In Soviet System, Books End You

Michael Levin at Forbes announced the coming end of books

http://blogs.forbes.com/booked/2011/05/20/are-books-an-endangered-species/

The publishing world gathers next week in Manhattan at BookExpo America, its annual trade show, but the one subject attendees won’t be discussing is the coming collapse of publishing and the inevitable disappearance of books.

Like other prophets announcing the end is coming, Mark Levin is wrong. Books are not disappearing. In fact, we might be entering the most vibrant time ever in publishing.

Oh, almost everything he says will sound intuitively right to people of a certain age, even those who work in the field. By people of a certain age, I mean people over say fifty five. Not all of them, but most of them. Ten years ago, on email lists with these authors, who are my elder colleagues in the field, I struggled to convince them that a) Amazon wasn’t a passing fad. b) Amazon was far more significant than anything – ANYTHING – they’d seen so far. They kept talking about browsing and serving coffee and bookstore cats and the virtues of brick and mortar. Oh, and the ineffable romanticism of the smell of paper or the feel of pages or something….

I get a feeling those people STILL have no idea why or how Amazon succeeded. They certainly don’t seem to have a grasp of how the rest of us use it. And then there’s the other side of it, the “the books are disappearing” side of it, which will seem intuitive to most people in the industry who never had ANY connection to their readers. We’re writers. We tend to run in flocks. Writers and wanna be writers naturally become the most vocal ones even in online reader forums – ALMOST all online reader forums.

Before I started being published by Baen I THOUGHT that the only people reading me were people looking to get published. Now that is not true, at least not for Baen readers, a good number of whom are “just readers” but the normal writer might not bump into many of those.

So, he’s wrong on two counts – how Amazon and ebooks are changing the game and what the game IS. He’s right – very right – on other things, like the model of publishing a bunch of books, promoting very few of them and blaming all failures on the writer himself. He just fails to take the logical conclusions from this.

The reason that publishing functioned the way he says it did – with publishers publishing an enormous amount of things that no one wanted to read – is that by the mid nineties, at least, publishers had managed to completely insulate themselves from market feedback. What do I mean by that? Surely they knew what sold and didn’t sell?

Well, yes to an extent. It will shock anyone outside the field to know that in fact there are several systems for ESTIMATING how many copies sell, but no system – not even point of sale – that covers every book sold. The best systems cover between 1/3 and 2/3 of the market – the composition varying depending on the type of book and where it’s stocked.

But – you’re saying by now – they know how many books they printed and how many returned, right? Well… maybe. Sometimes. For a given value of “know.” First of all there’s the lovely returns system. Books are not sold to the bookstores who stock them, they’re put on consignment. It used to be that books were “stripped” and the front covers mailed back. (The rest was in theory, but rarely in practice, discarded. More often sold for $1 on some discount rack.) That at least in theory allowed for some counting. But sometime along the line books were just virtually stripped, and a certain number virtually “returned”… by entering the numbers into a computer. Add to this that since at least the late nineties most publishers have been working on a de-facto Print On Demand basis. This is because of some government regulation counting inventory as tools and supplies and taxing publishers on inventory sitting in warehouses.

I have no idea what contract the publishers have with printers, but in my contracts – pretty much all of them  except Baen– it says print runs under some amount – say 100, though I think it’s more normally 500 – they don’t count as a new print run and don’t have to be reported.

So, imagine my laydown is 2000 (unfortunately not a rare, non-pushed print run.) Of those 500 are virtually returned (true or not, who knows? Do you assume every bookstore employee is not only scrupulously honest but very good at entering numbers? I don’t.) However, meanwhile another 3000 are printed and sent out in thirty 100 shipments. Of those, 1000 are “returned”.

The two most reputable tracking services variously report 1000 sales and 500 sales. This could mean anywhere between 1500, 3000 and possibly 4000 sales. Or it could mean the reported ones were the only ones you actually sold and the rest was lost in the cracks. What the heck does the accounting department at the house do? How do they pick the number you “sold”? Is it surprising that people report exactly the same number of sales across various houses? I’m sure they use a formula. And I’m sure the formula favors the house, of course.

Add to this that sometime in the nineties Borders introduced computers to control inventory and invented the concept of “stocking to the net.” This means they order as many books for their shelves as the number you sold before. This leads almost inevitably to the death spiral. I.e. bookstores ordered (and stocked) ten of your books last time. Seven of those sold (this btw, is an unusually high order if not pushed. And the time books stay on the shelves before being culled has shrunk to something like four weeks. If you’ve sold seven in that time, you’re doing well.) So for the next book they order seven and sell four. For the next book they order four… You can see where this is going. When it reaches zero, you, the writer, who are to blame for this, of course, have to change your name or quit writing.

