4 4 THE POLARIZATION OF THE FIELD
Up until now we have been analysing three developments that have shaped trade publishing in the English-speaking world – the growth of retail chains, the rise of literary agents and the emergence of publishing corporations – but we haven’t yet considered how the interplay of these three factors has created a field that has a certain structure and dynamic. The aim of the next five chapters is to do just that.
When we examine the field of trade publishing, we are immediately struck by the fact that there are a small number of very large corporations which, between them, command a substantial share of the market, and a large number of very small publishing operations, ranging from small indie presses to a variety of trade associations and educational institutions, with a small and dwindling number of medium-sized players. This polarization of the field is apparent in both the US and the UK – and, as we have seen, most of the large corporations are the same on both sides of the Atlantic. Why does the field of trade publishing become polarized in this way? Why do large corporations become so dominant in the field of trade publishing? Why are there still so many small publishing operations – why aren’t they simply eliminated by the large corporations? And why is it so difficult to be medium-sized?
The benefits of scale
One of the main reasons why large corporations have come to occupy such a prominent role in the field is that there are real benefits of scale that can be achieved in trade publishing. Although any analysis of this kind involves some simplification, there are six main areas where the benefits of scale can be found.
The first area – and the one where economies are most quickly achieved following a merger or acquisition – is the rationalization of the back office, the reduction of overheads and the consolidation of sales forces, warehouses, distribution and other publishing services. All of the large publishing corporations, even the most federal and decentralized, involve some degree of rationalization and consolidation in terms of central services. Business operations like finance, royalties, rights, etc., are commonly centralized, thereby eliminating duplication and reducing headcounts. Warehouses are consolidated into a single distribution service and sales forces may be wholly or partially combined into a single, integrated sales group, generally organized in terms of sales channels and territories. In some cases attempts will be made to reduce overheads further by relocating all or most of the staff to a single building, where different imprints may occupy different floors or may sit alongside one another on the same floor, with different floors or spaces being allocated to editorial, sales, marketing, etc.
The two areas where economies of scale are less easy to achieve are editorial and marketing/publicity. Editorial for reasons we examined in the previous chapter: the creative edge of the business tends to work best in small groups, where editors can be left to work on their own or in collaboration with a few colleagues, and maintaining a multiplicity of editorial units is one way of spreading the risks of trade publishing. Smaller editorial groups also provide a human scale where you most need it – where the organization interacts with authors and agents. Publicity and some aspects of marketing also tend to be decentralized in most publishing corporations and attached to particular imprints or divisions. This is partly in order to maintain a close connection between marketing/publicity and editorial, both for the purposes of acquisition and for the purposes of promotion, and partly to ensure that the imprints or divisions have a human face in one of the other key arenas where personal contact and relations of trust are vital: the media. Even the largest publishing corporations recognize the need to be small where it matters.
The economies achieved through rationalization and consolidation can make a real difference to the profitability of a trade publishing house. Partly because of the high discounts given to retailers (at least 47 per cent, but it can be considerably higher in the UK for reasons we shall examine later), the high advances (a large proportion of which – some put the figure at 85 per cent – never earn out), the high level of returns (on average around 30 per cent, though it can be 60 per cent or more for some frontlist titles) and the need for substantial marketing spend, trade publishing is a low-margin business. To achieve a profit margin of 10 per cent is considered by most senior managers in trade publishing to be an exceptional performance; 6–8 per cent is more typical, 3–4 per cent is not uncommon and 12–15 per cent is rare. This contrasts with higher education publishing or some areas of professional and technical publishing, where the discounts to retailers are much lower (typically 20 per cent for textbooks and 32 per cent for professional books) and profit margins above 20 per cent are considered normal. Hence the economies that can be achieved through rationalization and consolidation can make a real difference to profitability, since any savings in terms of costs will be reflected in an improved bottom line.
The second area where the benefits of scale can be realized is in dealing with suppliers. Publishers work with a variety of different suppliers, including typesetters and printers, and the terms they can get will depend on the volume of business they do – the more business, the better the terms. So a large publisher which can consolidate its business with a few key suppliers will be able to secure much better terms, thereby driving costs out of the supply chain. ‘When I arrived here we were dealing with about 70 printers across the world, printing in different formats,’ explained one senior manager who was responsible for streamlining a large publishing corporation which was making a loss when he arrived. ‘You consolidate into ten and suddenly you can take a lot of cost out of the business. Scale is a great facilitator to turning a business around and making it more profitable.’
Not only does scale enable you to negotiate better terms with suppliers, it also enables you to exact certain advantages which can have a significant, though less obvious, impact on sales and profitability. Given the volume of business they do, the large publishing corporations can put pressure on their key printers to turn around an urgent reprint in three days, whereas a small publisher might have to wait several weeks. In a business where the supply side is characterized by a great deal of uncertainty and wastage and where publishers typically print many more copies than they end up selling, the ability to shave several days off the reprint cycle gives the large publishers a crucial advantage. It means that they can afford to print in smaller quantities, knowing that they can resupply quickly if they need to, and they can put off reprint decisions until they have more information about sales. Enabling the publisher to make more accurate printing decisions by cutting down the time of the reprint cycle reduces the risk of being left with large quantities of unsold stock, which has to be written down and therefore reduces profitability, while at the same time reducing the risk of being temporarily out of stock and unable to fulfil orders, which may result in sales permanently lost.
The third area where large publishers enjoy the benefits of scale is in the negotiation with retailers. With the growth of the large retail chains, the distribution of power in the relation between publishers and retailers shifted decisively towards the retailers. The more market share a retailer has, the more power they have vis-à-vis their suppliers – that is, the publishers – when it comes to negotiating discounts, payment terms, resources for various forms of in-store promotions and marketing, and so on. This shift in the balance of power is particularly evident in the UK, where, unlike in the US, discounts are typically negotiated on a retailer-by-retailer basis; but even in the US the large retailers are able to use their market muscle to negotiate better terms and more money for promotions, among other things. The large publishers are in a much stronger position to resist the pressure for better terms from retailers, and are therefore in a better position to protect their margin when higher discounts and more marketing spend would threaten to erode it. The continued growth of large publishing corporations through further consolidation is in part a response to the shift in the balance of power from publisher to retailer that has occurred over the last couple of decades: it is, in part, a defensive reaction to the growing power of the retail chains.
The large publishers are also in a stronger position when it comes to getting their books into the main retail channels and securing positions of visibility within these channels. They will have dedicated sales teams of sufficient scale to call regularly on the key buyers at all the major retail chains, both bricks-and-mortar and online, specialist booksellers as well as general retailers, discount clubs and supermarkets. They will also have field sales forces to call on the independent booksellers that are spread across the country. While the independents represent a diminishing share of total sales, they remain very important for certain kinds of books, so the capacity to reach them with travelling sales reps gives the large publishers a crucial advantage. Small publishers – especially in the United States with its huge distances – simply cannot afford to maintain a sales force capable of calling on independents up and down the country. They are obliged either to ignore the independents, or to call selectively on a limited number of independents in certain parts of the country, or to buy in sales representation from another publisher or sales and distribution provider, which will give them reach but will not give them the same kind of dedicated sales representation that a large publisher, with its own in-house sales force, can count on.
The large publishers also have the resources you need to achieve high levels of visibility within the key retail channels. All the major bookselling chains – Barnes & Noble, Borders, Waterstone’s, etc. – charge publishers to display books in the key retail spaces at the front of the store. This is very costly, and the more visibility you want – that is, the better the location within the store and the more stores of the chain in which the book is displayed – the more costly it is. The larger the publisher is, the more easily they will be able to absorb these promotion costs. Small publishers will find it difficult to afford the costs of in-store promotions and, if they do it at all, will have to be very selective about the titles they decide to support.
The fourth area where large publishers enjoy benefits of scale is advances. As noted earlier, publishers are competing in two markets: they are competing in a retail market, where they are trying to get their books noticed, stocked and bought by booksellers and readers, and they are competing in a market for content, where they are competing with other publishers to acquire the rights for new books. And just as the growth of the retail chains has shifted the balance of power from publishers to retailers in the retail market, so too the rise of the literary agent has shifted the balance of power from publishers to authors and their agents in the market for content. A publisher who is unable to compete effectively with other publishers in the market for content will lose out; and a fundamental part of being able to compete effectively in this market is the ability to offer advances that compare favourably with what the other major players are able and willing to offer. An imprint or division that is part of a large publishing corporation will have access to corporate resources to pay advances, and this puts them in a much stronger position than that of the small or medium-sized publisher which must fund advances out of their own relatively modest cash reserves. This gives the imprints owned by large corporations a clear competitive advantage in auctions, and it puts them in a strong position to hold on to successful authors or to woo successful authors from elsewhere. Most bestselling authors will migrate to the large corporations (if they are not already there) and, if they move publishers, will usually move from one corporation to another, because it is only the large corporations that can afford to pay the level of advances which these authors and their agents can command.
A fifth benefit of scale is that it enables the large publishers to take hits. It provides them with the kind of financial cushion you need in order to take risks, to invest in books which could do very well but where success is by no means guaranteed. The loss on a seven-figure advance that doesn’t earn out can be absorbed by a large corporation, whereas a write-down of this magnitude would be disastrous for many smaller firms. Similarly, large corporations can afford to print 100,000 or more hardcover books and take the chance that a substantial proportion may not sell. If 80 per cent come back as returns they will not be bankrupt, whereas 80,000 unsold copies of a single title could cripple a smaller firm. Of course, the existence of a financial cushion can lead to a kind of excess, helping to drive up advances and encouraging the large publishers to overprint and push many more books into the marketplace than are likely to be bought. But it also enables the large publishers to take risks, and therefore to benefit from success on those occasions when the risks pay off.
