94: Is music book publishing in trouble?
Hello and welcome to Border Crossing issue #94.
I hope you’re well and keeping warm. I’m hitting ‘publish’ much later on Sunday than I’d planned, because we didn’t make it back from London last night after Anna’s birthday party.
Also I’ve been thinking a lot about my HIV+ friends today, on World Aids Day.
This issue, I write about the demise of Nine Eight Books and ponder the music book publishing world.
A big thank-you if you said hello and had a chat, when I was driving around England playing piano for Jim, on his author tour. It was lush to catch up with a bunch of you in real life, and obviously we had a blast.
A quick bit of housekeeping…
creativity counselling
From January 2025, I’m launching one-to-one Creativity Counselling, which is built around structured 90 minute face-to-face conversations.
This is available as a one-off session, or as a six month course (at the moment limited to five slots).
If your creative work needs a reboot, or you want to talk over a specific project in detail, or to improve how creativity sits within the whole of your life, or you’d just like an independent critical friend / experienced listening ear, this may be for you.
You can pre-order now. I expect the five slots for six month courses will go quickly over the next two weeks. For more details click the link — and feel free to email / DM me with any questions. There are discounts for folks on a low income. I can also design bespoke sessions / courses for your company or organisation, if your creative team might benefit from group work or individual counselling.
(note: I’m in no way a qualified psychotherapist, it’s just me, my ears and my experience across creative worlds)
book clearance sale
I’m (sadly) getting rid of the final two boxes of Buried In The English Earth, my annotated lyric book from 2022, to free up space (they keep banging my knee in the corner of my office), so now you can buy one today for £10 (+p&p) — that’s cost price, a daft bargain for a beautiful gilted, cloth-bound book.
gems
1
Charlie Brooker’s full length interview for Kite 2024.
2
Nan Goldin’s fearless ‘Are You Listening, Germany?’ speech, from the opening of her major retrospective at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, demolishes Germany’s cultural silencing around Gaza.
3
Rebekah King’s excellent (graphic) analysis of extreme violence and horror in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, written for her King’s Curiosities newsletter.
4
If you’re interested in the history of anarchism and/or the labour movement, Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time podcast recently covered the ‘Haymarket Affair’, the bombing of a workers’ rally in Chicago in 1886, followed by the unjust trial and execution of several prominent anarchists, who were later exonerated. It’s a fascinating American story (ought to be a film really) and the panel includes my favourite anarchism academic, Loughborough University’s Ruth Kinna.
5
While I’m on under-heralded anarchist legends, the most famous activist wrongly executed in the Haymarket affair, Albert Parsons, left behind a ‘widow’ of sorts, Lucy Parsons (whether they were actually married is a mystery) and her life story, as a deeply radical American rabble rouser and intellect at the end of the 19th century, is well worth a quick nose. Here’s her wikipedia entry. Later a peer of (and fierce arguer with) Emma Goldman, Parsons had a storied life, adjacent to great events, was famous in her day, yet isn’t widely remembered. As such, reading her life story back (and despite Parsons being less liberated on a personal front than Goldman) still she seems to exist outside of her time.
6
A full (2.5 hour) stream of the launch event at the Royal Festival Hall of Fitzcarraldo Editions’ re-publication of Edward W. Said’s classic book The Question of Palestine. Also, here’s a link to the book, via Fitzcarraldo.
7
Last Border Crossing I mentioned John Grindrod, the author and social (and architectural) historian, who was an inspiring tutor on the Arvon non-fiction course I recently took. Grindrod has launched a new advice newsletter series about non-fiction writing, via his Substack. It’s called ‘Couch To 100k’.
He also just released Bridges To Nowhere, a pamphlet about motorway bridges but it sold out too quickly for me to punt it to you (or manage to buy myself a copy). Hopefully the publisher will print some more.
potato gem
Fascinating Washington Post story looking at the price fixing lawsuits, which are making claims of an American potato cartel.
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94: Is music book publishing in trouble?
