.com.unity Forums - OT: The state of the book publishing industry?...

Found this reposted on the Baen forums.

"From: "Eric Flint"

Oh, mutter. I can't resist...

I'll add one further thing, to my diatribe about the glorious wonders of
capitalism.

I'm _still_ being hammered by the corporate bastards. Like almost all
full-time writers, the single biggest blow my income has taken for the
past several years -- way, way, way, way, way, way worse than any
possible impact writing off the 3rd world debt could possibly have --
has been the plunge in paperback sales.

Everybody in publishing knows that mass market paperback sales are in
the toilet, have been for about four or five years, and won't be picking
up any time soon if ever. A lot of readers have become aware of it
also, and are wondering why.

Well, I'll tell you why. Once again, you can thank the
now-almost-complete domination of economic life by giant corporations.

First, let me dispel a myth. A lot of people think the reason
paperbacks don't sell well any longer is because they're too expensive.

Nope. That's not the reason. Measured by the only criterion that
really means anything to people -- the relative cost of a paperback
compared to other forms of entertainment -- the price of paperbacks has
remained completely steady for half a century. (At least.)

Today, a paperback costs just about exactly what one ticket to the
movies costs. Fifty years ago... a paperback cost just about exactly
what one ticket to the movies cost.

No change at all. The reason people think it's changed is because they
can see that the cost ratio between a hardcover and a paperback has
dropped drastically. Which, it has. Fifty years ago, on average, a
hardcover cost ten to twelve times as much as a paperback, whereas today
it only costs three times as much.

But that's not because the price of paperbacks has gone up. It's
because the relative price of hardcovers has done _down_.

To be sure, the drop of hardcover prices explains _some_ of the drop in
paperback sales. But only a small part of it. There are more
hardcovers being bought today, certainly, but the increase doesn't come
close to making up the plunge in paperback sales.

So, what happened? Here's what happened:

Beginning in the late 1990s -- it started in the Pacific Northwest, with
the Safeway retail food chain -- the big customers for what's called the
"rack trade" in paperbacks started forcing book distributors to dance to
their tune. (The "rack trade" refers to all book outlets _other_ than
bookstores. The book racks in supermarkets, drug stores, airport news
stands, etc etc.)

Prior to that time, book distribution for the rack trade was actually
something of a legitimate model for free enterprise. There were over
four hundred book distributors in North America (about 370 in the US,
and the rest in Canada.) They serviced both publishers and the retail
outlets quite effectively, in fact. Largely, of course, because they
were small enough and specialized enough that they knew their local
markets. The truck drivers who delivered the books and stacked the
racks were full-time employees, making decent wages, who stayed on the
job long enough to learn which books were likely to sell in which stores
and stock the ranks accordingly.

But once American retailing became dominated by giant corporations, all
this changed. From the viewpoint of a giant retailer, books are a
nuisance. Even a top-selling book generates a small income compared to,
say, the sales of Coca-Cola. And where Coke only has a handful of
products that are easy to inventory and don't change very often, any
book publisher will come out with as many _new_ titles in a month or two
as Coke has products, period.

Most of the books -- "most" as in 99.99% -- are not top-selling titles.
Just keeping track of sales was a pain in the *** for giant retailers.

So, following the standard logic of giant corporations, they hammered
the distributors. They forced them to consolidate, first of all. A few
years ago, there were hundreds of book distributors serving the rack
trade. Today, there are three.

Secondly, they told the distributors they weren't interested any longer
in stocking anything but a few best-selling titles.

Since the distributors were now big corporations themselves, that was
fine with them. Dandy, in fact. For starters, they could fire most of
their (relatively) well-paid drivers. Which, they did. Today, in giant
retailing outfits, books are no longer stocked by professional book
drivers. They are stocked by teenage kids making minimum wage, with no
benefits, and who don't plan on staying at that job any longer than they
need to. With -- duh -- all the wonderful effects you can expect, in
terms of the intelligence with which books are stocked.

(It's not that the kids aren't bright enough. They just don't care.
Why should they? As jobs go, this is on a par with flipping hamburgers
or tearing movie tickets.)

And that's what happened to paperbacks. Other than for top-selling
authors like Grisham or Clancy or Roberts, the rack trade just vanished
completely -- and that trade accounted for about half of all paperback
sales.

When I first started getting published, I'd run across one or another of
my (then few) books here and there on the racks. But I haven't seen a
single copy of one of my books on the racks in years, now, even though
I'm today a much better known lead writer. If it hit me that hard,
imagine what it did to midlist writers and new writers, who _don't_ get
hardcover editions the way I do.

That was the main hit. The other hit was that as book _selling_ became
monopolized by Barnes and Noble, Borders and a few other big chains, the
same inexorable corporate logic took place. B&N and Borders discovered
that, dollar for dollar, building a new superstore was more profitable
than keeping the small mall outlets open. (i.e. Walden's, etc.) It's
not that the smaller mall stores weren't profitable. Most of them were.
It was simply that the superstores were _more_ profitable.

