I know we have several people around who have worked in or for the publishing industry in various forms (magazine, novel fiction, newpaper, et cetera), and I’m curious as to exactly what happened to the industry in the early 'Nineties. It seems to have really gone into a spiral of inflated expectations, lower profit margins, media consolidations, et cetera. In perusing some other online resources I found several writers who claimed that they went into screenwriting not because they enjoy it or see a big future in it (it’s mostly just hackwork, especially television writing) but because it was the only profitable game left.
So, what happened to cause this, as opposed to an effect thereof? Diminshed public appetite for fiction and written news? Corporate buyout and consolidation? Inflated value versus actual revenue (similar to the “tech bubble” burst)? Changing tastes and relevancy?
Two things happened in the nineties that squeezed the book business. One was the consolidation of the industry (ie, a handful of big publishers like Bertlesmann bought up a lot of mid-sized houses). Second was the advent of the large chain bookstores and the arrival of Amazon.com.
I think that the convergence of these two events has caused a couple of shifts in the industry. First, many more copies of books at the very top of the book-pyramid are being sold – things like Harry Potter – and the market efficiencies of having fewer publishers and fewer retail outlets has helped fuel that change. That’s great if you’re Stephen King or J.K. Rowling or Dr. Phil, but for the other thousands of books in the marketplace, it’s gotten much tougher. I suspect the number of titles published has grown, as RealityChuck suggests, but fewer copies of each are printed, and the amount of time that a book gets on the shelf is shorter. Average booksales vary in different categories, but I’d guess that in an apples to apples comparison, authors in 2005 are earning 1/2 to 1/4 of what a similar book would have yielded in 1980.
Second, while there are still many robust small publishers who have carved out their own niches, there aren’t as many mid-sized publishers left. It’s probably a little easier to get a $3000 book deal and a lot harder to get a $30,000 book deal. There are also whole genres of books that have essentially died as a result. In the mid-1990s, for example, there were three differnt football encyclopedias on the market, each by a different publisher and a different set of authors. None of the major publishers are doing sports reference books anymore, and so now there isn’t a football encyclopedia on the market. That’s one example, but I’d guess there are hundreds of others/
As for the magazine and newspaper industry, circulation has plummeted. The internet has probably been the biggest culprit – people can get the same sort of content online, usually for free. I suspect the new restrictions on print ads for tobacco products has also played a role.
There are some key differences between the business model for newspapers and magazines. Except in the larger American cities, newspapers generally don’t face any competition. Their biggest hurdle is convincing people to shell out a few quarters to get news that’s 12-24 hours old. That’s becoming an increasingly tougher sell. In cities like New York and London they’re are several papers waging an intense battle over a rapidly shrinking readership. (CSM had an article friday on how the European papers are facing the same struggle.)
Magazines have a bigger lag time between when stories are written and when they are read, and unlike newspapers they face intense competition in the marketplace. Increasingly, the magazines that are surviving are the ones that can bundle the sale of print ads with ads in their other outlets. Buy ads in Time Magazine or Sports Illustrated and you’ll also get spots on CNN and AOL.
It’s a tough tough racket being a writer, even for someone with a lot of experience. I’ve worked for a big city newspaper, a mid-sized publisher that went bankrupt, published several books and sold hundreds of freelance articles. the business just ain’t as lucrative as it used to be.
All (perhaps literally - I’m trying and failing to think of an exception, although there may be some) of the major New York publishing houses were bought up by international conglomerates by the end of the 1990s. A good many magazine groups were also picked up at the same time.
It was the era of synergy. If you had a movie studio, you should buy a magazine and a publishing house and that way you could hire writers to do interesting stories, turn them into books and then make movies out of them.
And besides, the book industry was consolidating behind two superstore chains, bestselling authors were selling higher and higher percentages of all books sold, and money was just pouring out of the sky.