Nine Eight Books just closed down, suddenly, despite four years of fascinating, successful (it seemed) music-related books.
Pete Selby’s music-oriented imprint has been part of (Swedish owned) Bonnier Books UK since 2020, doing unarguably exciting work. A pile of my favourite recent music-themed books have the Nine Eight logo on the spine. This summer they published Will Hodgkinson’s wildly praised Street-Level Superstar: A Year with LAWRENCE (about the author’s experiences attempting to write a biography of — and just hang out with — the eccentric, iconoclast auteur and former Felt and Denim frontman). In 2022 Nine Eight was the home for Lush singer Miki Berenyi’s pungent, troubling memoir Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success, which scored a ton of press, far beyond the 1990s indie niche, where one might’ve imagined it sitting. At least from the outside, it felt like Nine Eight was doing fine — both these examples gaining mainstream traction and attention.
Honestly, the list was great: Nine Eight published Yvonne Innes’ biography of her late husband Neil Innes, Dip My Brain In Joy (written with help from Be Funny Or Die author Joel Morris, who always brings the funny), Michael Head’s Ciao Ciao Bambino, Anna Doble’s lovely Connection Is A Song (in the Jude Rogers school of blending music fandom and affecting, well told, personal memoir) and Ian Broudie’s autobiography Tomorrow’s Here Today, co-written with John Higgs.
It seems unfathomable that this wasn’t a long-term cherished imprint.
It wasn’t only Nine Eight though: the parent company simultaneously ditched a couple of other imprints, including Black And White London. I heard on the grapevine (so this may be untrue but probably isn’t) that the tiny team, informed it was being shuttered, rather than being given a feasible amount of time, six months, a year, to wind up the imprint in an orderly fashion, instead got just a few days to vacate the office — abandoning god knows what, already deep into the process. Whatever the reasoning behind rolling a roster under one umbrella, this is clearly a capricious, insensitive way to do it — inevitably leaving scars, not to mention leaving behind a bunch of good people in the lurch, who’d entrusted projects and such.
Is something wider doing on?
Apart from feeling bad for Selby and his people, his authors — and very sad as a reader that Nine Eight is gone — the obvious question looms: is this just another random businessy dick move, or is it evidence that the recent expansion of music-related book publishing, which has been so thrilling, might be a bubble? Is the human curation of those imprints’ lists about to vanish into some boring sales-projection algorithm system?
According to The Bookseller, the kind of book that might’ve gone to Nine Eight will now be covered within Bonnier’s flagship UK non-fiction imprint Blink, which prior to this has been home to loads of (often shite) celeb and sports books (hello, Katie Price’s This Is Me, anyone?) and sure enough, Rough Trade was recently touting an exclusive expanded edition of Hodgkinson’s Lawrence book, with an exclusive extra chapter, under that Blink banner.
Obviously, really we know nothing about what went on behind the scenes. But what that shift doesn’t account for is the personal vision and curation skill of someone like Selby running a desk with a purpose, actively creating that roster. Pete Paphides tweeted that Pete Selby is: “a lifelong follower of great music writing, he knew which ideas would land best on the page and seemed to relish getting behind those that would have made other publishers scratch their heads and exclaim: ‘Sorry. I really don’t see it.’”
I fret too, selfishly. Everything long-form that I’m working has (at least tangentially) some kind of music connection. Nine Eight would’ve been up near the top of my ‘dream publisher’ list. As with Lee Brackstone’s gorgeous den of psych-bro magick debauchery and space-cake wisdom, White Rabbit Books, Nine Eight put thrilling work out into the world, precisely because it was driven by creative, idiosyncratic human brain power to gather ingredients, to make a roster special.
A couple of weeks ago, the great Brighton author David Bramwell gave a talk at the launch party for his excellent new book Outlandish — Countercultural Heroes & Journeys. Instead of focusing solely on the book’s content, Bramwell’s unexpected keynote was a very funny but badly bruised journey through the state of non-fiction publishing. Recently, I’ve been hearing more optimistic, positive accounts of that world, which I guess I’ll need to cling to, until I know for myself how it truly shapes up (I can’t exactly give up before I’ve even got going!) but it was a disconcerting contrast. Bramwell’s broad experience these past few years, across both mainstream and indie publishing, has left him very pessimistic.
