In part one of our series, we presented a very brief and high-level history of publishing. If you’re just joining us, what follows will make more sense if you read part one first. For part two, let’s fast-forward into the modern era.
As the number of manuscripts that might be published increased, publishers took on the role of gatekeepers. This gatekeeper role is, at least of late, touted as a filter to keep out sub-standard writing. In some (many?) cases that might be true. However, the reality is that, whatever it started out to be, it has become a filter to keep out writing that publishers don’t think will sell in sufficient quantity to turn a nice profit.
From the publisher’s perspective, it’s not about reading. Publishing is a business—a business that, like any other business, needs to make a profit in order to stay in business.
Traditional publishing is essentially the managing of scarcity, i.e., only a certain number of books can be published by a given publisher in a given year. And even though there are a fair number of publishers, there are far less publishing slots available than there are authors with manuscripts waiting to be published. It’s a buyer’s market and publishers get to cherry-pick from among the manuscripts available to them which ones they will publish.
On its face that sounds fair, but it really isn’t. There was a time when it was fairer than it is now because the playing field was closer to level. Acquisition editors were always on the lookout for good manuscripts and an unknown author with a good book had a reasonable chance of being published. Unfortunately, the general decline in reading and difficult economic times have made this less likely to be the case these days. If it comes down to a publishing slot going to an unknown or going to a well-known author, it will go to the well-known author—even if the unknown author has written a better book. The truth is many great books have fallen by the wayside, not because they were not “worthy,” but because there were only so many slots to fill and the decision was to take the sure thing rather than take a chance. Remember this is business—it’s not about fair—it’s about making money.
Even so, the average book sells only about 500 copies or so and most don’t “earn out” (make enough money to cover the author’s advance); meaning that subsequent books by that author may not be picked up the publisher. This is bad for publishers and bad for authors—who end up working for what amounts to a fairly paltry salary, given the amount of time it takes to write a salable book.
One could argue that this is due to poor decisions on the part of publishers about which books they decide to publish, and there would be an element of truth in that. However, the greatest influence is more likely to be the publisher’s business model: Publishers don’t market to consumers, but to brick-and-mortar bookstores. Bookstores get books at somewhere around half of the cover price and they get to return the books they don’t sell. The meaning of this is that publishers are placing books in bookstores essentially on consignment. If a book is not a “hot” seller right out of the gate, it may have a shelf life of a few short weeks before being sent back to the publisher. This is hardly enough time to develop a word-of-mouth following (which is widely regarded as the best kind of advertising for books) so the book languishes and maybe fails for no other reason than its limited exposure.
Stay tuned for the conclusion.
SDG