Granted, capitalism has always operated on the profit principle. But
what changes is that, once giant corporations replace "normal" sized
companies, simply being profitable is no longer enough. A small company
owned by a real person -- or a family -- will stay in business as long
as it turns a profit of any kind. (Or even just breaks even, as long as
the owners can make a decent living from it.)

But that same logic doesn't apply to Megacorp. A Megacorp will shut
down a profitable operation in a heartbeat -- if it thinks that some
other operation will turn _more_ profit.

(That's what happened, by the way, to many of the businesses I listed in
my earlier post who closed down. In only one case -- Danly -- was that
because the business was _losing_ money. In the other cases of plants
or divisions owned by giant corporations, the plants I worked at turned
a profit -- but not a big enough one compared to another plant.)

(And even Danly's not really an exception. Danly was founded a century
ago, and during the eighty year period it was actually run by the Danly
family, it usually dominated world production of stamping plant presses.
At its peak, it employed 5000 machinists -- the single largest machine
shop in the entire world. Then, in 1980, the Danly family sold it and
it passed through several large corporate hands, each of whom drove it
further into the ground. So, a business that thrived for 80 years as a
family business went bankrupt after less than twenty years as a big
corporate operation.)

The myth is to think that "capitalism" is the same phenomenon, at _any_
scale. It isn't. Once the scale becomes big enough, all the restraints
-- if you want to call it that; personally, I prefer the term "human
face" -- to business operations vanish completely. Profit becomes the
_only_ criterion.

So, over the past few years, the big booksellers have been closing down
their smaller mall operations all over the country. Tom Doherty told me
a couple of months ago that he estimates we've lost, over the past few
years, close to 4000 book outlets we used to have in the country.

Everything has imploded inward, into the superstores. Now, from the
standpoint of _hardcover_ sales, that's good. Superstores draw a large
clientele of what you might call
"dedicated" readers, and they're usually willing (or not unwilling,
anyway) to buy books in hardcover.

But what's been lost, almost completely for any except top-selling
writers, is the "casual" buyer who, in times past, would pick up a
paperback on the spot if they happened to spot one that interested them
on the racks. Every study done -- and there have been several --
concludes that about half of all people who will buy a paperback if the
opportunity is given them will _not_ drive the seven mile distance to a
superstore that is the average in American big cities to buy the same
paperback. (And forget the rural areas completely.)

To sum up, paperback sales have always depended heavily on casual buyers
-- and the logic of corporate capitalism as it gets further and further
entrenched is to do away with casual book sales altogether. (Except for
the few bestselling authors who can be branded and sold like Coke or
Pepsi.)

So, paperback sales went into the toilet. And, as more and more people
notice that Little Johnny Doesn't Read As Much As Little Johnny Used
To...

Naturally, they look for a scapegoat. And, naturally -- scapegoats are
always people toward the bottom of the pecking order -- they blame
schoolteachers.

Naturally, it doesn't occur to them -- or they're too cowardly to accuse
powerful people -- that maybe, just maybe, the reason that Little Johnny
Doesn't Read As Much As Little Johnny Used To has a lot to do with the
fact that, nowadays, Little Johnny is offered the same exciting wide
variety of choices in reading matter that he's offered in the way of
restaurant fare.

He can eat at McDonald's or Burger King. He can read Grisham or Clancy.

Thazzit, unless he's one of the relatively few kids who likes to hang
out at superstores -- assuming there's one in his town to begin with.

No wonder he prefers to cruise the internet. So would I, if I was a kid
today instead of back in the 50s and 60s, when I could find lots of
interesting stuff to read even in the small rack of my local small town
supermarket, at prices I could either afford or could wheedle my parents
into paying. (Using the term "super" very very loosely. It was about
the size of one of today's gas station minimarts.)

Eric

I need to make one thing clear, I think. My analysis of why the paperback market has gone into the can contains two rather separate parts. One is the analysis itself. The other is what you might call my commentary on it. Okay, fine, call it my Bolshie rant if you like. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

The commentary (or rant or diatribe) is mine. The analysis, however, is not. I just summarized a two-hour long explanation that Tom Doherty was kind enough to give me at the Nebula Awards a few months ago. Tom, for those of you who don't know, runs Tor Books, which is the largest SF publisher in the world. And most people in the business -- that I know, anyway -- think he's the most knowledgeable and shrewdest guy around when it comes to this stuff. With regard to marketing, anyway -- which is his professional background. He came up in publishing through the marketing end, not the editing side where most publishers come from.

Tom is also an old friend of Jim's, and while I don't think his political views are identical, he very definitely does not share _my_ views. He's a solid Republican. So whatever you may think of my commentary, don't make the mistake of thinking the analysis is the product of too many of my negative red vibes. T'ain't. That's a very experienced and very knowledgeable Republican's assessment of what happened.

Eric"

Now you know what you're missing by not being on.