A sixth benefit of scale is that it enables the large publishers to invest in IT and in the infrastructural systems that are so vital for publishing houses today. One consequence of the digital revolution – well known to those who work in the industry but less visible to those outside it – is that most aspects of the publishing process, from the preparation of manuscripts and the typesetting and design of books through to the processes of selling and marketing, the provision of efficient distribution and the management of the supply chain, as well as all the back-office systems like finance, royalties and rights, have been extensively digitized. Re-engineering publishing processes, maintaining IT systems in a state of continuous renewal and providing dedicated IT support staff are costly undertakings, and large publishers are able to invest much more than smaller houses in these less glamorous but extremely important aspects of the publishing business. They are also better able to invest in the kind of infrastructural work, such as creating data archives and digitizing their assets, which will enable them to take advantage of new and emerging revenue streams.
The virtues and vulnerabilities of being small
So in a field characterized by large retail chains and powerful agents who control access to customers and content respectively, there are clear advantages to being big. But the fact that the field of trade publishing is dominated by a handful of large corporations that are able to reap the benefits of scale does not mean that there is a dearth of small publishers today – on the contrary, the rise of large publishing corporations has gone hand in hand with the proliferation of small publishing operations. At first glance this might seem paradoxical: why haven’t the small players been either swept up by the large corporations or forced out of business? What is it about trade publishing that allows for, perhaps even encourages, the proliferation of small publishing operations?
Table 8 Estimated number of active publishers in the US by size, 2004
| 2004 publishing revenue | Estimated number of companies | Estimated % of companies |
| $50 million+ | 502 | 0.8 |
| $1 million–$50 million | 3,580 | 5.7 |
| $50,000–$1 million | 11,872 | 18.9 |
| 0–$50,000 | 46,860 | 74.6 |
| Total | 62,815 | 100.0 |
A ‘publisher’ is defined here as the owner of an ISBN. BISG estimates that, of the 85,000 US publishers in the Bowker database with active ISBNs, 62,815 (or 73.9 per cent) were ‘active publishers’ in 2004, that is, reported that they had revenues from book publishing in 2004.
Source: Under the Radar (Book Industry Study Group, 2005).
Let us look more carefully at what these small publishing operations actually are. It is not as easy to document this region of the field as it is to identify the large publishers, since many small publishing operations remain invisible to governmental organizations and to the main trade associations – they are ‘under the radar’, as a recent report commissioned by the Book Industry Study Group put it.1 Focusing on the United States, the BISG report estimates that, of the 62,815 active publishers in 2004, 93.6 per cent (or 58,795) had publishing revenues of less than $1 million, and 74.6 per cent (or 46,860) had publishing revenues of less than $50,000 (see table 8).2 While publishers with revenues less than $1 million represented over 90 per cent of active publishers, they accounted for less than 10 per cent of total book sales (around $2.7 billion, out of total book sales in the US of around $29 billion in 2004). However, publishers in the next group up, with publishing revenues between $1 million and $50 million, generated about $11.5 billion in sales, or around 40 per cent of total book sales. BISG estimates that there are around 3,580 companies that fall into this group of small to medium-sized publishers.
What are described as ‘publishers’ in this study are a very diverse array of organizations and entities. The definition of a ‘publisher’ used in this study is based on the ownership of an ISBN (an International Standard Book Number, which, following the introduction of the Standard Book Number (SBN) in 1967, has become the standard code for identifying a book), and an ‘active publisher’ is defined as the owner of an ISBN who reports revenue from book publishing during the year. At the lower end of the scale, many publishers are, in fact, self-publishers – individuals who acquire an ISBN in order to publish a book or pamphlet on their own, or with the help of the numerous self-publishing services that can be found on the internet. Of the publishers earning less than $50,000 per year, 46 per cent were self-publishers (the other largest group being small independent publishers, who also represented 46 per cent). As revenues increased, self-publishers declined as a proportion of the group, and independent publishers, trade associations, educational institutions and corporations became more important. For example, among the active publishers earning between $500,000 and $1 million in 2004, 75.8 per cent consisted of independent publishers, 11.3 per cent were university presses and educational institutions, 8.1 per cent were associations of various kinds and 3.2 per cent were corporations whose core business is something other than publishing.3
The BISG study does not give us an accurate picture of the distribution of economic capital in the field of US trade publishing, nor does it aim to do so. The figures are based on responses by a relatively small proportion of the total number of publishers in the US (3,234 out of 85,000), so the estimates of the total number of companies in each category are very approximate at best. The study does not deal specifically with trade publishing but covers all forms of book publishing, from adult trade and children’s books to professional, scholarly and college textbook publishing. Moreover, the definition of a ‘publisher’ as the ownership of an ISBN takes no account of who owns the owners of ISBNs: a number of imprints which own their own ISBNs, such as Random House, Knopf, Ballantine and Doubleday, may be owned by the same corporation (and, in this case, they actually are). Hence the estimated number of companies is unlikely to be an accurate reflection of the number of autonomous publishing entities. Nevertheless, the study very helpfully underscores the fact that consolidation within the publishing industry has not precluded the existence of a large number of smaller publishing operations.
Why are there so many small book publishing operations? One reason is that entry costs to the field are very low. This has always been the case, but the digital revolution has lowered the entry costs even further. The development of cheap desktop publishing software has made it possible for authors to publish their own work, and a variety of self-publishing organizations – Book Guild, AuthorHouse, Lulu, Xlibris, YouPublish, iUniverse, Matador, to mention just a few – have sprung up online to offer self-publishing services to authors. ISBNs can be obtained easily and inexpensively online. Printing can be done either through small traditional offset printing or, if the print run is low, through short-run digital printing or print on demand. Given the ease of self-publishing in the digital age, it is not surprising that self-publishers comprise nearly half of the publishers with annual revenues of less than $50,000 in the BISG study.
But the digital revolution has reduced costs for small independent publishers too and made it easier for them to start up and survive in the field of trade publishing. Over a period of two or three decades, the entire book production process, from the creation of the original text to the typesetting, design and printing of the book, has been transformed by the digital revolution. The role of typesetters changed and their costs fell dramatically; and with the growing availability of desktop publishing software, one could, if one wished, bypass traditional typesetters altogether. The rise of the internet also made it much easier for publishers to work with suppliers in India and the Far East, which reduced costs still further.
Small publishing operations are also facilitated by the fact that so much of the publishing process can be outsourced. A publisher does not have to employ its own copy-editors and designers – these tasks can be outsourced to freelancers or small companies. Nearly all publishers today, small and large, outsource typesetting and printing. Distribution and sales representation can also be outsourced, either to specialized organizations like Consortium, a sales and distribution company based in St Paul, Minnesota which offers sales and distribution services to publishers and charges a commission on sales, or to existing publishers which take on other publishers as clients and provide sales and distribution services for an agreed commission charge. Marketing and publicity services can also be bought in, although this is less common and less effective. The ability to outsource most of the publishing functions means that a small publisher can set up and operate with very little initial outlay and expertise. A computer, a telephone line, a kitchen table, a small amount of working capital and a name – that’s enough.
To a large extent, this world of small presses exists as a parallel universe to the world of the large corporate publishers. The worlds don’t overlap very often because the gulf between them, in terms of the scale of resources they have at their disposal, is just too great. The world of small presses is itself very diverse and comprises many different kinds of organizations, ranging from small operations run by one or two people working out of their own apartment or house and doing this in their spare time, in the evenings and weekends, to well-established businesses that have their own premises and employ several members of staff on a full- or part-time basis. In addition to private businesses, they include a variety of not-for-profit organizations, like The New Press in Manhattan, Archipelago Books in Brooklyn and Graywolf Press and Milkweed Editions in Minnesota. The financial constraints on not-for-profits are different from the constraints operating on small publishers acting as private businesses. Not-for-profits are tax-exempt and most receive grants from foundations, trusts and individuals; grants can comprise half or even two-thirds of their income, which cushions them to some extent from the harsh realities of the marketplace.
Whereas the large publishers benefit from an economy of scale, the small publishers benefit from what we could call an economy of favours. This economy of favours operates in many different ways. One way it operates is that small presses commonly share knowledge, expertise and contacts with one another. They see themselves as part of a common vocation and shared mission. Their competitive rivalries are overshadowed by the affinities that stem from their common sense of purpose, their shared understanding of the difficulties faced by all small publishers and their collective opposition to the world of the big corporate houses. They will recommend designers to one another, share sales figures with one another and so on. ‘They’re all good for different kinds of questions,’ said one small publisher based in Brooklyn. ‘[X] is very good with numbers so we’ll ask him, “Oh, you did this book last year, we’re thinking of doing a similar book, did it do well?” He’ll give us the exact figures. [Y] is good because he’s given us designers and things like that. [Z] is just kind of friendly and we hang out most with him.’ The fact that there are clusters of small indie presses in the same area – such as Brooklyn, where real estate is much cheaper than Manhattan and there is a vibrant cultural scene – facilitates the exchange of information and the intermingling of experience.
Another way that the economy of favours operates is in terms of the rates charged by freelancers for providing services to small independent publishers. In practice, a dual economy operates within the field, with many freelancers charging (and expecting to be paid) one rate by the large corporate publishers, while agreeing to work for small indie presses at a much lower rate. ‘We have the best book designers in the country,’ explained the owner of one indie press. ‘They can do a job for Random House and they’ll charge them $4,000. We’ll get the same book cover for $300.’ The contrast here may be slightly overstated. One freelance designer who works for both the large corporate publishers and the small indie presses explained that the going rate for the corporate publishers is $2,000–$2,500 plus the artwork for most books (and if you’re a well-known designer you can charge more), whereas the small independents typically pay $700–$1,000, and sometimes freelancers will do jackets for indie presses for as little as $200 (or even for free if they really want to do it, or want to build their portfolio). Whichever way you look at it, the small indie presses pay much less for freelance design – at least half, but probably more like a third or less – than the large corporations.
