Damocles' Sword A-hanging Over My Head...

Talk about impending doom.

I've just confirmed that I'm supposed to submit three articles for this week for the launch of our re-designed website, four if I include the Boracay article I was supposed to have done two-three months ago.

One article is supposed to be for the print edition's supplementary section, another is supposed to be the online edition, while a third is a special feature (also for the online). I'm actually supposed to do two or three articles for the special feature, something of the current events mode.

Of course, stories for The 15-minute Theatre and forgottenmachine's challenge at Story-crossing have also been banging at the door of my imagination. Damn, and I have such a good one for the latter, too.

Naturally, instead of working on these, I'm blogging.

In this case, it's an article about the state of Philippine publishing industry. (Thanks to Dean for the link!)

Some snippets:

How are book sales? Book sales, of both imported and local titles, contribute only 15%-20% to total store sales of the National Bookstore chain (a local chain)...

Bookselling in this country is severely hampered by costly yet inefficient postal and freight services required to move books around within an archipelago. An optimistic count of bookstores nationwide is 2,500 outlets for all of 75 million Filipinos, thus, about one bookstore for every 30,000 people...

Of the 40 to 50 full-fledged publishers, 95 percent are textbook publishers who produce for a captive market in basic education, in both private and public schools...

Next to textbooks, the biggest seller in the country today is the romance paperback or romance pocketbook...

No surprises in those statements.

Interesting enough, my impression is that the publishers still put out local literature not because of any bottom-line consideration but they have to (whether out of national or cultural pride):

Literature is indeed the lifeblood of publishing and whether it is serious or popular, or once in a rare while both a commercial and literary success, it must be nurtured and made available to the widest sector of the population...

It is this kinship between literature and books, between literary writers and publishers, and between writers and their audiences that motivates us to keep allocating budgets, no matter how small, to literary titles. Always, it pays to publish good literature.

What's more, the biggest bookchain, National Bookstore, also runs Anvil, one of the biggest publishing outfits in the country. Now, that's veddy interesting...