What's Wrong With Publishing28 January 2002 I mentioned recently that I still want to be published in print, and that I think ebooks are a good way to establish a reputation for marketability if you can't land a publishing contract. Some have pointed out since then that my argument does not hold water, since most of the New York majors won't go near anything epublished, no matter how well it sold (with all due respect to M.J. Rose, she's the exception rather than the rule when it comes to an ebook being picked up for print publication). So this week I'd like to take a look at the state of the publishing industry today, explain why it's harder to break in to publishing today than in perhaps any time in history since the invention of the printing press, and next week I'll talk about how the industry must change if it is to survive (and what that means for new, as-yet-unpublished authors). Big Business
Publishing used to be almost a family business. Authors had personal relationships with their publishing houses, sometimes even sleeping on their editor's couches. Often a publisher would see talent in a new young writer and support that writer for many years, printing book after book that didn't sell, just trusting that eventually the writer would "break through" and make it big. The publisher was the friend and champion of the writer, willing to risk again and again for a writer they believed in. Those days are long past. Publishing today is a business, dominated by stockholders and profit margins, run entirely according to the hard, cold numbers. Investors in the major megacorporations that own nearly all of the New York majors want profit, and lots of it. In a business that traditionally makes maybe 4-6% profit in a good year, today's stockholders are demanding 15-18%. That's a lot of pressure for editors and publishers to find books that will sell. Gone are the days when a publisher could nurture a writer with potential through several lackluster efforts. Today's editors can't afford a single flop. But there's a problem. Publishing is now and has always been something of a crap shoot. The book-buying public is fickle and nearly impossible to predict. With so little margin for error, how can modern publishers be sure their gambles will pay off? They have to minimize risk every way they can. First they got rid of the "slush pile". Almost no publishers accept manuscripts submitted by anyone but a literary agent anymore. The idea is that if the work is represented by an agent, then the publisher knows that at least the agent thinks it's good enough to publish. There's a certain degree of quality-assurance built in. Then publishers started monkeying with the lists. A publisher's catalogue was traditionally divided into three categories:
Traditionally, the highest risk was in the frontlist, because that's where most of the money was spent. If one of these would-be-blockbusters flopped, the publisher lost a lot of money on marketing and the huge advance paid to the author. The midlist was a quiet money maker, many books doing just better than breaking even thanks to loyal followings, and backlist was where most of the real profit was, since these books continue to sell over and over through the years with no further marketing costs, and the editorial overhead for them long in the past. Aside from printing costs and royalties to the authors, these books were pure profit. This system worked well as long as the book-buying public shopped in little neighborhood bookstores. Enough clerks championed midlist titles to keep them alive, the media took care of the frontlist books and the backlist sold enough to justify printing after printing for some books. But the whole system changed when national chain superstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders began to take over. The economics of the superstores is different from the little neighborhood shops. Even though the stores are huge, they carry everything, unlike smaller stores that could afford to specialize. Because of that, many superstores actually have less shelf space for any particular genre than you would have found in the smaller shops. Less shelf space and more books means that the superstores have much higher turn over, with many mass market paperbacks given six weeks or less to sell before they're removed from the shelves to make way for something new. The reason this affected publishing as a whole is that the superstores also get substantial discounts from the bo0k distributors, and can sell at much lower prices. Since a book from a superstore is exactly the same product as a book from a small bookshop, most consumers are going to buy the book from the superstore for a few bucks less than the small shop would pay the distributor for the book. Small bookshops that deal in new books have all but disappeared as a result. There's just no money in trying to compete with Barnes & Noble. MidlistDead-ends The nature of how the superstores do business dictates what the publishing houses do with their lists. The frontlist books now get virtually all the attention, because those are the high profile books that get people in the bookstores in the first place. Backlist books, traditionally the most profitable, are dropped and forgotten because the publisher can't keep them on the shelves long enough for them to make money. And the midlist, well, the midlist just gets screwed. It all comes down to the numbers. A midlist book generally gets published straight to paperback. It then has four to six weeks of shelf life to sell, and if it doesn't the covers are ripped off by bookstore personnel and sent back to the publisher for a full credit. In other words, the bookstore risks nothing and if the book doesn't sell, it's a pure loss for the publisher. How many of those do you think it takes to completely negate all the profits an author like Stephen King brings in? Publishers are edgy about publishing any midlist titles at all, on the grounds that they cost too much when they flop. So they play the numbers. A title has to sell so many copies for it to be worth it for the publisher to carry the author's next book. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any logic in this scenario. The following is not uncommon for midlist writers: Let's say you get a book contract and you get a $20,000 advance. Not bad, you dance a little jig. Then your book gets published, a print run of 30,000 copies. The book gets a little push of marketing on the Internet, someone influential likes you, and you manage to sell every one of those 30,000 copies, no returns at all. In fact, orders for more copies are still coming in from bookstores. Then your agent calls with the bad news. He just got off the phone with the publisher, and they've decided not to pick up your next book (which is odd, you think, considering your current runaway hit is the second book in a trilogy). Their reason? You didn't sell enough copies. You protest that you sold every copy they printed, but their numbers say that you had to sell at least 50,000 in order to be profitable enough to publish your next book, and you only sold 30,000. Sorry, try somewhere else, we're all full up here. That may not make any sense, but it does happen. Lots of midlist writers, successful, award-winning writers, are finding that they can't sell a book in New York anymore. The numbers on their last book weren't quite good enough, and as far as the publishers are concerned, that is the end of the story. So what can a new writer -- or for that matter, a moderately successful midlist writer who discovers they can't sell in New York anymore -- do to get their books sold and read? Come back next week to find out. |