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Richard Curtis on
Publishing in the 21st Century
by Richard Curtis
PART TWO
PAPERBACKS: THE TAIL THAT
WAGGED THE DOG
(first published in Backspace
http://www.bksp.org)
For many publishing people, the world as they had known it
ended in the summer of 1996. On a warm brilliant day I sat
down at a table in a Spanish restaurant for what I thought
would be a typical lunch with the publisher of a mass-market
paperback company. I found him slumped head in hands over
a seriously stiff drink.
“What’s the matter?”
He looked up, miserable. “You haven’t heard?
The wholesale distribution business is imploding. Hundreds
and hundreds of drivers have been let go.”
I groaned, beckoned to the waiter and pointed to my friend’s
glass. “I’ll have the same.”
The collapse of the distribution system that
fueled the mass-market paperback revolution was a trauma from
which the book industry has not recovered to this day. To
appreciate the impact of my friend’s announcement requires
a brief description of the way books were distributed after
the post-World War II paperback revolution that swept the
U.S. publishing industry.
Hardcover vs. Paperback Distribution
By way of contrast, trade or “general interest”
hardcover books are offered to bookstore buyers by publishers’
sales representatives. The store buyers select which titles
they order and the number of copies they will stock in their
stores. Though released year-round, hardcovers are offered
on a seasonal basis in publishers’ catalogues issued
several times annually. Whatever the reality may be, the theory
is that they will have a decent shelf life and if popular
may remain on display for months or longer. This business
model has not changed fundamentally from the last century
to the present time.
Mass-market paperbacks (as opposed to the larger “trade
paperback” format) are a very different matter. Introduced
in 1939, “pocket books” took hold in the ‘50s
and ‘60s, but publishers soon realized that the hardcover
distribution approach didn’t work. They needed a different
sales model and turned to the one used for magazines.
Every month, magazines were shipped to depots – “agencies”
– around the country. Drivers picked up the magazines
at the agencies and visited stores on pre-assigned routes
in towns and cities. Most of the stores were not bookshops
but rather supermarkets, candy stores, newspaper stands, and
bus, train or airport terminals. Each month, these salaried
employees collected the previous month’s unsold publications
and replaced them on the store’s racks and shelves with
new stock.
To paperback book publishers, this existing distribution
network was the perfect vehicle for delivering their product
to a far-flung readership. Thus it came to pass that paperbacks
began hitching rides with magazines. And that too is how they
came to be released on a monthly schedule. After 1956, when
the leading magazine wholesaler went out of business, a number
of entrepreneurs set up shop as independent wholesale distributors
(“ID’s” or “rack jobbers”),
handling mostly books.
Because they were a monthly phenomenon, paperbacks did not
enjoy a long shelf life; the exigencies of returning paperbacks,
when the distributor cleared the racks to make room for the
next month’s releases, made for an ephemeral existence.
What is more, the unsold copies were usually not redistributed
or remaindered. Because paperback publishers had to pay freight
for returned copies, many of which were dirty or damaged,
the stores found it more efficient simply to strip the covers
off the unsold books, send the insides to be pulped, and return
only the covers to the publishers for credit when settling
accounts.
Since paperbacks were returnable, distributors delayed paying
publishers until unsold stock was returned. To account to
authors for the gap between copies sold and royalties released,
the paperback publishers took a page from the creative accounting
systems devised by the hardcover industry, holding large amounts
of royalties for long periods until returns were finalized.
Royalty reports to authors were deliberately fashioned to
omit information about the number of copies printed, shipped,
and returned, or about the amounts of royalty reserved pending
finalization of returns. This suppressing of vital sales data
gave publishers carte blanche to retain royalties that might
have been remitted to authors. Some publishers got too creative
and held royalties forever. Until the 1990s, when pressure
from agents and from writers’ organizations forced publishers
to reveal significant details, mass-market houses reported
only net sales with no information as to how they arrived
at those net figures. As I wrote at the time, it was like
reporting batting averages to baseball fans without revealing
how many at-bats or hits the players had had.