Why are freelancers willing to accept so much less from the small independents? Some freelancers are willing to work for less (or even for free) because they need the work and the experience and they don’t yet have the connections you need to get freelance jobs from the large corporations. But even those who do jobs for the large corporations are often willing to work for the small indie presses at lower rates because they share the ethos of the indie presses and/or they find it rewarding to do so. Some freelancers see themselves as part of the same cultural and political project, sympathizing with their radical political views, their countercultural values and their anti-corporate stance. ‘Ethically I support independent publishing companies and I respect what they’re doing,’ said one freelance designer. ‘I feel that if anybody deserves good design to sell their books and compete, they do, and I’d love to be able to give it to them. If we can continue to offer our services to small companies and offer the same services to a big company then at least it will level the visual playing field of the business.’ Others are happy to work for less for the small indie presses simply because they like the books or the authors and they find it satisfying, both professionally and personally, to design the covers. Their reasons are more aesthetic and professional than political. ‘Here’s one I did for $200,’ said one well-established freelance designer who earns his living by working for the large publishing corporations but still does work for much less for indie presses. ‘I did it because of the subject matter – I just think it’s an important book and I’m very happy that they’re publishing it.’ He continues to work for the indie presses because he sees it as a creative challenge and he likes the content, even though he could make more money if he only accepted work from the large corporate publishers. ‘There are all kinds of different designers, but I do it because I love to do it. I don’t do it for the money, I do it because of the satisfaction of making things.’
The economy of favours can also operate at the retail level. ‘There’s definitely an affinity between independent bookstores and independent publishers,’ said the owner of one small publishing house in Brooklyn who regularly organizes events with several independent bookstores in the New York area. ‘They love what we do, they love how we do it, they love what we stand for.’ But it’s not just the independents – ‘We have a strong affinity with Barnes & Noble too.’ He explained how one of the buyers at Barnes & Noble had read and really liked one of his books, and loved the cover too. ‘So she put this book at the front of Barnes & Noble and kept it there for two years.’ They paid some co-op money to Barnes & Noble, ‘but had we been Simon & Schuster, Barnes & Noble would’ve demanded a lot more money than they demanded from us’. Thanks in part to the heavy exposure it got in Barnes & Noble, this book went on to become this publisher’s bestselling title, selling over 70,000 copies in Barnes & Noble alone. ‘The buyers at Barnes & Noble don’t want to think they’re crushing little companies,’ explained this small independent publisher. ‘They care about books and they care about the literary landscape, so they want to support independent presses. A lot of floor managers at Barnes & Noble’s are young people, young college graduates who notice our books and care about our books. So even in Chicago or LA, we’re really well represented in Barnes & Noble and it’s coming from the top but also from the bottom.’
The small independent presses do not just exist in a different space and benefit from a different kind of economy than the large corporate publishers, they also tend to operate in different ways. At the outset they often depend on an injection of cash from the founder-owner(s), in some cases supplemented by resources from family and/or friends, which provides the necessary working capital. The company is commonly subsidized by the unpaid, or only partly paid, labour of the founder-owner(s), who may have savings or other resources to fall back on or who, in some cases, may have other jobs to pay their bills. Costs are often kept to a minimum by working from home or renting offices in low-rent premises such as disused factories. If there are paid employees, they often work long hours for modest salaries, and much of the routine work is done by unpaid interns. ‘There’s a daily scrimping process,’ explained one owner. ‘With every encounter that involves money, I’m angling for ways to cut the costs because there’s just no cushion or room to manoeuvre.’ Some small publishing houses have benefited from one or two books that became unexpected successes and generated a windfall that temporarily eased the cash flow, enabled them to clear debts and invest in future growth. But in financial terms, most small publishers live from hand to mouth, constantly worried about cash flow, juggling bills and in some cases funding the business by running up debts on personal credit cards. ‘We printed a whole season on credit card debt,’ said one small publisher in Brooklyn.
In editorial terms, small publishers are much less dependent on agents than the large houses, for the simple reason that they are unable or unwilling to pay advances at a level that most agents would regard as minimally acceptable. So when agents go out with a new book, the small indie presses are very unlikely to be on their ‘A’ list or even their ‘B’ list. There are exceptions. There are occasions when an agent may feel that a particular book would be a good fit on the list of a certain small press, and there are some small presses who are willing to pay modest but significant advances for a book that they really want to publish. But it is more commonly the case that agents will turn to the small presses only when they have failed to sell a book to one of the large or medium-sized houses which are able and willing to pay substantial advances. Some agents, especially the younger ones, may then be willing to sell to a small press for a small advance because, at this stage, there may be no real alternative apart from dropping the project altogether, and they may feel that it is better to place the book with a small press for a small advance in the hope that it will help to build the author’s career and lead to better deals with bigger presses in the future.
Since the small presses cannot rely on agents to provide them with new content, they have to devise other acquisition strategies. How they do this varies from press to press. Some use strategies very similar to those of young agents: they go to literary festivals and writers’ events, read literary journals, magazines and newspapers, scouting for new talent and looking for new authors and ideas to pursue. Some rely more on their own personal contacts and networks, their accumulated social capital, following up recommendations from existing authors, friends and acquaintances. ‘A lot of the books we get are through friends,’ commented one small publisher. ‘So I sort of rely on my social world to be the agents for the books I publish.’ Others seek to commission books from individuals who have developed a presence and a following in the blogosphere. ‘We were personally very involved in the political blogosphere,’ explained the owner of one small press, ‘so we thought we should start doing books out of the blogosphere. It’s kind of a new movement that most publishers don’t understand because you’ve got to kind of be part of it to really know who’s big and who’s not big and what ideas sell and what ideas don’t sell.’ Most small presses rely on some combination of these methods, together with an element, especially with non-fiction, of good old-fashioned brainstorming – thinking up ideas that would make good books and then trying to find authors to write them. Small presses also receive a large amount of unsolicited material and, while they may initially look through this material conscientiously, many soon realize that they have to close the doors – ‘It took me about five or six years to realise how many hours were spent reading manuscripts that we weren’t publishing, because if you have a slush pile the percentage that you’re going to end up publishing of unsolicited manuscripts is really small.’ The more established a small press becomes, the more likely it is that it will receive submissions from agents and that the proportion of agented material will grow, but the relation between agents and small presses is generally less harmonious than the relations between agents and editors or publishers at the large houses simply because the gulf between the financial aspirations of agents and the economic realities of small presses is so great.
Most small presses tend to be strongly editorially driven and to publish books about which the founder-owner(s) feel passionate. This is a world in which passion, commitment and belief play a crucial role – whether it is political commitment, countercultural beliefs or a passion for certain kinds of writing and literature. That the books taken on should sell and make money matters, of course, but this is rarely the most important consideration. ‘We had a staff meeting yesterday where I introduced to the staff four novels that I’ve recently read and that I want to consider for publication because I like all four of them to varying degrees,’ explained the founder-owner of one small indie press which has achieved some success. ‘None of those books have bestseller written on them and I’m proud of that. To me that’s grounding and I love that, I need that because it lets me know that I’m still in it for the reasons why I got in it. I hope we can succeed with any of the four books but truthfully none of the four is likely to sell very well. But I’m really excited about them.’ Commercial success is not frowned upon, and most small publishers would be only too pleased to have a book that was a runaway success – ‘You want the books to be read. That is the goal. And in fact I would love it if we sold a million books and suddenly had lots of cash in the bank.’ But most books are taken on not because the founder-owner(s) thinks they actually will be very successful in commercial terms, but for other reasons. And the fact that commercial success is generally a secondary concern gives the small presses a leeway to experiment with what might be seen as small, more marginal and offbeat books in a way that the large houses are less likely to do.
The downplaying of commercial considerations in many small presses is often coupled with a view, articulated with varying degrees of passion, of the shortcomings and inadequacies of the world of the big corporate publishers. For many small indie presses, the world of corporate publishing is seen as a sphere of commodification in which money reigns supreme and where cultural values and commitments have been sacrificed to commercial ends. The founder-owner of one small indie press put it very well:
A lot of people are dismayed by the direction that publishing and culture in general have moved, particularly in the United States – by the corporate commodification of all culture. Whether it’s the music industry or the book publishing industry, every year decision-making processes are controlled more and more by the bottom line and I think people find it refreshing that we’re driven by an editorial imperative, an aesthetic imperative, and the bottom line takes a back seat. And I think that in a culture moving in a different direction, people like to see what we’re doing and therefore support us. Even people at Random House and Simon & Schuster will talk about how noble what we do is. Having said that, I don’t think of myself as out of sync with the direction our culture is heading. And in fact, when I hear people in publishing pining about the good old days when people cared more about books, I reject that, because to me it’s actually a very conservative mode of thought. I embrace the fact that culture changes, pop culture develops. I don’t have a problem with the number of readers there are in society; I think the burden is on us book publishers to engage people in transforming society. So we are very countercultural. A lot of our books explore things on, or are written by authors who sort of fancy themselves on, the periphery of mainstream society.
