
Is Publishing Too Top-Heavy? - pseudolus
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/81637-is-publishing-too-top-heavy.html
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cstross
> “There used to be a lot more books that could sell 40,000–50,000 copies. Now
> more sell fewer than 10,000 copies.”

Well, _duh_.

Speaking as a working novelist (who has been earning a living that way for the
past 19 years, thank you very much) I note that the editor quoted above was
speaking of _print_ sales, not sales including ebooks. A _really prominent_
feature of the publishing landscape in the past decade has been the collapse
of the mass market distribution channel -- small C-format paperbacks which are
sold on 90 day credit: when payment is due the distributor must be paid in
full or _receive proof of destruction_ in the form of stripped covers. (This
channel was originally created for periodicals and expanded to books in the
wake of the depression and the second world war. Trade books sometimes come in
C-format -- especially in countries like the UK where the mass market channel
crashed and burned in the 1990s -- but usually come in hardcover and A-format
or B-format: larger paperbacks. These books are returned intact to the
distributor for credit, and a lot of bookstores rotate their stock on a 90 day
basis, relying on the wholesaler's line of credit to cover their expenses.)

Anyway: mass market paperback sales in the midlist (not the bestsellers: the
other 90% of the trade) fell off a cliff once ebooks showed up. Ebooks were
about 1% of my sales in 2005, rose to about 5% by 2008, then took off like a
rocket: I'm now with a publisher who _prioritises_ ebooks (but issues
hardcovers as well), with roughly 50-60% electronic sales. In contrast, the
figures for my mass market paperback releases dropped from roughly 60,000 for
my first novel, to under 10,000 a decade late ... although I'm earning about
five times as much.

I have two hypotheses to explain this:

1\. MMPBs were traditionally bought as disposable reading: the vast majority
of customers wanted a cheap read, and binned/donated/re-sold their MMPBs on
the second hand market after one read. (Hardcovers, in contrast, tend to be
collected by fans.) Ebooks fill the disposable reading niche _even better_
than MMPBs insofar as they're infinitely more portable, and these days you
don't need a specialized gadget to read them: any modern smartphone will do.

(It's no coincidence that my rising ebook revenue took up the slack from my
descending mass market paperback revenue.)

2\. Amazon, the 500kg gorilla in the ebook field, doesn't release any figures
for direct sales of self-published ebooks, but I'm guessing they're huge. A
lot of writers bypass the traditional publishers completely and go direct to
ebook via Amazon, who don't offer the range of support services of a Big Five
outfit but who also pass more of the money through to the author. (Disclaimer:
I'm with two Big Five publishers. The higher royalties would be nice but I
don't like having to recruit and pay my own editors and proofreaders and
typesetter, and I want to spend my time writing rather than being a one-man
publishing business. There's this thing called division of labour ...) Anyway:
about 90% of the self-published material (my opinion is based on a three year
deep dive into Kindle Unlimited) is rubbish that, frankly, isn't ready for
publication ... another 9% is decent commercial-grade fiction, and 1% is
stand-out star quality stuff, and _some of that is going bestseller under the
radar_. That is: because it's sold on Amazon and AMZN doesn't feed numbers to
Bookscan AIUI (Bookscan captures _retail_ sales at the EPOS terminal) they
don't show up in the charts, even if they sell a million copies. And these
books are invisibly eating away at the major publishers' market, corroding it
below the waterline.

~~~
PaulHoule
My take.

I have a huge collection of C format paperbacks from the 1960s and 1970s; as
ephemeral as these are supposed to be, they held up really well until about
2005, by 2015 the yellowing started getting serious.

I (mostly) hate larger format paperbacks, since these are often poorly made --
you bring a $50 book home, open it, and the spine breaks right away.

The conventional wisdom that hardcovers are "better" than paperbacks seem to
be belied by the fact that hardcovers are usually cheaper on the secondary
market, sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot.

~~~
cstross
The yellowing is due to acid leaching in the wood pulp paper; it _can_ be
reversed or halted for a price, but it's accelerated in conditions of higher
humidity.

US hardcovers are _supposed_ to be saddle-stitched and bound, and printed on
acid-free paper. UK hardcovers use cheaper paper and perfect binding, as do
paperbacks; "perfect" binding is basically cut sheets held together using a
thermosetting glue. A lot of late 60s/early 70s UK paperbacks had such
terrible glue that they were cracking and the pages falling out within a
couple of years.

------
OrangeMango
Pro baseball teams don't measure the success of their player development
systems by minor league ticket sales.

I guess its no wonder that book publishers are terrible at developing great
authors.

------
billpollock
Publishers should be taking more risks. The risks make a list interesting.

Think PoC || GTFO bibles. My staff thought it was crazy to publish them. Haha.

~~~
cstross
I note that "No Starch" is a young insurgent publisher and not part of the Big
Five.

The Big Five are _all_ about supply chain management contracts. That's all.
Everything that can be outsourced is outsourced.

But this leaves them vulnerable to obsolescent boilerplate contracts horked up
by an ossified legal department, which get in the way of business innovation.

Some of them are working around this, either by firing off contract updates
for backlist titles to be signed by their authors or assignees: others by
incubating internal startup ventures with from-scratch redesign of their
workflow.

Example: Tor.com is an imprint of Macmillan, and its chief executive is Fritz
Foy. It goes back about a decade and its front end is a very successful SF/F
media website. Tor is _also_ an imprint of Macmillan, and its chief executive
is Fritz Foy. It goes back about 40 years and its website is ... not its best
aspect. In fact, Tor.com's entire editorial staff also wear Tor hats from time
to time, although their marketing team are different. But the contracts might
as well come from another star system. Tor's legalese focusses on the
traditional trade fiction distribution channels and would you please sign this
paragraph about microfiche and gramophone rights just in case we still use
those formats, while Tor.com assumes ebooks have priority and by the way
there'll be a hardcover issued via Tor as a distributor, and maybe a trade
paperback.)

~~~
billpollock
We've been around since 1994. :)

~~~
cstross
You're a young insurgent then!

Some of the big five have roots going back to _18_ 94, and earlier.

(Time runs at a different pace in publishing, if that makes sense.)