The Paperback Industry Blossoms
Unlike retailers of hardcover books, paperback booksellers
seldom had much say over which titles were stocked on their
racks. They passively received the current month’s selection
and passively watched the unsold stock loaded into the distributor’s
vehicle a month later. The authors of those books watched
the process too, but some of them figured out ways to influence
the wholesalers to promote their books. A number of leading
authors, on their own initiative or sponsored by their publishers,
began visiting the wholesale agencies and pitching their books
at executives and ingratiating themselves with the jobbers.
Some of the more energetic writers went so far as to drop
in on drivers as they loaded their vehicles, bringing coffee
and donuts and promotional material to inspire them. This
technique was particularly successful with romance fiction,
which sold most abundantly in the supermarkets that women
visited two or three times every week. It did not hurt if
the authors were attractive. Many a lovestruck driver stocked
extra copies of a title after a pretty novelist shared a pre-dawn
breakfast with him on the tailgate of his station wagon.
Although a growing number of traditional bookstores stocked
mass-market paperbacks, it was the wholesale distribution
network that fueled the huge growth of the book business in
the last quarter of the twentieth century, spawning a thriving
industry and a generation of bestselling authors. Even when
those authors graduated to hardbacks, paperback reprints of
their books drove sales overall. In the late 1980s and early
‘90s, mass-market paperback revenue made the difference
between feast and famine for hardcover publishers. Income
from romance fiction alone contributed 25% of the cash flowing
into the trade book industry.
Smart publishing executives recognized how heavily they
depended on mass-market income for their profits. But that
message did not always filter down to their editors. Many
of them, possessing only a hazy idea of where the money for
their acquisitions came from, spent profligately and ended
up taking a bath on books and authors that flopped miserably.
Or they simply acquired whatever they pleased without giving
much thought to the bottom line, failing to realize that they
were indulging in a luxury largely subsidized by paperback
book revenue. Many lived in denial that their beloved first
novels, short story collections, poetry anthologies and other
elevated forms of literary endeavor were financed by romances,
westerns, thrillers, horror novels and space operas.
Efficiency Strikes the Distribution
Business
Meanwhile, the infrastructure of paperback book distribution
was undergoing significant changes. The dramatic rise and
expansion of bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble siphoned
business away from wholesalers’ franchises, both in
cities and suburban malls. Computerized sales information
enabled publishers, wholesalers and retailers to better track
the performance of categories and identify winners and losers
among specific books and authors. And the stunning advent
of amazon.com leveraged the awesome power of the Internet
to link supply and demand.
Assessing these patterns, paperback distributors began asking
themselves why they needed to employ human labor when they
could more efficiently and economically service bookstores
and other outlets by shipping books directly to the retailers.
Yes, it would mean that the human element -- the guy in the
station wagon who knew which towns loved historical romances
and which preferred contemporary ones, which adored westerns
and which were big on science fiction – would be removed
from the equation. But -- well, that was progress!
The big agencies pulled the plug in that summer of 1996
when whole fleets of drivers were discharged, and in the following
years the wholesale distribution workforce was reduced to
a fraction of what it had been in its heyday.
The Bottom Drops Out
Most publishing executives were slow to recognize the implications
of the nosedive in the wholesale paperback distribution business,
dismissing it as one of those occasional and inevitable shifts
to which the industry had always adapted. What was the big
deal? Fewer romances and other genre novels would be published,
wasn’t that all there was to it?
In fact, the consequences were nothing short of calamitous.
The impact was felt in every sector of the publishing business,
from what got written to what got published to what got read.
It wasn’t long before customers in west Texas or Nebraska
or South Carolina discovered that many books by their favorite
authors were no longer being stocked in their local stores.
When customers or store owners complained, they were told
to take it up with the distributor – in Vancouver or
some other far-flung location reachable only by an 800 phone
number.
The Rise of the Airport Model
A key result of the shift in distribution patterns was the
streamlining of the way retailers ordered books from publishers.
Why pick and choose among thousands of titles that might sell
only a handful of copies? Wasn’t it better to follow
the formula that worked so well at airports, ordering only
the top fifteen or twenty bestselling books by branded authors
like Nora Roberts, Robert Ludlum, John Grisham and Stephen
King?
