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PUBLISHERS
MUST REWRITE THEIR RULE BOOK According to an avalanche of recent articles, "midlist books" -- those that sell fewer than 10,000 copies -- are an endangered species. Why? The book business has become too commercialized. Media barons buy up the old-line publishers and flog editors for higher returns, chains displace community bookstores; and the obsession with bestsellers squeezes the mid-list into powder. Soon, nothing will be left but Grishams, "Angela's Ashes," and a bunch of self-help books. Don't believe everything you read. This turmoil is a classic example of capitalism's creative destruction, clearing away an antiquated structure and opening up opportunities for innovation, to the benefit of both authors and readers. What's needed is more, not less, commercial thinking. To explain this unfashionable optimism, start with some basic numbers, sketched out recently by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker. For a book with a price tag of $25, the cost of the printing and binding is about $2.50. Another $2.50 goes to the author. The publisher gets $7.50 for overhead, costs and profit, and the remaining $12.50 goes to the distribution chain -- the wholesaler and retailer. For midlist books, almost none of this money goes into promotional efforts. A midlist book is assigned for a time to a publicist, who handles several books and who may not even have time to read them all. He sends it to reviewers and to special groups identified by the author, and fields any requests for information. That's it -- no marketing plan, advertising, direct mail, promotional events or follow-up calls to reviewers. Result: mid-list authors regard publishers as slothful incompetents; publishers regard mid-list authors as ungrateful egomaniacs lucky to be in print at all. Both views are largely right, which makes for a prickly relationship. At the book stores, a midlist book sits briefly on the new-releases rack. Then it departs for the nether shelves, retrievable if requested, but not exactly obvious to the browser. Yet these books collectively are very important to the bookstores. Leonard Riggio, CEO of Barnes & Noble, says that only about 3 percent of the books he sells are bestsellers. Fifty-nine percent are from the "backlist," which means books more than a year old, and more than half come from a source other than the top 10 publishing houses. Something is strange about the economics here. Although bookstores and wholesalers collect half their revenue from these books, they provide minimal economic value to the midlist. They perform two basic functions: providing customers with specific books at their request, and allowing them to browse. It's hard to see how these could be worth as much as writing, printing, editing, and shipping combined. Distributors incur costs, of course -- rent, staff, inventory. But adding cost is not the same as adding value. The current system of selling books works well for a particular type of customer: people who are looking for "a book," perhaps as a gift or a way to pass time on an airplane. A bookstore gives them a lot to choose from. The current system also works for the few books that get a ton of free publicity becuse the publishers push them or because of new tie-ins. But mid-list books aim at customers with more specialized needs. Some are looking not for "a book" but for something on computers, or the Civil War, or property rights. Some deal with a subject professionally and need to know when something relevant is out. One reason for the rise of the chains is that they do a better job catering to such markets than community bookstores did. But even so, the existing structure of book distribution does not work well for these customers because it does not provide them with the specialized information they need. Nor does the publishers' blind reliance on free ink and reviews fill the gap. The more segmented the market, the less publicity its interests get; and only a small percentage of midlist books, chosen unpredictablyly, get reviewed in the general press. In the midlist marketplace, the problem is precisely a lack of commercialism -- a failure to identify the customers, tell them the product exists, and show them why it meets their needs. But with the marketplace changing and technology opening up new possibilities, people in the publishing business are looking greedily at that $12.50 that now goes to the distribution chain. Maybe it could be better used. For $2.50, say, a publisher could deliver books by UPS or Federal Express, which would leave it with $10 to spend. This could finance a price cut, or buy a lot of advertising. Or a publisher or middleman could innovate, creating databases of folks with particular interests and using fax and email to send them information. Or, taking a page from Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, it could set up interactive web sites. People are also thinking about how to match bookstores strengths -- browsing and quick delivery. Chapters and even whole books are going up on the Internet, on the theory that people will want to buy the real book to read. An alternative is the "virtual bookstore," a small shop with a single sample copy and overnight delivery. Another drawing-board idea is to use high-speed printers to produce books on the spot as they are sold. The only limit is ingenuity. Midlist books will continue to be produced -- authors' egos and readers' needs will see to that. But the present system of distribution serves neither authors nor readers well. So bring on the bulldozers, and let book lovers cheer the creative force of commercialism. JAMES V. DeLONG Washington |
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