Of course, not all small publishers see themselves as countercultural, or position themselves in opposition to what some see as the commercialization of mainstream publishing. There are some small publishers who see themselves as more mainstream, seeking to publish the same kinds of books as larger houses and taking some of the more successful independents (or former independents) as their models. ‘Fourth Estate was a real model to me,’ recalled the co-owner of one small independent house in Britain. ‘They were the house I looked at with huge admiration for brilliant, creative, innovative publishing, doing a lot of books I liked. Harvill and Faber remained the lists that I really cared about in terms of the deep backlist and the fiction.’ This small publisher was motivated not by radical political beliefs or countercultural values – ‘I’m not some freak who has strange tastes’ – but simply by the love of good literature and a firm belief in his own ability to recognize quality when he sees it. Being small has its limitations in terms of the resources that are available for new acquisitions among other things, but this is offset in his view by the intimacy and personal touch that only a small house can provide. ‘To me, the very reading experience is one of the most intimate things there is, and therefore I think the place that books come out of should be an intimate environment. And I think you can affect things in more minute detail if you’re working in a smaller house, and just more care and love goes into the actual publishing.’ He is happy to remain small or to grow at only a modest rate and he values the fact that, as a small privately owned independent, he doesn’t have to publish for the bottom line – ‘I’d never want to be going down that route.’
Regardless of the differences in the beliefs and aspirations that motivate small publishers, they all share one thing in common: vulnerability. Their smallness gives them a degree of freedom and creativity – they can be nimble, move quickly, experiment with unconventional books, or simply publish books they like, without having to pay as much attention as large publishers to the prospective financial contribution of a book they want to take on. But their smallness also renders them vulnerable in several ways – consider five.
In the first place, most small publishers are undercapitalized and they experience cashflow problems more or less constantly. Given the long production cycles, advances must be paid to authors, and bills from typesetters, designers and printers must be paid, well before a book is actually published; and even when it is published, the payment terms with retailers and wholesalers generally mean that a publisher will be paid 90 or 120 days after the stock is shipped to the customer. Hence a publisher needs substantial working capital simply to fund work in progress. Every advance paid locks up capital in a new book project which may or may not materialize and, even if it does materialize, may or may not earn out. Every print run decision locks up capital in stock which may or may not sell, or which may be provisionally sold to a retailer or wholesaler only to be returned some months later for full credit. For large publishers with substantial cash reserves, these cashflow issues are important but they are not life-threatening. For small independent presses, however, they are a constant source of anxiety. Most small publishers will say that the hardest thing about running a small press is money, capital, cash flow, ‘because the whole business is predicated on being able to finance something nine months out, or 12 months out’. ‘I would love to have a line of credit,’ said one small publisher in Brooklyn. ‘We are totally desperate for a line of credit. Basically it’s really difficult to get financing for new publishers because banks really don’t understand why young publishers need so much capital to start out and why it’s such a heavy cashflow business where you bottom out and then you have money coming in all sorts of times and you don’t have a constant cash flow. So you need large amounts of capital and then you don’t see that returned for a while. We need a line of credit – that’s the hardest thing.’ In the absence of cash reserves and good credit arrangements, many small publishers find themselves juggling bills and deciding which to pay and which to keep on hold. In some cases they may find themselves relying on a bridging loan from their distributor, who may be prepared to lend them money against future earnings. Some small presses may have to curtail new book production simply because they are not in a position to pay the printer’s bills. And for some, the risk of bankruptcy is ever-present.
A second source of vulnerability for small presses is that they often find it difficult to get the kind of attention for their books in the media that they need in order to drive sales. Many small presses are not in a position to pay for a full-time publicity manager – in many small houses, the owner-founders take on the responsibility of dealing with the press and invest a good deal of their own time and energy in this. But even those small houses that can afford dedicated publicity staff often struggle to get the kind of media attention that the large publishers or more established imprints are able to get. ‘If there’s a book review editor that’s on the edge, like should I do this book by this small publisher or this book from Knopf, I mean which one’s going to be more important? Which one’s going to look better on the book page? Probably the Knopf book, and ours will get pushed back,’ commented a publicity manager at one small house. He felt that even on those occasions when their books were covered in the media, the reviews tended to appear much later than they did with books from the major imprints at the large corporations, so that the momentum you need in order to drive sales when the books are actually in the bookstores was dissipated. ‘If the review runs late and then people see the review and want the book but they’re being returned, it just becomes a nightmare. And that has happened over and over.’
Others are even more despondent. ‘It seems to be incredibly difficult for independent presses to get serious book reviews,’ said the owner of one small publishing house. ‘And when I say serious book reviews I mean in the serious publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post and the New York Review of Books and so forth. They tend not to review a lot of little independent press type books, they tend not to review many trade paperbacks, and they tend not to review outsider authors – people that don’t have any kind of track record or literary credentials. They like to review books by known names.’ This small publisher has more or less given up trying to get reviews in newspapers like the New York Times or book review supplements like the New York Times Book Review – ‘We almost don’t even bother.’ He has been publishing for seven years and he has never had a review in the New York Times or the Washington Post or the New York Review of Books. Their books have been reviewed in other major newspapers, like the Boston Globe, the Dallas Morning News and the Houston Chronicle, ‘so it’s not that it’s a complete lock-out by major newspapers’. But like many small publishers, he has found that focusing on other forms of publicity, like radio and internet, has proven to be a better use of his time.
A third source of vulnerability is the dependence that many small presses have on one or two highly successful books. The growth pattern of many small trade houses is like this: sales tick over very modestly for a number of years and the company is loss-making; then suddenly, and usually quite unexpectedly, they have a book that takes off, perhaps because it wins a major prize, gets picked by Oprah or the Richard and Judy Book Club4 or gets a big review in a major media outlet like the New York Times Book Review; this surprise success produces a sudden influx of cash that increases the company’s revenue by a multiple of two, three or even more; after years of running at a loss, they suddenly find themselves profitable and with cash in the bank. Now the problems they face change: they are profitable and successful but success in trade publishing is short-lived. A successful book, whether fiction or non-fiction, may continue to sell well as a backlist title, but the spike in sales that it produced as a bestselling frontlist title will fall off very quickly. The publisher will need to find new ways to try to prevent revenues from falling back to where they were before their unexpected success. The newer the publisher is, the smaller their backlist will be and the more they will depend on finding another exceptionally successful book to sustain their growth. Given that there is often an element of luck in success of this kind, the task is not easy and there is always a risk that, in the absence of another bestseller, sales will plummet.
Those small publishers who are fortunate enough to have a surprise success respond to this dilemma in different ways. Some use the proceeds of their success to acquire other small companies or lists, partly in an attempt to build up their backlist. Others use the resources to grow organically, taking on new staff and buying more – and more expensive – books. Either path increases overheads and accentuates the need to maintain revenues (or prevent them from falling too far). Moreover, achieving success with one or two books changes the way that other players in the field view the house. A small publisher that was not even on the radar screens of agents will suddenly find themselves receiving submissions from them, with the expectation that they will be able to pay competitive advances. A small house that previously eschewed agents and advances may find itself drawn into a game that it can ill afford to play, and the risk of overpaying in the hope of generating another success is a constant danger. ‘Your success leads you to being more above the parapet,’ explained the head of one small house which had enjoyed enormous success a few years earlier with a novel that had been turned down by all the big houses and went on to win the Booker Prize. ‘The dangers now are that we overpay for books, we spend too much money and we have to write off not only lots of stock but big advances too. You have to be extremely focused in your publishing and make sure that everyone in the house is similarly responsible in their different ways.’
A fourth source of vulnerability for small houses is losing their authors. A small house may be willing to take a chance with an author who is overlooked or turned down by the bigger houses and may then find that, if the book is successful, the author and his or her agent want to ‘test the market’ for the next book and see what other publishers are willing to pay. This may force the small house either to pay an advance which is higher than is sensible for them, given their limited cash reserves, or to back out of the competitive situation and allow the author to go elsewhere. This makes it very difficult for small houses to hold on to authors and to build their careers in the way that larger houses can, and therefore makes it difficult for them to reap the long-term rewards of their willingness to take risks at the beginning of an author’s career. Most small publishers can cite examples of how an author whom they published when the big houses were not interested, or whose work they came across and actively supported, subsequently decided, often with the encouragement of an agent, to move to a bigger house which was able to pay a much larger advance for their next book (or even for the book that the small publisher had been urging the author to write).
Small publishers respond to this predicament in different ways. Some take the view that this is perfectly understandable and a natural consequence of the structure of the field. ‘I respect my authors and they treat us with respect,’ said the founder-owner of a small publishing house in Brooklyn. ‘So if they’re in a situation where they write a new book and I’m interested in publishing it and there’s another publisher, like Random House, who is going to give them $75,000, that’s their decision. And they know what’s best for them a hell of a lot more than I know what’s best for them. I think it’s really arrogant when any publisher gets mad at their authors for leaving them because if you respect your authors, then you have to respect their ability to make the best decision for themselves.’ However, even this publisher admitted to feeling used and betrayed on occasion. He cited the case of a foreign author whom he had gone out of his way to meet and whom he had helped a great deal, reading and revising the text in minute detail – ‘literally touching every single sentence, essentially rewriting every sentence in the book’ – and then, when the author was named as a finalist for a big award, ‘we were suddenly small beans. And that was just awful. I felt betrayed. None of it would’ve ever started had I not gone to meet him, had I not edited every sentence of his book to make it what it was.’
Small publishers can try to minimize the risks of authors leaving by forging close relationships with the authors they want to keep – making up in human and social capital for what they lack in economic capital. The owner of one small house put it like this:
If an author decides to go, that’s ultimately their decision. But you can try and decrease the chances of that happening by publishing them in a way that the bigger houses can’t. They have a relationship with you – not just me as the publisher but also with the editorial director, with our publicity director, our rights director, with all the different people that are part of this small company, people who are enormously talented and really good to work with. And you have to hope that authors are going to recognize that and appreciate it and feel that that’s worth a lot more than just being offered more money up front by another publisher.
