It all coming down around our ears

Publishing's crises (incompletely) explained

Posted by Cory Doctorow, September 21, 2008 8:59 PM



|
permalink

Boris Kachka's long feature on NY publishing's crisis in New York
Magazine is a sad but important read. But Kachka puts a lot of emphasis
on greed and foolishness and media and bookstore consolidation, while
ignoring the largest contraction in book-sales since the heyday: sales
through non-bookstore venues like Wal-Mart and the local grocery store.

Historically, these outlets have sold more books than bookstores, and
were a vital induction system that coaxed people who didn't (yet) love
books into the bookstores. When these chains went national, they
demanded national distributors to stock them from coast-to-coast. The
result: a huge shift in the way these shelves are stocked: once stocked
by local distributors who chose from a very wide range of titles and
hand-picked the right books for each little grocery store and pharmacy,
now they are supplied by a national database totalling somewhere around
100 titles. The consolidated distributors demand gigantic discounts
from publishers -- and even so, they go bankrupt with dismal
regularity, often with FBI arrests of top execs for corruption.

So yes, there was a lot of foolishness in book-publishing, yes,
some writers got stupid advances, yes, mergers and acquisitions have
left many publishers without a coherent vision or command structure.
But when 51 percent of your sales disappears and is replaced by a
lottery system where a couple dozen titles get nationwide distribution
to non-bookstore customers and everything else is pushed into a ditch,
surely that must count for something.

The advances you don’t hear about have been dropping
precipitously. For every Pretty Young Debut Novelist who snags that
seven-figure prize, ten solid literary novelists have seen advances
slashed for their third books.

Of course, back in the boom nineties, the corporations themselves
were pumping up the expectations of midlist writers. Consider Dale
Peck. His first novel, Martin and John, came out in 1993 to excellent
reviews, and by his third book, in 1998, he was, by his own account,
wildly overpaid. Books, he says, “were like Internet stocks, getting
enormous advances without demonstrating any moneymaking whatsoever.”
Having rarely sold more than 10,000 copies, he took up with superagent
Andrew Wylie, developed a reputation for being a “diva,” and pretty
soon couldn’t sell a book to save his life. Until he started
specializing in genre fiction—first children’s books, then horror. Last
year, Peck sold Body Surfing, a thriller about demons exiting people
through sexual release. He’s now splitting $3 million with Heroes
writer Tim Kring to produce a trilogy of conspiracy thrillers.

Peck sees an increasingly hostile environment for the kind of
books he used to write. “When you get $100,000 for a novel,” he says,
“you want $150,000 and then $200,000, so when they pay you $25,000 for
the next one, and my rent is $2,500 a month, what do you do? The system
works just fine for commercial fiction. But for literary fiction, I
think we had a nice run of it in the commercial world.”