The Publishing Death Spiral

[sleigh]

Via the ever-vigilant ysabetwordsmith, a post from Norman Spinrad explaining the publishing death spiral.

Here's the nutshell, in Norman's own words:

Let’s say that some chain has ordered 10,000 copies of a novel, sold 8000 copies, and returned 2000, a really excellent sell-through of 80%. So they order to net on the author’s next novel, meaning 8000 copies. And let’s even say they still have an 80% sell-through of 6400 books, so they order 6400 copies of the next book, and sell 5120....

You see where this mathematical regression is going, don’t you? Sooner or later right down the willy-hole to an unpublishablity that has nothing at all to do with the literary quality of a writer’s work, or the loyalty of a reasonable body of would-be readers, or even the passionate support of an editor below the very top of the corporate pyramid.

Read the whole post, though, since it's entertaining and does a vastly better job of explaining his reasoning as to why so many writers have to resort to pseudonyms after three or four books...

What do you think? Is the American model of publishing broken?

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

How does this make any sense? The number of books sold is a measure of the popularity of the author, or how much his audience want to read his books, or something like that -- it has nothing to do with an artificial number used by a printer to know when to press the "stop printing the thing" button.

So if an author sells 8000 books, it's because 8000 people want to pay the money to read his book -- regardless of whether the printer prints 10,000, 100,000, or 1,000,000, regardless of whether B&N and Borders order 10,000, 100,000, or 1,000,000. And if the author's next book sells 6400 copies, it's because 1600 fewer people wan to read his second book -- again, regardless of whether the printer prints 8000, 10,000, 100,000 or 1,000,000, regardless of whether B&N and Borders order 8000, 10,000, 100,000, or 1,000,000.

Spinrad seems to be saying that customer demand is somehow influenced by how many books the major chains plus Amazon buy. Now there's going to be some noise in the system -- with fewer books in stores they'll be more mismatch between the stores the buyers are in and the stores the books are in -- but is that it? Is that really enough to explain his phenomenon? I just don't buy his argument.

B

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

There is some validity (I feel) in what he's saying. It's a matter of visibility. Rarely does anyone sell every book that's out there. 80% (as Norman points out) is a decent sell-through. THe fewer books that are out there, the fewer potential book buyers see 'em. If you're not on the shelves, you're essentially invisible... and thus you sell less.

And I've seen too many fellow writers have novels turned down not (ostensibly) because the publisher didn't like the book, but because sales figures for the last book were low, and therefore the chains won't order in enough copies of the next book, which means that the book will almost certainly tank.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

"It's a matter of visibility. Rarely does anyone sell every book that's out there. 80% (as Norman points out) is a decent sell-through. THe fewer books that are out there, the fewer potential book buyers see 'em. If you're not on the shelves, you're essentially invisible... and thus you sell less."

That's the noise in the system -- the mismatch between which stores have the books on their shelves and which stores have the customers in the aisles -- I mentioned. That certainly has some effect, but how much really these days? Ignoring WalMart and airport bookstores -- places our books will never see the inside of -- and ignoring best sellers, what percentage of books these days are purchased by someone browsing amongst the bookstore shelves? On the Internet, every book has the same amount of visibility, regardless of how many books are printed or ordered. Do people really learn that you've published another book by stumbling on it randomly, or are they paying attention or is a friend who is paying attention telling them...or what? Seems to me that the death of bookstores, as bad as that is for other reasons, is inherently solving this mismatch problem.

And what's replacing that is information-age notions of "visibility." This is what Spinrad's editor was talking about in this paragraph:

"I wish I could help. Power in this day and age in terms of 'cutting edge' fiction has (as I’m sure you’re aware) largely left the hands of conventional publishers. Rather, the guys who are making it now are doing so off of their web presence, having established themselves as counter-culture figures at large on the net."

You want visibility in the 21st century: don't expect bookstores to provide it, do it yourself. Now we can argue about whether this is good or bad for society, but it also solves the mismatch problem.

"And I've seen too many fellow writers have novels turned down not (ostensibly) because the publisher didn't like the book, but because sales figures for the last book were low, and therefore the chains won't order in enough copies of the next book, which means that the book will almost certainly tank."

Another way of saying this is: publishers now realize that they're not very good at predicting which authors are good (where good = good selling), and there's now enough data that they can safely ignore their own biases. It would be better if publishers would also publish books they didn't like because the crowd data indicated that they would sell, but it's not necessarily a bad thing.

The real issue here is the publishing has become a business instead of an industry. Whenever that happens, quality suffers.

B

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Publishers still focus heavily on getting books in stores. That's the mandate passed to the sales force: get books on shelves.

That's why they offer co-op dollars. Why they pay for front-of-store display, or push backlist-filled endcaps with the new hardcover. Why, when the buyer at Barnes and Noble says, "We don't like this cover," the publisher changes the gorram cover.

There's no question that a typical, new-to-this-author reader needs to see a book more than once before deciding to buy it.

Online sales are big, and ebook sales are growing, so this dynamic is very likely to change in the next several years. But for now, it's still "get eyeballs" and the place to get eyeballs is the bookstores.

Bookstores offer "order it and we'll ship it to you" nowadays, but usually if a person is in a bookstore, it's because they want a book right now, not next week. Those are the sales publishers focus on.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Interesting.

It's different in technical non-fiction, I think.

Definitely agree with your last paragraph. "We'll order it and ship it for you" is a futile attempt to compete with Amazon.

B

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Definitely different in technical (or other scholarly) nonfiction. I worked for one of the giant trade houses for 14 years, and now I work for a university press. Entirely different sales approaches.

I'm staggered that at the scholarly press we have 100% sell-through on some books! An 80% sell-through at a trade press is considered amazing. Budgets at my current employer work assume a very high sell-through. Budgets at my previous employer assumed a 55% sell-through.