While this small publisher worked hard to keep his authors by trying to provide them with the kind of personal attention and care – ‘intimacy’ was his way of describing it – that they would be less likely to get at a larger house, he was under no illusions about the risks. Already he had lost several authors to larger houses, and the dangers are common knowledge to all small publishers. ‘It’s like M [the owner of a medium-sized independent house] always says to me, “Just you wait, the more books you’ve got, the more times you’ll be fucked over by agents.”’
A fifth source of vulnerability is the dependence of small publishers on third-party sales and distribution arrangements. Sales representation, warehousing of stock and distribution (or order fulfilment) are areas where economies of scale in publishing really do matter. Although the growth of the retail chains and the centralization of buying in the chains, coupled with the decline of the independent bookstores, has reduced the need to maintain large sales forces which travel the country and call on a myriad of bookstores, it is nevertheless vital for publishers to have a team of sales reps who can call regularly on the national accounts and on the most important independent bookstores; and if they wish to sell their books in international markets, they need sales reps who can call on accounts overseas. All of this is very costly and it is very difficult, if not impossible, for a small independent publisher to maintain a sales force on a scale that would enable it to achieve good representation on a national level, let alone internationally. Similarly with warehousing and distribution: these are specialized functions that require high levels of staffing and investment in order to be run in an efficient, state-of-the-art way, and small publishers are simply not in a position to support staffing and investment of this kind. Hence, most small publishers will find themselves turning to third parties in order to buy in sales and distribution services.
There are two main sources of sales and distribution provision to which small publishers can turn. On the one hand, there are organizations, such as Consortium, which are specialized in providing sales and distribution services to small publishers. They have many clients – Consortium represents over a hundred small presses – and they produce composite seasonal catalogues that present new titles from all of the presses they serve. The other source of sales and distribution provision is large or medium-sized publishers who have their own warehouses and sales forces and who are willing to take on third-party clients; at a time when sales growth is hard to achieve and when it is becoming more and more difficult to justify maintaining a field sales force (that is, a sales team that calls on the dwindling number of independent bookstores), the extra revenue that can be generated from taking on third-party clients is a welcome addition for some of the large and medium-sized houses.
For small publishers, contracting out sales and distribution can work well, but it has several downsides. First, it means that the small publisher’s books are being sold by reps who are also selling books by other publishers and who are therefore not able to give their undivided attention to the books of the small house. There is always the worry among small publishers who have third-party sales arrangements that their books are being overlooked or are not being given the priority that they would be given if they were being sold by reps employed by the house itself – ‘You’re always a stepchild,’ as one publisher put it.
The second downside is that sales and distribution services of this kind are expensive. The organizations which provide sales and distribution services generally charge their clients a commission on sales. The commission can vary widely, depending on the service provided and the size of the client among other things, but it commonly ranges between 20 and 26 per cent for full sales representation and distribution. This amounts to a serious drain on the already very limited resources of small houses. If they are selling their books at a full trade discount of, say, 48 per cent, and they are paying 20 per cent for sales and distribution, then the sale of a book retailing for $15 will provide them with revenue of only $6.24, from which they must pay royalties and cost of sales as well as marketing expenses and other overheads. ‘You just can’t run a profitable business if you’re paying 20 per cent out for your sales and distribution function,’ said one small publisher. ‘And if you’re operating on 26 per cent, you’re probably really losing money.’ In his view, the need to contract out sales and distribution was the single most important limitation they faced as a small independent house: ‘We’ve had our ups and downs with sales but we’ve made some really good books. All said and done, we should be doing a lot better than we are, and I think the removal of sales and distribution from within the walls of your own house is the explanation – you know, the financial numbers are not there, and also just the kind of control and input isn’t there either.’ He may be overstating the debilitating effect of these costs, but there can be no doubt that the commissions charged for sales and distribution are onerous for small publishers.
Contracting out sales and distribution also means that small publishers, whose position is precarious already, are dependent on the financial stability of a third party who holds their stock and is responsible for collecting their revenue. Some distributors guarantee receivables for their distributees but not all do, and if a distributor were to encounter financial difficulties or go bankrupt then the position of the small publishers who were its clients could become critical. This hypothetical situation became a grim reality for many small and medium-sized publishers in the US in 2007, and some were forced into bankruptcy following the collapse of Advanced Marketing Services, the parent company of Publishers Group West which distributed books for more than 130 independent publishers. PGW was founded in Berkeley, California in 1976 by a young Stanford University graduate, Charlie Winton, as a sales, marketing and distribution collective for small publishers. Over the years it built up a substantial client base which included many well-known small and medium-sized trade houses like McSweeney’s, Soft Skull, Milkweed and Grove Atlantic. Winton established a reputation as an active supporter of small presses, frequently advancing money to his clients to ease their cashflow problems. But in 2002 Winton sold the business to Advanced Marketing Services, a large distribution company based in San Diego, so that he could focus on his own publishing activities. Following the discovery of irregularities in AMS’s accounting practices, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 29 December 2006. This meant that the end-of-year sales revenues of the publishers who were clients of PGW were frozen. In early 2007, the Perseus Books Group, based in New York, took over many of PGW’s clients, offering them a 70-cents-on-the-dollar settlement for revenues owed. But for some small publishers who were already living from hand to mouth, the temporary collapse of PGW and the freezing of revenues proved to be the last straw. ‘The independents got fucked by the Enron of publishing,’ as one small publisher, forced into bankruptcy by the affair, graphically put it.
Let us make these considerations more concrete by walking into the offices of a small publishing house, ‘Sparrow Press’, on the outskirts of New York. Sparrow’s offices are located in one of the old disused factories that are scattered across areas like Brooklyn, Hoboken and Jersey City. The red brick walls, chimney stacks and narrow corridors lined with heating pipes and strip lighting attest to a building designed in another age for another purpose, but now the machinery is silent and the floors have been divided into loft spaces for small businesses and artistic collectives of various kinds. Sparrow has an open-plan loft space that is notionally split into separate offices by free-standing bookshelves and screens. Now they have two full-time employees and a couple of unpaid interns working for them but when they began it was a two-person, husband and wife, operation. They started, five or six years earlier, with no knowledge of publishing – ‘It’s really amazing how little we knew’ – and very little capital. They were motivated to publish a book that had arisen out of specific political circumstances, and they wanted to publish it themselves because this was, in part, a way of taking a stand against the established media – ‘A lot of what we were doing was saying “screw the media”.’ Publishing the book themselves rather than going to an established publisher was a way of intervening in a public debate and public arena without having to rely on existing media organizations. ‘Books still have a power here and they’re a part of the media that nobody really acknowledges as part of the media.’ They thought of themselves more as artists than as business people, and making a book was more like an art project than a commercial venture – ‘We were artists and we didn’t think a lot about money. We did it for art’s sake.’
They learned how to publish a book by calling friends and getting advice and help from others, but much of it was learning by trial and error. ‘You would not believe the errors we made – it’s just astonishing.’ With the first book the colour of the cover came out wrong and they made the printer rip off every single cover and redo them – ‘It was like one debacle on top of another.’ Like many small presses, they funded the first and subsequent books by using personal savings, gifts and credit cards – ‘We printed on credit cards.’ After a couple of years they took on investors, family and friends who were willing to put a modest amount of capital into the venture, and they got a line of credit from a bank. But ‘like most small businesses, we were totally undercapitalized and we’ve never recovered from that. We’re always a day late and a dollar short.’ Their output nevertheless grew rapidly, rising from two books in the first year to 20 or more by year four. They worked from their apartment for the first couple of years before taking space in the old factory. Their early books sold modestly; some got a certain amount of media attention and did better than others but sales were modest and, in financial terms, they were living from hand to mouth. And then suddenly they had a big success – a book that other houses had turned down, they took on and, when it was published, it struck a chord. They sold 20,000 in cloth before releasing it in paperback. This success generated an influx of cash but the reprieve was temporary and the success of this book highlighted the problems they faced as a small publisher in the field. ‘We would need to have a series of bestsellers every year to really be able to make this system work,’ but it’s difficult for them to achieve this for various reasons.
In the first place, they don’t have the money to print the books. If the retail chains get excited about a book and want to take 5,000 or 10,000 copies, this becomes a huge outlay of resources for them. They will also have to pay co-op to the chains in order to get the books displayed in the stores. They will have to price it at a level that will reduce their profit margins. And then, even if the book sells well, they are likely to be faced with high returns, at least 20 per cent, possibly as high as 50 per cent, which will be credited to the retailer and deducted from their receivables by their distributor, though they still have to pay the printer’s bills. ‘We call it “feeding the beast”. You have to feed the goddam beast and it just doesn’t work.’ As the returns come back they undo much of the gain they thought they had achieved with a book that seemed to be selling well – ‘I think of them as little time bombs planted along the way.’ Of course, the big houses get high returns too, but they can afford to take the hits in a way that Sparrow cannot. As a small house with limited resources, they have to try to reduce the risks of overprinting and high returns by printing more cautiously – ‘We have to print very close to the bone. We can’t afford to over-print on the off chance that the book will hit and start moving fast.’ But then they find themselves running the risk of being out of stock at the very moment when a book starts to sell and, unlike the large publishers, they don’t have the clout to get the printers to deliver a reprint in a few days. ‘If we’d been Random House and we could print in a day and ship in a couple of days, we would have sold 300,000 copies of this,’ said one of Sparrow’s owners, holding up a brightly covered paperback novel. ‘This thing was hot. But we simply couldn’t make the books. We couldn’t make enough books and we couldn’t make them fast enough. I was literally on my knees, I was begging the printers, but the fastest we could get them out was three weeks. We really missed a lot of the heat of the thing.’
