda Briggs has collected a group of 20 authors who are now considering a class action against Jojo.
Freda Briggs: I tried to find out whether they were all in the same boat, because if this was happening to other authors, it needs to be stopped.
Hagar Cohen: Jojo Publishing's Barry Dorr has replied to a series of questions put to him by Background Briefing. You can read those questions and his full response on our website. Since we contacted Barry Dorr, he has emailed many of the authors acknowledging shortfalls in Jojo's communication with them. And he has given the authors an undertaking to provide them with their overdue statements.
Background Briefing's coordinating producer is Linda McGinness, research by Lawrence Bull, technical production this week by Simon Branthwaite, our executive producer is Chris Bullock, and I'm Hagar Cohen.