What they forgot was that the book industry always ran on much smaller margins than any other major industry except for supermarkets. And supermarkets at least know what foods people will buy week after week. Each book is a brand new product that has to be individually hyped from scratch. Even brand names don’t always sell well from book to book, and some of them don’t like having to rewrite the same book over and over. Movies get around this by spending an average of $35 million per picture on advertising. But you can’t get that much money back from a book and you can’t do a truly national campaign for less. So book publishing turns out to be a less attractive industry than they thought.
And magazines are worse. As Tina Brown found out, you can’t manufacture fascinating articles that can be turned into books and movies on an assembly line. And then paper prices skyrocketed and postal costs increased and advertisers became obsessed with television and then the Internet and suddenly magazines were a losing proposition.
Newspapers have been losing readers for years because the younger demographics don’t know how to read. Which doesn’t help the book or magazine industries no none neither. People turn to the twenty-hour news channels or now the Internet for news, sports, and even for comics.
But even the Internet is no panacea, as Time Warner found out when they stupidly allowed AOL to sucker them into the worst deal of all history. Only a handful of companies are making any real money via the Internet and even that real money is a pittance compared to any large bricks and mortar company.
So, to use the most clichéd book and movie metaphor of our time, a perfect storm of problems hit every faction of the printed words on the page industry all at once. The number of books published may be up, but average print runs are down for everyone short of J. K. Rowling. Newspapers are a dying medium. Magazines will hold out longer, but are not at all healthy. Conglomerates that got into the industry are frantically bailing out.
True, but the actual financial viability for all but the most successful of authors and publishers seems to have plummeted. In times past you could make a decent living–but not a fortune–as a writer of genre fiction; today, though, as others have indicated, unless you are James Petersen or J.K. Rowling or the like, you are holding a regular job and the writing is just a sideline, if not actually a hobby. A Patricia Highsmith or Philip K. Dick couldn’t make it today’s novel fiction market, for instance. The successful authors are the ones who are selling movie rights (not that this wasn’t true in the past, but moreso today, methinks.) Part, no doubt, is that pay scales for authors–particularly freelance journalists and short fiction writers–have not scaled up proportionally, if at all, to inflaction, but also, there just seems to be less demand for actual writing. What passes for writing in modern print, especially newspapers and the more popular slicks like Maxim and Stuff, wouldn’t pass muster as advertising copy in Playboy and Alfred Hitchcock’s in the 'Sixties and 'Seventies. Even the venerable New Yorker is on a downward slide from which it is questioned it can return. And newspapers! The Los Angeles Times is scarcely readable, so bad at times is the form and grammar, the Chicago Tribune barely moreso. The Post still has pretty high standards on the occasions I pick it up, but the New York Times as always been overblown, and the local Knight-Ridder papers are almost invariably either highly derivative or contain original articles that are hideously edited and vetted.
::snicker:: Yeah, AOL is good at that sort of talk-up. I have to admit, I use the Internet in some form or another for virtually all newsfeed; not is it more convenient (and lacking a televisor, I don’t have ready access to CNN and Faux News even if I wanted it) but it also presents more viewpoints and often in a more complete manner than the sound-bite philosophy adopted by the television news organizations. Print news is just often wrong when not simply out of date, though I’ve been of this opinion for nearly as long as I’ve been reading the paper and news journals, and the broadcast “newsmagazines” are manifestly about finding and exploiting the most outlandish story (from poisoned apples to exploding trucks) and rarely do a complete job of checking there facts or, indeed, even making certain their basic premises are statistically and factually sound.
This is about how I imagined it, but I did (and still do) want confirmation from people actually working in or around the industry. I wonder how it will pan out in the end. It sounds as if, were it my intention (about which I’ll keep firmly close-lipped) were I to seek some kind of career in wordsmithing and fictionating (hey, if the CINC can make up words, so can I) I’d be better, if still inadvisably, to look toward that glittering plasticine metropolis festooned with featherduster folage and streetwalkers than to gaze after the great publishing corporations of Ursa Min…I mean, Manhattan Island.