As paperback publishers awoke to the new buying patterns,
they were forced to choose between star authors and those
whose sales performance fell below a minimum level. At first
the triaging was restricted to marginal genres like westerns,
but as the last decade of the twentieth century progressed
the definition of “marginal” broadened to embrace
every category of book that fell below an ever-stricter definition
of commerciality, a process akin to the lowering of the bar
in a limbo dance. Limbo indeed: authors who had made a living
for years from sales of ten or fifteen thousand copies of
their paperbacks were now being dropped by their publishers
as the minimum sales quota increased to twenty or thirty thousand
copies or more.
Like the men and women who distributed their books, a lot
of authors were thrown out of work, and the grim truth finally
dawned on publishing executives. It wasn’t just genre
titles that were affected by the seismic shift in book distribution;
paperbacks of every kind were being hit by the pullback.
“What are the Author’s Numbers?
What is the Author’s Platform?”
As the publishing industry entered the twenty-first century,
book industry executives began requiring editors to produce
elaborate profit and loss projections and other corporate-style
analyses of the potential viability of books and authors.
What was the sales performance of previous books? Did they
“sell through” satisfactorily or did returns cross
the threshold of unprofitability according to the latest formulas
devised by bookstore chain number-crunchers? The mantra of
“The Bottom Line” was invoked ad nauseam at every
editorial committee, and editors were constantly reminded,
“We can only afford to publish hits. If you can’t
project a big profit on a book, turn it down.”
Editorial financial projections were aided by an Orwellian
innovation called BookScan, instituted early in 2001 by Nielsen
Broadcast Data Systems, the world's leading provider of airplay
tracking information for the entertainment industry. BookScan
offered subscribing publishers weekly analyses of sales by
most major book retailers. Within moments, editors could access
vital sales statistics on previously published books and authors,
elevating performance parameters over traditional but less
quantifiable values like compelling storytelling or stirring
prose.
And what about the author? Was he or she attractive and
mediagenic? Did he or she have a “platform” –
an organizational base such as a hit television series or
chain of fitness centers capable of promoting the sale of
books? Was the author willing to buy large quantities of books
for giveaway or resale by his or her franchise?
More and more, the importance of traditional literary criteria
took a back seat to “The Numbers” and “The
Platform.” Promising but modestly successful novelists
discovered they could not get their second or third books
published, and aspiring newcomers could not sell their books
at all. As for nonfiction, no matter how compelling the memoir
or business guide or social commentary might be, publishers
were disposed to reject it because the author was not “branded.”
Faced with these grim options, authors resorted to increasingly
frenzied measures to get published. Established novelists
wrote under pennames to disguise the poor performance of their
earlier books, or strove to produce blockbuster “breakout”
novels long on sex, violence, and plot but short on craft
and characterization. Without supportive publishers to carry
them while they developed their talents over four or five
books, new novelists focused on gimmicky concepts with “log
lines” that could be pitched like movie scripts. Nonfiction
authors plumped up their credentials or hired public relations
specialists to burnish their images and enhance their media
exposure. Others subsidized the purchase of large quantities
of their own books to drive up their “numbers.”
Literary agents were besieged by writers frantically seeking
the advantage of representation by successful dealmakers.
Self-publication soared, especially as electronic and print
technology and Internet promotion brought the costs of vanity
books down to proletarian levels.
As a shrinking marketplace combined with the pressure to
publish books profitably, a sort of Boyle’s Law came
into play. Those familiar with this physical principle know
that such conditions accelerate molecular activity and produce
heat, an apt metaphor for the growing anxiety among authors
and editors.
And that brings us to today.
What options do authors, agents and publishers have under
the circumstances described in these articles? What strategies
must they employ to navigate between the ever-narrowing choices
in the traditional publishing landscape and the almost infinite
ones in the emerging world of virtual publishing? In the final
installment of this series, we’ll examine the conditions
under which the game must be played if literary endeavor is
to continue fulfilling its mandate to inform, enlighten and
entertain. In particular we will focus on the roles of “gatekeepers”
in the publishing process -- editors, agents, bookstore buyers,
reviewers and critics – who separate gold from dross
in our literature. If those roles are being “disintermediated”
by the forces I’ve described, and the filters between
writer and reader continue to be dissolved, who is going to
decide what we read?
Read Part One of this Series
| Read Part Three of this Series
|
Discuss
All the best,
Richard Curtis
|