Now, I can see where this system gave Borders a huge advantage when they were a small chain in Michigan.  They would still — of course — order authors who made it big AFTER they banned them.  But for the average author, it prevented their stocking “things no one reads.”  I mean, there were still other places for authors to make it big, and to return to those few bookstores with big numbers that resisted the “ordering to the net” bane. I can’t for the life of me understand what possessed the rest of the field to follow suit, or even Borders to extend it nationally. Surely it is obvious to anyone not lobotomized that this would lead to every author not receiving publisher-ex-machina extraordinary help being kept out of the market. But apparently bookstores didn’t see this.

For editors OTOH this was a happy time. Look, as far as I know, publishing has always moved by fads. For instance, there was the whole gothic romance thing in the eighties. Something sold and then they bought all of it. And for a time all of it sold. But the fads weren’t completely divorced from public taste. The bookstores/market acted as a check on that. The publishers could “push” a book to an extent, but there were always bestsellers that flopped completely and books that weren’t pushed at all that made a runaway success in independent bookstores. Did I mention that by the late nineties most independents were dead or dying? And that distribution took place through three distributors?

Why was this a happy time? Well, because most editors don’t care how well a book sells. They care how closely they predicted how a book would sell. When they first decide to buy a book, they have to decide how much advance to pay and have to take these figures to “meeting”. The figures are based on what the author has sold in the past, what the books are, how those books have sold in the past, and, oh, yeah… the editor’s intuition. Or something. It should be clear to everyone by now that these projections are more art than science. After all, books are not cans of beans. You can’t say “A hundred people will eat beans in this town this week.” For instance, I read an awful lot of mystery, fantasy and science fiction, but just because a book says something like that on the spine it doesn’t mean I’ll like it. Heck, even my favorite authors wrote two or three books I hated.

So it’s risky for the editor to make these projections. And it looks good if the projections work out.

By the mid nineties most books sold exactly till what was owed the author was what he/she had been paid in advance. And then the book was taken out of print.

Precision of this sort in forecasting the uncertain is only possible if the producer takes the bit between his/her teeth and controls how much the book sells. This was possible by controlling distribution. Here the whole concept of “push” came in and bookstores started charging publishers for special displays for the books – end caps, dumps – as well as engaging in convoluted quid pro quo. The publisher who wanted to make sure an author who got a big advance did well could, for instance, offer a discount on a bestseller (or threaten to cut the bestseller’s laydown with that store) if they took also 100 books from promising author X.

So, by … oh, even five years ago, books were like late-stage USSR. They were completely a command economy, where what the consumers wanted didn’t matter nearly as much as the internal numbers and the validation of the bureaucracy and career bureaucrats.

However, by five years ago this was already being undermined by Amazon. Amazon affected me most, first, as a reader. To understand how much or how, you have to understand how I read. I’m a high volume near-indiscriminate reader. If this were done with anything else, I’d be considered addicted. I have to read before sleeping, for instance. I have to read at breakfast. I’ll read the back of a cereal box, medicine instructions or wanted adds if that’s all I can find. HOWEVER in every genre and subgenre “I know what I like when I see it.” Let’s take mystery: I read cozies, police procedurals and woman in peril. I read thrillers, historicals and humor. HOWEVER I don’t read “Chic Lit” in any of those varieties. It’s nothing against the people who do, but I’m in my late forties, it’s been a long time since I dated and I don’t live for shoes.

Throughout most of the nineties, when the kids were little, our normal vacations were in Denver, then about an hour and a half from where we lived. The vacations usually lasted three days and started with a swoop by the new/used bookstore where I NEVER spent less than $250 and walked out usually with three bags full of books. These books then got devoured while taking the kids to the amusement park, or sitting under shade trees watching them play, or reading in the hotel bed while they watched cartoons.

Sometime after 2001 I noticed that I was finding fewer books I wanted to read. I’ll tell you the blunt truth, the last time I made one of those visits, four years ago, I bought $35 worth of books, most of them replacements for books lost or destroyed.

Meanwhile in the oughts my buying from Amazon skyrocketed. Because the problem, you see, was not that there weren’t books being published that I might like to read, it is that those were not the “cool” ones that got “pushed” (which to my biased mind seemed to be mostly about sleeping with tons of guys and bitching shoes.) They just never got on the shelves. A friend of mine referred to her visits to the bookstore as “I’m going to go and be disappointed by chain name.” So I started buying on Amazon. I started as a way of finding the people the publishers weren’t pushing but who had books coming out (I read Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones before they were cool in the States, for instance.) And then I stuck around to read the “also recommends” and the books mentioned in the comments. If anything I was buying more books, a lot of them on hard cover, due to pre order. But I was buying less at brick and mortar stores, because they simply didn’t stock what I wanted.