Or else, perhaps, I should just bury myself deep in the study of non-linear differential equations and leave the keypounding to those whose bellies do not so readily rumble and whose tastes are for the cheapest rum and vodka on the bottom shelf. Charles Bukowski, where art thou?
That’s just one of the peculiarities of the publishing business that makes it tough to succeed. Another is that books are fully retrunable. If B&N buys 1000 copies of my book and don’t sell them, they simply return them to the publisher for a full refund. I’m not aware of any other business with this sort of model. It puts all of the burden of risk on the publisher’s shoulders.
I’m a publishing guy specializing in magazines and newsletters.
And I can’t begin to tell you how the spike in paper costs undercut most magazine’s profit. It’s one of the things we MUST have and it was shooting up enormously every year. Urgh.
Circulation is declining all around, yes. And readership is aging. Getting new and younger reader to replace those oldsters is becoming more and more difficult.
Newsletters…not so much…especially those concentrated on high-end data and so forth. As long as you’re selling something that will directly and quickly benefit people there’s no limit to the prices. I know many MANY small newsletter publishers (2-5 employees) who charge $2000+ per year, more 1000 copies, and do very well.
But the general interest stuff? Who wants to bother?
The SC decision was in 1979 but many publishing companies are old and slow moving creatures when it comes to major change. I work in wholesale books and to this day its a hard sell on some management types to burn off inventory and not try to “fluff” inventory value to look better for cost of sales purposes which is often part of management bonuses.
In some ways, it’s becoming easier to get new books published. New authors tend to give up quickly and go with a vanity publisher or print-on-demand house, which reduces the amount of slush at the mainstream presses.
As others pointed out, the average advance has dropped significantly, although I don’t believe the typical royalty percentage has changed much. If you can sell 100,000 books today, you (the author) will make more than if you had sold 100,000 books in 1980 just because the price of a book has gone up. The publisher, on the other hand, is working on tighter margins so it’s probably not the same there.
It’s always been easy to have a vanity press print up books that nobody will ever read. The only difference today is that it’s cheaper.
You’re dreaming if you think this has reduced the slush. Every publishing house in existence is overwhelmed with submissions.
You need to know what the rate of inflation is compared to the average cost of a book to make this comparison meaningful. It’s likely that book prices have gone up faster than inflation has since 1980 but the increased degree of difficulty in selling the same number of books probably cancels this out.
I agree that advances have dropped siginificantly and that royalty rates are about the same. The big difference is that the size of the print runs is much smaller and the total number of copies of each title that sells is much smaller. A book that would have sold 100,000 in 1980 is getting a first print run of 30,000 today, and maybe 1/3 of those will get returned unsold.
Yes, that was my point. New authors give up on traditional publishing houses sooner now, since you can set up a P.O.D. at a vanity press for a few hundred bucks.
Maybe I am dreaming about the reduced slush piles, but it sure seems like I’m competing with fewer first-time authors now. Maybe it’s just the types of books I write.
In 1996, paperback distributors realized that they could use computers to monitor sales of PB books, and no longer needed drivers to ship great wads of books around. Whole fleets of drivers – who knew what sold in the stores – were fired.
To quote from Richard Curtis:
So you had a perfect storm of changes:
The consolidation of the publishing houses, which meant editors lost their jobs; many are now free-lance book docs.
The use of previous book sales to determine how much of an author’s new book is ordered, so that authors don’t get the luxury of building an audience, particularly those who get big advances.
The collapse of the mass-market distribution system, which hurt midlist and genre authors.
On the other hand, we have:
The rise of the Internet and blogging, enabling authors to build an audience through self-promotion. Check out the sites of Douglas Clegg, M.J. Rose, John Scalzi and James Lileks for examples.
The rise of amazon.com, powells.com and other online booksellers, which enables readers to get the books they want. Same with used books through abebooks.com.
And if you’re really desperate, self-publishing has become cheaper and more convenient than in the old days of Vantage Press.