Many of the books they signed up emerged out of their own commissioning. They would think up an idea for a book and then try to find an author or set of authors to write it, or they would read an article or hear an author speak and then ask them if they would be interested in turning it into a book. Once they had a bestseller they were on the radar screens of agents who began sending things to them with ever-greater frequency, but they preferred not to work with agents because they found that the expectations of agents, both in terms of advances and in terms of controlling rights, were not financially manageable for them. ‘It’s about accelerated money. They need a lot of money, they need it up front, they need accelerated schedules, they need to control rights – all the things the big houses have slowly granted them over the years. We’re always trying to slow down the money, to work with the cash flow.’ There have been occasions when they came up with the idea for a book and approached an author, or worked with a writer to develop a book they were writing, only to find that as soon as an agent got involved they would lose the book. ‘The author will love the idea and they’ll say, “That’s fantastic, let’s do it, just call my agent and tell her I said it’s a go.” And you call the agent and the agent will say, “Well, we’re gonna need $20,000, we’re gonna need it tomorrow and we’re gonna keep all the rights.” We tend to avoid them. The pie just isn’t big enough for that third person. That’s the flat out economic reason for it.’
They also found it very difficult to get media attention for their books. In the first few years they did a lot of books on topical, newsworthy issues and they thought they would get plenty of review coverage in the media, but they soon came to realize that this view was naive. As they now see it, the main print review media are in cahoots with the big publishers and it’s very hard for small publishers to get their attention. ‘It’s a very exclusive club and it’s very hard to break into. They don’t take things from outside all that seriously.’ The big houses are able to build a book in the media through a combination of promotion and publicity. ‘In the big houses, if something begins to go, you pour fuel on the fire and make it burn faster. But you’re just not able to do that with a house this size.’ Now they don’t bother much with the mainstream print review media, and often don’t even send their books to them. They concentrate on radio, internet marketing and events in bookstores and elsewhere.
Sparrow’s sales and distribution were handled by a third party and their problems were compounded when their distributor was taken over. Following the takeover, there were lots of problems with the billing system and the operation of the warehouse – ‘They lost shipments of books, entire deliveries of books and things like that.’ Sales declined and returns skyrocketed. Since their distributor was virtually their only source of revenue, they felt more vulnerable than ever. Suddenly there seemed to be some truth to the saying that every independent publisher is just one crisis away from bankruptcy. The situation became so dire that they eventually decided they had to change distributors in order to survive. For a business that was living hand to mouth, this was in itself a highly risky move, since it creates a temporary hiatus in revenues which a small press like Sparrow is ill-equipped to manage. Their debts grew and they fell back on goodwill – ‘the kindness of strangers’ – in order to tide them over, all the time hoping that the new sales and distribution arrangements would eventually bring a significant uplift in sales (and, fortunately for Sparrow, they eventually did).
Sparrow continues to publish some very good and innovative books and the founder-owners take pride in the books they have published, even those that have sold only 200 or 300 copies – ‘They were mistakes but they’re mistakes we were proud of,’ said one; ‘they’re beautiful mistakes,’ said the other. For them, publishing is a kind of calling, a personal, cultural and political commitment with which they persevere even though it is tough, a way of participating in cultural and political life and giving expression to something that might not otherwise get brought into the world – ‘You feel you’re doing a very worthy thing. It’s exhilarating at the same time as it’s deeply heartbreaking.’ But in purely financial terms their situation remains precarious. ‘We’re tired, we’re worried, our credit cards have maxed out and we’ve used up every resource we had – just every single one.’ They live on the edge, constantly worried about whether they will be able to pay their staff and keep their creditors on hold for another week or two. ‘It feels like a train wreck in slow motion’: this is how one of Sparrow’s founders summed up their first five years as a small independent press.
Of course, every small publishing house is different and each has its own unique characteristics, depending on its history and on the personalities and commitments of the individuals involved, but all face similar pressures and difficulties that stem from the structure and logic of the field. Some small houses limp along from one year to the next, supported in part by the labour of love invested by their founder-owners, who may themselves survive by earning their salaries in other jobs. Some eventually run out of cash and go into liquidation or are taken over by other small or medium-sized houses. There are some founder-owners who decide that, after having run their company on a shoestring for a number of years and grown it to a respectable size, it’s time to bail out – either to join forces with another press or to sell up and retire or make another life for themselves. If the company is profitable and has a good list, they are likely to find a number of suitors among those middle-sized and even large houses that are looking to grow. But there are also some small houses that flourish, thanks to a combination of luck, clever publishing and good financial backing. They find a niche and develop a reputation for innovative publishing. They have the occasional success, which produces a spike in sales and eases the cashflow problems, and their books get shortlisted for prizes and sometimes win, which raises their profile and augments their symbolic as well as their economic capital. Their title output increases and their revenue grows; after years of loss-making and debt they find themselves generating a modest profit. Over time a few of these houses find themselves moving from the world of small publishers into a grey zone where they are neither big nor small but ‘medium-sized’.
Why it is so difficult to be medium-sized
There are a handful of large corporations in the field of trade publishing and a large number of small publishing operations of one kind or another but the space in between – the space of the medium-sized publishing house – is thinly populated. Of course, ‘medium-sized’ is a loose term – what is medium-sized in the eyes of one person may be small in the view of another. Here I’m using the term to refer very loosely to publishing organizations that have annual revenues from trade publishing of around $20 million or above but less than $500 million (or, in the UK context, more than £10 million but less than £100 million). Many of the medium-sized publishers that do exist tend to operate within a specialized niche like health and fitness, practical guides and how-to books, religious publishing or children’s publishing – this is the case with Rodale, Thomas Nelson, Scholastic, Workman and Egmont, for example. There are other medium-sized publishers who are significant players in the field of trade publishing and who combine this with a presence in another publishing field, such as higher education publishing and/or STM publishing, which provides greater scale and helps them to counterbalance the unpredictability and low profitability of trade publishing – such is the case with Wiley and Norton, to mention two. But the number of independent publishers who are focused exclusively or substantially on mainstream adult fiction and non-fiction trade publishing and could be regarded as medium-sized is relatively small. In the US, Norton and Grove Atlantic fall unambiguously into this category (Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt would count as medium-sized trade publishers, although they are no longer independent). In the UK, Faber and Bloomsbury are probably the two most significant trade houses that are medium-sized and still independent, although Bloomsbury’s position is unusual in that their growth in recent years has been accounted for overwhelmingly by the books of one author (J. K. Rowling).
So why are there so few medium-sized independent houses in the field of trade publishing? In the first place, it’s not easy to grow a trade publishing business from small to medium-sized. The field is crowded and the market is saturated, so any growth beyond inflation that one company achieves is largely at the expense of someone else. There are very few, if any, backlists left to buy, since nearly all of the older publishing houses have been bought up by the conglomerates, so you are heavily dependent on frontlist successes to maintain revenue and growth. ‘It requires you being lucky at such a disproportionate level that it is unrealistic,’ observed the publisher at one of the medium-sized independents. When those legendary publishers like Bennett Cerf, Alfred Knopf, John Farrar and Roger Straus built their companies, they did so at a time when the state of the field was very different. Agents were not a major force and they didn’t have to compete with large corporations for content and attention. They could acquire new books without having to pay high advances and they had time to build a backlist. Today these conditions no longer apply. Now more than ever, it takes a special combination of entrepreneurial flair, publishing nous and sheer good luck to steer a trade publishing house from a small start-up into the ranks of the medium-sized and keep it there.
Being medium-sized in the field of trade publishing is in some ways the most difficult place to be. You have much higher overheads than the small publishers and you cannot benefit from the economy of favours that is part of their world, but you don’t have the size and resources of the large corporations and therefore you cannot achieve the same economies of scale as they can, nor can you wield the same clout with suppliers and retailers or reach into pockets that are as deep. You are now on the agents’ radar screens and you find yourself competing with imprints at the large corporations for new books, but you don’t have the resources of the large corporations to draw on when you’re making a bid. For the occasional title you can afford to splash out, but the risk for you is much greater than it is for the imprint at a large corporation, which can afford to take more hits when the advances fail to earn out (as many invariably will). Moreover, every expensive acquisition of this kind has an opportunity cost for you that it doesn’t have for the large corporations. You can only afford to take so many chances of this kind, so you have to call your shots very carefully, whereas the imprints at the corporations can always go back for more if a special book comes along that seems to warrant it.
Not only will you find yourself at a disadvantage in the acquisitions process, you will also find that holding on to your successful authors will become one of your greatest challenges. You need one or two books that do exceptionally well every year in order to maintain revenue levels and be profitable, but your most successful authors – often with the encouragement of agents – will be tempted to ‘test the market’ and move to larger houses that can pay significantly higher advances. The large corporate publishers can afford to pay more not only because their pockets are deeper but also because they can, and routinely do, overpay on advances in the knowledge that they will have to write off a proportion of the unearned advance, regarding this as part of the game they have to play in order to sign the most sought-after authors and books, and this is something that the medium-sized house can ill afford to do. And if you lose your successful authors to bigger houses, then you have to reinvent success from scratch every time. William, the publisher of one medium-sized house, put it like this:
What I’m finding increasingly difficult, having grown from $7–8 million to around $20 million, is that we’re losing our authors after we make them successful. And it’s very difficult, psychologically and emotionally and in all other ways, but business-wise it’s very difficult, because now we’ve got to go back and start all over and find another one, and hope to be lucky and have a hit. The authors get more money and I can’t afford to pay it, and I’m making mistakes by paying it sometimes and the book’s not earning out. Often authors will give us a 20 or 30 per cent break, they’ll go into business with us if we get within 20 per cent [of what the large groups will pay]. But sometimes the number is so high that I shouldn’t even be getting within 50 per cent of the number because it’s foolish. And sometimes I go ahead and do it and I lose money. The large groups will write off between 5 and 8 per cent of net revenues in unearned author advances each year. That’s a giant amount of money. If I did that I’d be out of business. They are still able to do it and make a profit, and part of the reason they can is because of the economy of scale they have. They’re doing their own sales and distribution – they’re probably saving 6–8 points right there. So what it means is that they’re using different currency than I’m using. They’re playing with monopoly money, I’m playing with real money. And that’s what I see as the most daunting task ahead for me.
