Trade Book Publishing, 1977-2007
The period was one of upheaval in the book publishing business. The changes had begun in the previous decade, and no end to the turbulence is yet in sight. In general, numbers went up: more titles published, more copies of popular titles sold, more money made by the lucky few authors and their agents and publishers. Change worked to the detriment of many writers, especially first novelists and midlist authors.
Commentators often expressed nostalgia for an earlier, more stable time. In The Blockbuster Complex (1981), Thomas Whiteside wrote that in the ‘50s, publishing was “a business in which publishers and editors could feel sustained not only by their love of books but also by their sense of professional independence, arising from the fact that most publishing houses were independently owned and run, and by a diversity of relatively stable relationships with authors, agents, and booksellers.”
In the 1960s, an era of mergers, acquisitions and consolidations began. Economic power became more concentrated. In 1977, the ten largest publishers accounted for 60 percent of trade books sold, Whiteside said. In 1999, “five major conglomerates control 80 percent of book sales,” Andre Schiffrin wrote. Seeking a quick return on their investment, the new owners of publishing houses pressed editors to acquire titles that would sell in large numbers, and sell quickly.
Other factors contributed to forcing the pace. Chain bookstores grew as independents declined. (In the ‘90s, their numbers fell from 5400 to 3200.) Most chain stores were located in malls and paying high rents. Competition for shelf space was keen. Computerized inventory control made sales figures more readily available. Chains were quicker than independents to take advantage of the bookseller’s ability to return slow-selling titles to the publisher for credit.
In the 1970s mass-market paperbacks rolled up prodigiously large sales of such titles as The Godfather and Valley of the Dolls, leading agents to demand large advances for well-known authors, and to encourage them to jump from one publisher to another. Agents themselves, and book packagers, also became more powerful. Authors at every level began to rely even more heavily on their agents as their relationships with editors became more distant and transitory.
The paperback advance was divided half and half between author and original hardcover publisher. In the ‘70s, hardcover publishers expected the paperback to subsidize the hardcover edition to a considerable extent. By the mid-80s, they could no longer count on this.
The share of publisher income from backlist (previously published books) dropped, and share of profit from sales of new books rose. Inflation drove production costs up, particularly sharply in the late ‘70s. A typical hardcover novel cost about $8 in 1977 to about $26 in 2007.
Book clubs declined in prestige and popularity, especially during the ‘90s.
The focus on bestsellers quickly destroyed the “independence” and “stability” people in the book business had, according to Whiteside, enjoyed. The screenwriter William Goldman famously wrote that the key insight to understanding the movie business was “Nobody Knows Anything.” Though people in Hollywood talk endlessly about what makes a hit, and anyone involved in a hit tends to lay claim to a magic touch, in fact no one can predict which film will make money. The same rule applies to the book business, as numerous heavily promoted flops have proved. Editors gambled desperately on authors, and most of them lost.
The atmosphere in the book world was similar to what Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker described in the sports world:
"Partly what drains the joy from pro football is what drains the joy from much of American life: there’s a lot of money to be made by a few people, and a lot less for everybody else….The unhappiness you feel in many players…is…the rancor of the near-miss. Why them and not us? is a radical question. Why the guy at the next locker and not me? a bitter one."
Andre Schiffrin was something of an emblematic figure of this age. He succeeded his father as head of Pantheon, a distinguished independent publisher that was taken over by a conglomerate. Shiffrin was forced out and started the New Press, a nonprofit publisher, with backing from foundations
In The Business of Books (2000) Schiffrin explained how changes in publishing worked against first novelists. In the ‘50s, he said,
"It was understood that…new fiction [was] bound to lose money. It was assumed that believing in authors was an investment for their future and that they would remain faithful to the publishers who had discovered and nourished them."
This assumption had already broken down in 1977, and novelists whose first book did not sell well often faced stiff resistance to publishing their second book.
Another group of novelists who found conditions turning against them were “midlist authors,” those with steady but unspectacular sales. By 1981, Whiteside wrote, “the economic threshold below which an author’s work is considered something that a company cannot afford to handle has risen.”
In the early years of the new millennium, many were expecting even bigger changes for the book publishing industry, as a result of technological advances. Some commentators pointed to the cataclysm in the music business caused by new consumer electronics and predicted that something similar was in store for the book business. At the extreme were visionaries who saw the internet replacing books, magazines, and newspapers, transforming the relationship between readers and writers, and even changing in the very nature of the skill called literacy, with scan-and-search replacing reading. Forbes magazine demurred in December 2006, pointing out that book sales were still going up and asserting that the internet promoted traditional reading and writing.
Other authors expected change, but less radical change, with new technology enhancing the marketing of traditional books. One of the most talked-about business books of 2006 was The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. The author suggested that many of the problems of book publishing could be corrected—were in fact already being ameliorated —by the Internet:
"The theory of the long tail can be boiled down to this: Our culture and econcomy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve, and moving toward a large number of niches in the tail. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare."
Obviously, this development offers hope of countering some of the most harmful trends of the “blockbuster complex” in book publishing. In fact, Amazon was one of Anderson’s leading examples of the virtues, for the non-blockbuster author, of internet retailing over chain stores, only beginning with the advantage of virtually unlimited inventory versus the war for shelf space and warehouse rental.
He also mentioned that websites like lulu.com were making self-publishing a more attractive option for authors. Speaking of print on demand technology, which lowers production and storage costs, Steve Riggio, CEO of Barnes & Nobel, said, “Over the next few years, the traditional definition what a ‘published book’ is will have less meaning.”