John Fairbairn wrote:I agree, and improving the distribution of Go books is one of the goals of Go Game Guru. Unfortunately, I've found the major publishers fairly reluctant to sell books wholesale. I'm variously told that business is either too good or too bad to want to sell books to third parties. I can believe one or the other, but not both.
Here's a simple observation, from a simple mind perhaps... When you don't sell books, you don't end up selling any books.
I know this is extremely disingenuous because David wrote to GoGoD at great length and explained rather more than he does here. For example, he reported that at least one company wanted to impose a possibly perfectly reasonable condition that he he did not compete with them in their own area. There were other factors not mentioned here, but we must not stray into commercial confidences.
John, what precisely about my comment is 'extremely disingenuous'? My email, which you didn't reply to, but apparently read, was mostly technical details about how we could help you distribute GoGoD. Since you aren't interested in that, there's nothing left to discuss on that matter.
In the rest of the email I was asking for your help and advice regarding Slate and Shell. I had no intention of discussing Slate and Shell in particular here, but you're really not leaving me with a lot of choices, are you?
There's more to it than you know, and I really think you should talk to William Cobb about it. Also, you've completely misunderstood what I wrote in the email. Slate and Shell are very protective of the US market. Fine, we know that. But they also refused to sell us books which would be sold in the Australian and European markets. I know from the trial we ran earlier in the year that books sold from Australia will be purchased by people in the US, as well as other countries.
Slate and Shell are naive if they think their existing wholesale customers don't sell books back into the US. So I apparently just made the mistake of being too honest with William and telling him upfront that that would happen to a certain extent (and certainly does already). I was willing to find a solution to the issue of the US market, which is apparently a huge concerns of theirs. However, I do personally think they focus on this one thing too much, to the detriment of their business. We may disagree on that point, that's fine too.
I think the books you've written over the last few years, which we all know are published by Slate and Shell, are very good. They also publish other good books like the Shuko tesuji dictionaries, which I already mentioned earlier in this discussion. Because of that, I'd be happy to help Slate and Shell sell them in Australia and other countries, if they wanted to. That's really all there is to it fundamentally.
For what we're trying to achieve with Go Game Guru, we do need to earn a reasonable amount of money to promote the game in a financially sustainable way. Go books themselves are never going to be a big source of that income, we know that. That's not why we want to sell them. Improving their distribution is useful because it is yet another way to help promote Go using the existing resources.
If you're going to insist on taking things I've said out of context and repeating them here, just publish the whole text of my email discussion with T Mark and let people judge for themselves. The offer I made to you and T Mark was entirely in good faith, and I believe it was reasonable and very generous. There's nothing I said that I'm ashamed of anyway.
Otherwise, talk to your publisher and stop complaining about not selling enough Go books. I've watched you make frequent comments regarding the Go book market and refrained from saying anything for almost a year now. Next time, I'll remind you of this conversation...
. So is reviewing them.