The large corporations are, in effect, paying higher royalties to certain key authors because they know that a proportion of the advance will have to be written off and they build this into their calculations as part of the cost of doing business. They can do this and still be profitable because their size enables them to achieve economies of scale and to squeeze costs out of the supply chain elsewhere.
So how can William compete with the large corporations? There are various things he can do. First, he has to try to be quicker and smarter than the editors and publishers at the large corporations, finding things before they do, seeing potential where they don’t and getting promising new books under contract before the large corporations get involved – ‘I’ve got to be smarter and quicker and faster. I’ve got to be more active than reactive. I’ve got to take more chances, and I’ll buy books before other people read them or see them.’ Second, he has to create a set of relations with authors that some authors will value more than they will value the extra money they could get if they were to go to a larger house, and create a list with which they want to be associated. William has a special way of describing this: publishing good books has a ‘psychic equity’, by which he means, first, he enjoys doing it – ‘It’s part of why I’m in this business rather than being in real estate or a bond salesman’ – and second, ‘it creates some value for your imprint.’ People look at your list differently – book reviewers, retailers but also other authors, the kind of authors you want to publish. In other words, it creates symbolic value for the house, which becomes a vital weapon in his struggle to acquire and hold on to successful and sought-after authors in the face of competition from large corporate publishers who have access to much greater quantities of economic capital. William described the case of a successful fiction writer he wanted to publish and who was being courted by a number of the big houses. ‘I wrote letters over a year and a half, two years, and sent her catalogues and books. And finally she agreed to sell us the books at a reasonable price, very fair. We’ve now sold over 300,000 copies of her books. But when I finally had dinner with her I said, “What persuaded you?” And she said, “Well, you know, I saw your catalogues and I liked the books. I thought what an interesting list. I’d be pleased to be, proud to be, part of this list.”’
A third thing William can do is be inventive in the way he tries to recover advances. If he can persuade the agent to grant him world rights, then he can earn back part of the advance – in some cases, quite a substantial part of the advance – by selling translation rights into different languages. He will want to hold on to paperback rights if at all possible, since this is the only way he will be able to build his backlist over time, but in exceptional circumstances he may also consider doing a deal with another house to split the hardback and paperback rights and share the advance in order to secure a book or prevent a successful author from moving elsewhere. Even this strategy doesn’t always work, however. Perhaps the best example, well known in the publishing industry, is Charles Frazier, whose first novel, Cold Mountain, was a tremendous success, selling more than 1.6 million copies in hardcover. The hardcover sales of this book, together with the sale of the paperback rights to Random House/Vintage, lifted what was then a small New York publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press (now Grove Atlantic), into the ranks of the medium-sized trade houses. For Frazier’s second novel Grove Atlantic joined forces with Knopf and Vintage to split the hardback and paperback rights and were able to offer a combined advance in excess of $5 million. It wasn’t enough, however. Under the guidance of his new agent, the author held out for more – and got it from another division of the Random House group, which was prepared to offer $8.25 million for Thirteen Moons on the basis of a short proposal. As it turned out, the loss of this author was a blessing in disguise for Grove Atlantic (and a small disaster for Random House and the editor who bought it), since actual sales of the second novel were far below the level that would have been necessary to recoup even the more modest (but still very sizeable) advance that Grove Atlantic was willing to offer.
So these are the key problems faced by the medium-sized publisher: you are not on an equal footing when it comes to competing with the big corporations for new books and you are vulnerable when it comes to holding on to your most successful authors. And that is the main reason why it is so difficult to be medium-sized. Your problems are exacerbated by the fact that you will not be able to achieve the economies of scale that the large corporations can achieve and you will have less clout in your negotiations with suppliers and retailers, and this will give you even less room to manoeuvre when it comes to competing with the corporations and writing off unearned advances.
Clubbing together
One way for small and medium-sized publishers to try to counter some of the difficulties they experience in the field of trade publishing is to join forces and collaborate in various ways – to club together. The area where there is likely to be the most obvious gains from collaboration of this kind is sales and distribution: if a small or medium-sized publisher were to bring together a number of small publishers and offer a sales and/or distribution arrangement to them, or if they were together to work out a collective sales and/or distribution arrangement, then they might be able to offset some of the disadvantages they suffer as small players in the field. The two main examples where this kind of clubbing together has occurred are the Perseus Group in the US and Faber’s so-called ‘Alliance’ in the UK.
The Perseus Group is a hybrid model. Founded in the mid-1990s by a wealthy financial investor, Frank Pearl, who liked good books and was worried that they were being increasingly sidelined by the large corporations, Perseus has evolved into two closely linked but distinct businesses. On the one hand, the Perseus Book Group comprises a number of publishing houses and imprints that are either wholly owned by the private equity firm Perseus LLC or are a joint venture with them. Some of these houses, like Basic Books, were cast-offs of the large corporations, while others, like Da Capo Press, Running Press and the Avalon Publishing Group, were straightforward acquisitions of stand-alone companies. Public Affairs and Nation Books have more complex joint-venture arrangements with Perseus. On the other hand, Perseus also developed a sales and distribution service that could be offered to a whole range of small and medium-sized independent publishing houses that were not part of the Perseus Book Group. This side of the business grew dramatically between 2005 and 2007 with the acquisition of three other distribution services, CDS, Consortium and Publishers Group West, making Perseus the leading provider of sales and distribution services to independent publishers in the US.
With Pearl’s financial backing, Perseus has been able to develop a sales and distribution service for small independent publishers that is much more extensive and sophisticated than they would be able to develop by themselves. ‘Independent publishers need a platform to support them that’s much more robust than what they needed a generation ago, to level the playing field with both the giant conglomerate competitors and the giant conglomerate booksellers which are dominating the industry,’ said one senior manager at Perseus. They see themselves as specialists in selling and distributing the kinds of books that are aimed at specialized, well-defined markets – ‘our strategy is to succeed by reaching target markets rather than compete for the giant blockbuster hit.’ But occasionally a targeted book will catch on and explode into the broader market, and when that happens ‘you have to have the scale and sophistication to be able to chase that and exploit it fully.’ And that’s what Perseus seeks to provide in terms of its sales and distribution services – ‘the distribution range and the power in the marketplace and the ability to make a million-copy bestseller happen, and we’re doing it on behalf of an independent publisher’.
This is undoubtedly a hugely important, indeed invaluable, service for small and medium-sized publishers in the US; without it, these small presses would be much worse off, and many would be unable to survive. However, the danger for the small presses is that, with the consolidation of CDS, Consortium and PGW in the hands of the Perseus Group, the Group has now become the dominant provider of sales and distribution services to small presses in the US, and this has strengthened their hand in negotiating terms with small presses, for whom the cost of sales and distribution is one of the critical factors affecting their survival and competitive position. And some small presses fear that the consolidation of sales and distribution services will be followed inexorably by the rationalization of sales forces, with sales forces being merged and independent sales reps being laid off, leading to poorer and less comprehensive representation for the small presses who are their clients. ‘I think it’s a very dangerous moment,’ said one small publisher, ‘and I think it’s very unhealthy for the culture at large.’ Whether this publisher is right to be worried or is being overly pessimistic remains to be seen.
Faber’s ‘Alliance’ is a much more modest undertaking but is of equal significance for small independent publishers in the UK. Faber is a medium-sized independent trade publisher with an outstanding backlist in literary fiction and poetry, but as a relatively small player it didn’t have the same access to the major retail channels as the large corporate publishers – ‘We weren’t really at the races,’ as one senior manager put it. It had provided third-party sales representation to a number of small independent houses, but the idea of the Alliance was born in 2004 when Faber began talking with a number of other British independent publishers about providing sales representation for them in Europe. ‘They said, “Europe, yeah, that’s fine, get on with it, but what we really want to talk with you about is the UK,” and at that point the Alliance was born,’ explained one of the people who was involved at the outset. Faber joined together with several key independents (Atlantic, Canongate, Icon, Portobello, Profile and Short Books, subsequently joined by Quercus, Serpent’s Tail and Granta), providing different levels of sales representation for different houses, depending on whether they wanted to do their own major accounts. ‘At one stroke, all of a sudden, we were worth dealing with.’ By 2006 they had become the sixth largest group in Britain, roughly comparable to Pan Macmillan in terms of total sales. They were now able to gain access to the supermarkets and other non-traditional retailers, such as discount clubs and motorway service stations, in a way that simply hadn’t been possible before. ‘From their point of view, they knew the independent sector was producing good books but at the same time they never really bothered to get ahold of them – OK, the occasional flash bestseller happened that they had to get involved in. But at last there was one place they could go for all that different stuff, all the variety, with a fantastic track record and people who were quite fun to do business with.’ They soon began to collaborate on other aspects of the business. All the publishers moved to the same distributor and they used their collective strength to negotiate better terms for everyone. Similarly with printers and other suppliers, and recently they’ve begun to collaborate on rights. ‘It started as a set of sales arrangements, which doesn’t sound very glamorous, but it’s become a very big idea and it’s become, front-end and back-end, extremely valuable to all the companies concerned.’