When a supply system is completely divorced from feedback – see the late stage USSR or the late stage publishing before correction by Amazon/ebooks – you inevitably get what the people at the top think people SHOULD WANT to consume. In fact, if I had a dime for every time an editor said something like “my job is to educate the public” or “my job is to refine the public taste” I’d be buried in dimes, and I’m not a small woman. Of course their job SHOULDN’T be any of that. And in fact it wasn’t. Their job, as defined by the way they got paid more, promoted and admired was to buy books that their particular clique admired. And their clique being mostly of a uniform age, with the same type of liberal arts degrees from the same type of college and living in the same environment (NYC) their choices were amazingly uniform. One thing Mark Levin doesn’t mention are the vast quantity of pseudo literary books that are what Holly Black called “the grey goo” or something like that. No protagonist. No antagonist. No discernable plot. Basically slice of life story in the lives of Woody Allen clones minus the tantalizing quasi-incest angle. These books got the most awards, got called important, and got their editors lots of prestige. And no one bought them unless they got assigned to literature classes. Or rather, no one bought them knowing what they contained. But it was always possible to fudge numbers enough that the author sold another “important” book.

This infected even science fiction and fantasy, in their quest to be taken “seriously” and in fact, it infected almost every field, except Romance (which notably is still the best selling field.) This is because the incentive was to make the editor respected, not to make the house money.

So, is Mark Levin right? Is epublishing the end of books.

No. Not only no but HELL NO. It might be the end of the precious, coddled, literary work of art. (Though I doubt it. There will always be a café society that enforces the reading of these pastermieces as a way to achieve entrance.) It is almost certainly the end of the “pushed” book.

But Levin seems confused on two things. One is the expectation of payment.

He refers to electronic media as something people expect to be free. This is patently false. Oh, it was true perhaps in the beginning, and what we got was worth every penny. These days, though, I pay for both blogs I like and fansites I like. The subscription is not enforced, but I pay because I want the service to go on.

Even music is not free online, at least not music people want to listen to. Myself and friends pay for subscription services as well as various downloads. Yes, there’s any amount of pirating, but a lot of this is by very young people who couldn’t afford to buy, anyway and who will pay once they’re fans. [(For a clue on this consult Baen about Webscriptions.)

BTW, Baen Books, in SF and fantasy is an exception to almost all of the processes above (though the distribution got interesting for them too, since bookstores refused to stock them for the longest time – you see, they publish both center-right, right and communist authors, so in the twisted parlance of our days they’re a “right wing” publishing house, that bookstores often refused to stock – the reason being too complex to go into here.) This is because Baen Books was a family publishing house (still is) controlled by one person who did not care what the establishment thought of him (now her). Baen maintained (and maintains) an online presence which allowed/allows them to listen to their public directly, so they had a better idea of what sold or didn’t. (There were other innovations which I won’t go into, due to space constraints.) And Baen books, btw, is doing very well.  Better than ever in both print and ebook.]

Most of the writing available for free on line, is worth its price. The exception being the free books on Amazon and the free samples of books on Amazon which are of course really just used as promotional devices.  Oh, and the Baen Free Library which is evil book-pushing.  They hook you with the free ones, and know you’ll pay to keep yourself in books from then on.  (I have a book there.)

And that’s the second thing in which Mark Levin is totally wrong. I now routinely browse Amazon from my Kindle. It’s very easy to download samples (for free) of books that sound even vaguely interesting. I tend to buy about one in three books whose samples I download, and often these aren’t books I’d have THOUGHT of buying, even in a store. Even better, I’m totally uninfluenced by the quality of paper/colors on cover or where the book is shelved. I can assure you I’m buying more books than ever.

Will we see the mega blockbusters, like Rowling or King or… Well… I don’t know. There will continue to be such things as sudden inexplicable fads. Let’s face it, nothing rational can explain those explosions. There will also still be bestsellers, for a definition of bestsellers (though I think they might change in way of manifesting – i.e. right now bestsellers are books that sell a lot of copies in a brief period of time. I think in the future there might be a lot more “sleepers” which sell almost nothing for a year or two and then suddenly achieve critical mass and take off and sell… And continue selling, since there’s no inventory to carry and no printed books to warehouse.) There will still be books that sell a few dozen copies and disappear forever. But I suspect the average model will become the book that sells, oh, somewhere between 5 and 10k copies. In the current model that is a “killing” number. No publisher can publish books that sell only that forever and make a profit. However, for a book selling at say 3.99 ( for ease of my horrible mathematical sense) published by the author (or a small press) this means either 2.75 or 1.32 in profit for the author, which over 5 to 10k books means an author writing two to three books a year (not unusual) is making a passable living. A living that will GROW every year, as more books are added to the list, and the old ones continue selling.

The end of the book? No Mr. Levin. The end of books that are the equivalent of rotting turnips or size 21 boots for the left foot only. The beginning of the golden age of stories people actually want to read.

*Crossposted at Classical Values.*