He’s ended up self-publishing this new book, selling online and at live events. Outlandish isn’t a music book but Bramwell moves in many of those same circles — he’s written before on music and culture, been published by big and small companies, collaborated with Pete Fowler on a Rough Trade pamphlet, for example, and he’s a music maker himself (Oddfellows Casino). So his warnings do cut through.
You’ve probably noticed, these past few years, your favourite indie record shop greatly expanding its book section. It’s curious to think about how the re-emergence of vinyl records built something that is now being maintained — at least in part — by a certain kind of curated book sales, of all things. Walking around those places, overall, this sub-section of retail does appear to be healthy. Along with the explosion of instores / outstores (which I must write about over on Double Chorus because there’s some very dodgy economics going on, right in the middle of that emerging new normal of ‘touring’ music), our country’s indie record shops — chains and true independents — are strongly occupying a certain segment of our cultural psyche.
In that world, Hodgkinson’s Lawrence book for example will spend December being touted right up the very top of all their ‘books of 2024’ lists. If Nine Eight was still active to reap the benefits, enjoy the kudos of — and income from — that attention, who knows what its 2025 and 2026 might’ve looked like.
If this is just one company doing a juddering restructure, and especially if Pete Selby lands on solid ground somewhere else, where his curatorial gifts are valued, then I will remain a chunk more optimistic than Bramwell does.
Last week I was up at Louder Than Words festival in Manchester, tinkling piano for Jim’s author event. LTW is a brilliant few days and it sits right at the heart of that literary/music crossover space, an event full of veteran rock critics, music biz analysts, high profile pop memoir-ists from across the music world. But it’s an outlier, with few comparable events. And we weren’t there long enough to truly gauge the vibe, nor figure out if there are wider concerns — some I spoke to are optimistic and still excited about that space, while others feel pinch.
However, it was up in Manchester that I realised a dispiriting broader truth:
Simply: any fears — however valid — about any particular sub-section of a creative trade, are exactly the same as every other section. Every single one. Without doubt, globally, we’re in late stage ecocidal capitalism. Every part of making and delivering arts and culture now constantly faces down a scary set of questions — always acutely challenging — which regularly tip over into the existential. And I realised it’s basically an error to compartmentalise: to think of it solely in terms of a specific bit of the arts, rather than thinking about everything as a whole.
Just as we shouldn’t think of any proposed solution or route forward as a binary. Longer term, (probably technology-aided) DIY / ‘Direct To Fan’ (yuck) will inevitably be the core way forward for every creator and maker. But that doesn’t mean we need to jump ship from hustling bigger companies today. We can — we should — do both. Do it all.
In the gems above, I mentioned John Grindrod’s newsletter and his fast selling pamphlet. But those don’t remotely preclude Grindrod still working within the ‘proper’ publishing world as well, having successfully sold forthcoming book(s) inside that industry, and knowing he’ll be present in bookshops before too long.
So yeah. The threat is existential, but bloody everything is. We can’t get distracted by false binaries or compartmentalising: we have to do it all.
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get in touch
email: chris@christt.com
Instagram: @cjthorpetracey
always there
Try my irregular music newsletter Double Chorus
Listen to Refigure podcast, the bitesize DIY arts review show I make with Rifa. It’s series #7 and there’s a new ep every fortnight (roughly) just search “refigure” where you get podcasts.
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As I said at the top, help me clear the last two boxes: purchase my book of annotated Chris T-T lyrics Buried in the English Earth for just £10 + p&p, via the Border Crossing shop.
My Pact Coffee discount code is CHRIS-A8UKQG. Sign up for coffee bean delivery, use this code, you get £5 off and I get £5 off a bag too.
Please look after yourself and your people.
All my love,
Christopher
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