As a consortium of independent publishers, the Alliance was a very clever and effective way to respond to changes in the marketplace. By clubbing together they were able to get a seat at the table of the big retail chains – and especially at the table of the supermarkets which were becoming an increasingly important channel to market in the UK. It raised the profile of the independent sector in a way that no single independent could do alone – with the possible exception of Bloomsbury, at least while it was riding high on the success of Harry Potter. But the success of an alliance of this kind depends very much on getting the right balance between the interests of the different parties and there is always the danger that the central player – in this case, Faber – will be perceived as dominant, wielding more power and gaining more from the Alliance (and the commission it charges) than the others gain from it. There are even some senior managers at Faber who fear that the Alliance may compromise the interests and autonomy of the smaller companies who are party to it: ‘I worry that we’re replicating what Random House did by sort of sucking up these different companies. Of course, they did it in a very different way, by buying them and making them imprints, and in order to compete we’ve had to do the same thing in our own way. I wish it was different really.’ But the realities of the marketplace are such that clubbing together is one of the only ways that small publishers can gain effective access to the major retail channels.
On the margins of the field
We have concentrated in this and the previous chapter on analysing the positions of three types of publishing house that occupy the field of trade publishing – the large publishing corporations that are dominant players in the field, the myriad of small publishing operations and the handful of medium-sized trade publishers. But there are also a variety of publishers who are situated on the margins of the field and who regularly publish trade books, even if trade publishing is not their primary concern. The university presses are one such set of players.
The university presses belong primarily to another publishing field – that of scholarly publishing.5 Their principal output is scholarly monographs, that is, high-level academic books that are written by academics and researchers and intended primarily for other academics and researchers. Their remit as university presses is to publish works of scholarship, mostly written by academics, and to make available the results of scholarly and scientific research. They are first and foremost educational institutions that are concerned with the development and transmission of knowledge rather than commercial enterprises, and it is for this reason that they are recognized in law as not-for-profit organizations (charities in the UK) and exempted from corporation tax.
However, many university presses have long been involved in other publishing fields, including reference publishing, journal publishing and ELT (English-language teaching) publishing, as well as trade publishing. Harvard University Press was one of the first of the American university presses to become a serious player in the field of trade publishing. This was largely the consequence of the appointment of Arthur Rosenthal as director in 1972. The founder of Basic Books, Rosenthal was a New York trade publisher who had a great deal of experience publishing books by scholars and scientists for a general readership. He arrived at Harvard at a time when the Press was in serious financial difficulties, having suffered a deficit of more than half a million dollars in 1970–1 on sales of around $3 million, and a deficit of $350,000 in 1971–2.6 Rosenthal reoriented the activities of the Press and gave it a new profile as an up-market trade house, publishing 10 or 12 titles per season (out of a total of around 50–60 titles per season) that had the potential to get national review coverage and to do well in the trade.
Harvard’s success in ploughing the ground between academic and trade publishing provided a model that other university presses have sought to emulate with varying degrees of dedication and success. The key assumption of this model is that high-quality books with a scholarly content, often (but not always) written by scholars, have the capacity to sell into a general trade market if they are developed and marketed properly – that is, they can ‘cross over’ from academic to trade. Hence an academic publisher, if they choose their books well and develop and market them effectively, can reach an educated readership beyond the academy. This fits well with the self-understanding of the university presses, many of whom see their mission not just in terms of serving the scholarly community but also in terms of making scholarship available to a wider readership and contributing to the broader public debate.
Since the late 1980s, the attractions of this model in the eyes of many in the world of the university presses have been accentuated by three developments. First, as a result of a dynamic internal to the field of scholarly publishing, the sales of scholarly monographs – the staple output of the university presses – have declined dramatically. At the same time, many university presses were expected by their host institutions to become more robust financially and less dependent on subsidies and other forms of support. So many university presses began to look for other forms of publishing where they might be able to generate revenue and compensate for the declining sales of scholarly monographs. Regional publishing – that is, books about the history, culture and environment of the region, including cookbooks, travel books and books about flora and fauna – was one type of publishing to which many of the American university presses turned. Trade publishing was another.
The second development that made trade publishing look increasingly attractive to many university presses was the fact that, as the once-independent trade houses were bought up by the large corporations, the kinds of books they were seeking to publish began to change. Their sales expectations were higher, and the kinds of books they might have taken on in the past were being passed over by many of the imprints in the large corporations. Moreover, many of these imprints were publishing some authors whose books were selling less well than they had in the past – not necessarily because the books were less good or less interesting, but simply because the market had changed. So there was a growing pool of so-called ‘mid-list’ titles that were in search of new homes, and publishers with mainly academic lists were able to move into this space. While a mainstream trade publisher might be looking to acquire books that would sell a minimum of 10,000 or even 20,000 hardcover copies and consider anything less to be marginal, many academic publishers would be delighted to sell 3,000 or 4,000 copies of a non-fiction hardcover before bringing out a paperback edition. The sales thresholds and expectations of the university presses were much lower, and therefore they were able to move into a space in the field of trade publishing that was being increasingly vacated by the big trade houses.
A third development that favoured the migration of university presses into trade publishing was the rise of the retail chains. The rapid growth of the chains created an increased demand for books that were needed to stock the newly opened superstores, and many academic publishers found that they could secure substantial orders from the chains for books that were perceived to have some trade potential. In sharp contrast to the declining library market for scholarly monographs, the late 1980s and 1990s were a period of more or less steadily expanding demand for scholarly books that crossed over into the general trade, particularly in the US. Many American university presses saw this as an opportunity to increase sales and devoted more attention to commissioning books which they thought they could sell into the chains, from which they were deriving a growing proportion of their revenue.
These three developments explain why university presses have become increasingly involved in trade publishing since the late 1980s, and some university presses – especially Oxford University Press, Harvard, Princeton and Yale – now have a recognized presence in the field. But even the largest and most active of the university presses are still marginal players. For the university presses, trade publishing is a sideline, it’s not their raison d’être, and they don’t have the resources to compete at the upper levels. Even the largest of the university presses will seldom pay over $100,000 and will generally prefer low five-figure advances. ‘Most of our advances are around $10,000,’ said the director of one university press; they will occasionally pay significantly more than this, partly in order to let the agents know that they are able and willing to go higher (‘You want to be seen to be able to play in that league’), but this is rare. They simply don’t have money to throw around. This means that, in practice and for most books, the university presses will not be on agents’ ‘A’ lists but may be on their ‘B’ or ‘C’ lists (if they appear at all). When they find themselves in competitive situations, it is generally other university presses, and occasionally the more serious medium-sized independents or imprints like Norton, Basic and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, with which they are competing. Given their relative weakness in the market for content, the university presses generally prefer to use a different acquisitions model, relying less on agents and more on their privileged access to the academic community to try to persuade academics to write books that stand a chance of crossing over into the trade. But like all small and medium-sized publishers, the university presses run the risk of losing their more successful authors to bigger houses, especially since some agents have actively sought to recruit successful and promising academic authors for their client lists.
Just as university presses lack the resources to compete with the major trade houses in the market for content, so too they lack the clout and the resources to get their books into the big retail chains and make them visible. ‘We don’t have money to spend and we aren’t in the world [of trade publishing] vigorously enough to market the book,’ observed the director of one of the university presses which is most active in trade publishing. ‘We can’t buy the real estate at Barnes & Noble.’ For most of the university presses, Amazon is their biggest customer rather than Barnes & Noble and the other retail chains. When the university presses do have big successes in the field of trade publishing, more often than not they are books that surprise everyone, themselves included. They are home runs that come seemingly from nowhere, lifted out of relative obscurity by historical events, unexpected reviews or just some strange concatenation of circumstances. Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban, published by Yale in April 2000, was a modest-selling backlist title imported from the UK when the events of 9/11 suddenly turned it into a runaway success. When Princeton published Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit in 2005 – a short essay that had originally been written as an article for an academic collection some years earlier – no one at the press imagined that it would sell more than a few thousand copies at best; when the book found its way on to the New York Times bestseller list and sold over 360,000 copies in cloth, everyone at the press was surprised.
Despite the disadvantages they suffer, participating in the field of trade publishing remains worthwhile in the eyes of some university press directors. It can help to raise the profile of the press in the review media and in the public arena more generally, and the sales that can be achieved in trade publishing can make a significant financial contribution if you get things right. The key is to participate modestly and to recognize that, whatever success you may occasionally have, you are and always will be on the margins of the field. ‘We have no illusions that we’re in the game with HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and so on,’ explained one university press director. ‘We think of ourselves as competing at the lower end. A bestseller for us would be five figures and that’s really the range that we’re looking to strike at – 10,000 copies plus is a very good thing for us. Most of our books don’t achieve this but that’s the goal. So we see ourselves as a bigger fish in the university press world but not really pretending to be with those other guys who are throwing away six-figure advances on a regular basis.’
While the university presses cannot compete at the same level with the big trade houses, they sometimes find themselves picking up established authors who have, in effect, been cast off by the trade houses, or who feel undervalued by them. The sales of these authors’ books may be declining with each new book and the trajectory of their careers may appear to be downwards, so the big trade house may lose interest. The books themselves may be getting better and their careers may be maturing but the sales are just not good enough to retain the interest of the big trade houses – ‘The romance is over, the buzz is off,’ as one university press director put it. But what the large trade house sees as a declining asset may look to the university press like a valuable catch. They will be quite happy to sign an established author knowing that they are unlikely to sell more than 10,000 copies in cloth. ‘Everyone’s happy in a sense because there’s no false expectation. We can’t be burned and he’s not out there on a limb.’ Some established authors writing high-quality non-fiction, especially if they are professors with a career investment in the academic world, will self-consciously migrate to the margins of the field where a university press may offer them a more commodious home.
1 See Under the Radar (New York: Book Industry Study Group, 2005).
2 Ibid., pp. 15, 21.
3 Ibid., p. 26.
4 The Oprah Book Club and Richard and Judy Book Club are discussed in more detail in ch. 7.
5 For a full analysis of this field, see Thompson, Books in the Digital Age, part 2.
6 See Max Hall, Harvard University Press: A History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 186.