But in the end, books are still being written and still being sold. There’s still a lot of crap out there, and writers aren’t giving up, although it sounds like they are. But we’re going through an evolutionary change, and those who can adjust will have a better chance of succeeding than those who don’t try at all.
Up until recently, technical nonfiction. Few of my rejections have come from somebody else beating me to the punch, or publishers never finding my submissions under stagnating piles of slush. They’ve generally been because the publisher wasn’t interested in that topic–or my take on the topic, anyway.
Currently, I’m in a far more competitive field: children’s books. I’m not competing with the new authors here, though, because I have an established series with my publishing house. I’m still sending out the nonfiction proposals, though!
I acknowledge that the fiction market (which is what pesch is mostly talking about) is quite different. I’ve never been in a market which used mass-market paperbacks, for example.
And, in fact, the overall book market is increasing. Another good sign for authors is that the marketshare of independent booksellers is increasing. Indys are much more likely to take a chance on new authors and to carry regional and specialty titles. The big chains carry mostly frontlist (except for the highly successful, proven backlist titles), and individual managers aren’t given the leeway that the indys have in selecting titles for stock.
A new author writing “just another novel” these days will have a devil of a time breaking in. Part of the evolutionary change you’re referring to is toward authors recognizing that they need to find a specialty or somehow make their books distinctive.
No wonder an optimist like you is writing children’s books. The glass is not only half-full but has rainbow-flavored water.
While I can find articles saying that the marketshare of indys soared from 15% in 2003 to 16% in 2004, that sorta slides around the fact that their marketshare was 32% in 1990 and that their number fell from 4700 in 1993 to 1885 in 2004. (That article gives them an 18% share in 2003. I can’t explain the discrepancy.)
Yep, I’m an optimist (heavily tinged with realism). Heck, I’m so optimistic that I bought an indy bookstore myself in 2001. My store’s sales have risen steadily since then, and are currently up 20% over YTD last year.
Yes, marketshare for indys was far higher in 1990. It was darned near 100% in 1930. It dropped, and now it’s coming back up a bit. One of the reasons I feel good about indy marketshare going up at all is that it had dropped so far. This could well be a sign that I’m not the only person who has grown tired of the bland selection of the chains and their lack of support for small presses and midlist authors. It’s not just a one-year blip, either. An article in Bookselling This Week entitled Independent Bookstore Sales Continue Upward Trend states:
Yeah, I know it’s a trade pub for indy booksellers, but I like my rose-colored glasses, thankyouverymuch!
------ It dropped, and now it’s coming back up a bit. One of the reasons I feel good about indy marketshare going up at all is that it had dropped so far. This could well be a sign that I’m not the only person who has grown tired of the bland selection of the chains and their lack of support for small presses and midlist authors.
Yeah, but how do you compete with Amazon’s 20-30%+ discount and infinite selection? (Real question: do you have a coffeehouse? Is your location terrific? How does it work?)
Separately:
Shouldn’t lower online prices and great selection stimulate book sales? I would think that it would easier for an Aardvark author to link sell his wares to the relatively exclusive groupings of Aardvark fans. In other words, I would think it would be better mid-ranked authors in the 10,000-200,000 category at Amazon.
I think the online selling is a boon for niche authors, but… this is the point I keep trying to make… at the same time it’s made things tougher for midlist authors. Now we have to compete with the authors from smaller presses whose books would never be on the shelf of a brick-and-mortar bookstore. Fifteen years ago, my book might be the only entry on a subject that was available at Waldenbooks or B.Dalton. Now, that’ll never happen.
We’re also competing (in most genres) with used copies of books, many of which are out of print. It’s great for the consumer, who has more choices at Amazon than he ever did at a mall bookstore, but it’s much tougher for an author.
It dropped, and now it’s coming back up a bit. One of the reasons I feel good about indy marketshare going up at all is that it had dropped so far. This could well be a sign that I’m not the only person who has grown tired of the bland selection of the chains and their lack of support for small presses and midlist authors. It’s not just a one-year blip, either. An article in Bookselling This Week entitled