Publishing and the Commercial Situation of the Literary Novel
Pimps v Publishers - Who provides the best service? A scientific survey.
A New Model For The Publishing Industry. Is it a Supermodel or just an ordinary model?
The publishing industry has failed writers.
Writing is no longer a profession which can support an educated person, and literary writing least of all.
Publishers have allowed this situation to come into being through their business practices and incompetence. This is a process which has been gathering momentum for at least 30 years and publishers have been resolutely ignoring it.
Once writers were public stars of great cultural importance. Hemingway, Fitzgerald. Eugene O'Neill, Edna St Vincent Millay etc. Even Kerouac could get himself on mainstream television talk shows.
Now serious writers are teaching in obscurity for a living and they cannot get their faces in a magazine beside Paris Hilton’s underpants. Or instead of them.
The publishing industry is one which has destroyed its own lifeblood.
They have failed to develop their new rising writing talent. Instead they have abandoned career writers in favor of the lottery of the surprise hit book. They don’t want writers as artists, they want one hit wonders as media phenomena.
The reason they want this is that they then don’t have to make any investment in the promotion of a writer’s career. One hit wonders don’t need promotion because they are here now. And in any case they have no future.
I imagine the serious people who went into publishing for the right reasons (the love of good writing), are embarrassed by this, and the best of them have probably left the industry as a result.
But it’s time for publishers to pay the price, because now the writers, whom they have exploited so mercilessly, no longer have any need of them.
The chickens have come home to roost.
Let me briefly present a few facts and figures.
Be warned, they are shocking for writers!
A typical literary fiction book sells 5000 copies on average in USA. Just enough to keep a published writer in obscurity forever.
Publishers pay her $500-$2000 in total for perpetual rights to this book.
They buy 2 years of a highly educated writer’s labor for this price.
(I’ll pay you more than that to come and cut my lawn for 2 years.)
But on closer inspection, 5000 sales actually produces $75,000 at a paperback book price of $15.
And many of these sales are actually hardback sales to libraries and book collectors at $25-$30.
$75,000 - That’s quite a lot of money!
That’s enough for a writer to live on for a year and write another book.
That’s a living on full time writing! On a literary novel!
And that is from USA alone. The world rights are also worth around the same amount.
So where is all this money going, and why isn’t it coming to the writer?
And how can it begin to?
That's the discussion we should be having.
SOME FACTS:
Booksellers have the best terms in all retail. If they can’t sell a product, then they don’t have to pay for it.
No other retail industry enjoys these terms. Because they are insane terms.
When a bookstore sells a book they make approximately 5 times as much money on that book as the writer does. (50% of cover price).
And when they can’t sell it, they return it and pay nothing. And the publisher passes on the cost of this to the writer via devious accounting.
And this is only the beginning of the ways in which the deck is stacked against the writer.
I don’t want to run all the numbers here, they’re on the internet if you’re interested.
Here I want to discuss why is this happening and what can writers do about it now.
Essentially in the end the writer is handing over around 90-95% of the earnings from her books in perpetuity, and getting virtually nothing in return. Only mediocre distribution at ridiculous retail terms.
My estimate is that a well written book which generates average initial sales of 5000 copies is probably worth around $100,000 in total sales over the lifetime of the writer.
And that is assuming that there is no career which eventually develops a best seller, which in turn makes an author's backlist books far more valuable.
In this case, which is likely to be a typical case for a good and serious writer having a 30 year career, the value of any one novel by that writer is probably closer to $250,000 in USA, and probably twice that when worldwide rights are considered over a 30+ year period.
And yet the writer is only receiving $2000 and finding herself abandoned and unable to publish a second book..
Imagine if other industries treated their most crucial employees in this manner? Imagine if Google or Microsoft will only pay their best, most skilled and experienced employees $2000 for two years of their work.
It’s so absurd it looks like a joke when typed.
Now, what does a writer get for all the money she is donating to publishers?
Once upon a time she got status and promotion into the public debate. Reviews and press etc.
Also editorial services and guidance.
No longer. Now publishers tell writers to go out into bookshops and sell their own books to customers one at a time. They advise you to sell them to your friends!
You get to keep a 5% royalty of your own book sales when you sell it to passing strangers. You are now an unpaid salesperson for the publisher too. With no commission on the sale!
All this to save them the cost of getting a writer on a television show. By using modern and professional PR methods. Television is already half dead and publishers still haven't mastered it as a promotional medium.
And this at a time when the internet is free and available to all.
These people are completely mad!
Publishers are at least 20 years behind the times. And perhaps 40 years.
How did this come to be?
Well really, it came to be because the writers allowed it.
Publishers exploited writers’ desire to see their work published. Because writing is not about money, the publishers simply refused to give writers any of it. Writers were vulnerable there, and publishers exploited that vulnerability.
Publishers changed their industry to operate for their own convenience and to their own advantage. Even though it was a short sighted policy which would lead to their own destruction. As it now has.
They have little to offer writers any longer.
Ebooks are the future and publishers are not required for this. Especially not publishers who provide no editorial services and no marketing services.
If writers are also doing the editorial and marketing, (and they are), then 100% of the profits should return to them. There is simply no value added by publishers, only the status of legitimacy, which has been severely tarnished by the quality of fiction being generally published these days.
So what is the problem in the publishing industry specifically?
The publishers can’t tell a good book from a bad one.
Not any longer, although I believe they once could.
And they have sought to make it no longer necessary to do so. They don’t employ people who have this skill any longer. It’s not valued as it once was.
19 publishers rejected Harry Potter. Their professional opinion was that it was not worth paying $500 for it. Think about this for a moment, the average reader apparently thought it was good enough to pay for.
Regardless of what you think of the book, it's proven that the average person had a better judgment of the quality of that book than publishing professionals at 19 publishing houses.
Harry Potter total sales are now over 400 million. This means 400 million people thought it was at least good enough. So there are at least 400 million people in the world with better literary insight than the professional publishers at 19 publishing houses.
Publishers can’t tell which books will sell, and which ones are of such literary merit that they should be made to sell via strong promotion.
They don’t know their own field, nor their own industry, and they have never even bothered to find out by surveying their customers. Imagine that level of incompetence in today’s corporate world!
Publishers’ policy of the last decades has been just to throw everything out there equally and see what sticks.
And what sticks subsidizes what does not stick.
The result is that poverty is assured for all.
90% of the books being published should not be published. They are making everyone poor. Most of all the writers.
Publishers have abdicated their responsibility to be arbiters of good writing and to develop the careers of the few valuable writers who can do it. They no longer even accept manuscript submissions, having also abdicated that function to literary agents. Who in turn have their interns do it by perusing marketing pitches.
Publishers have blindly followed Hollywood in attempting to remove the necessity for quality from the creative equation, never noticing that the movie industry is one which has also destroyed itself. As has the recording industry for that matter. All out of greed and incompetence. All by attempting to make their corporate financial returns predictable and independent of the quality of the creative product. An undertaking which only a fool who understands nothing about art or entertainment would attempt.
Pimps v Publishers - Who provides the best service? A scientific survey.
