5 5 BIG BOOKS
We’ve seen how, with the rise of publishing corporations, the growth of the retail chains and the increasing power of agents, the field of trade publishing becomes polarized. On the publishing side, the large corporations become the dominant players in the field, and the imprints and houses that are owned by the large corporations feature prominently on the ‘A’ lists of agents who are seeking to sell what they regard as their most highly valued assets. Some small independent presses will also occasionally feature on an agent’s ‘A’ list, depending on the author and the book, but they will rarely feature on the ‘A’ list for a book for which an agent has high financial expectations: in these cases the agent will focus his or her selling activities on the imprints in the large corporations in the knowledge that they will be able and willing to pay an advance at the sought-for level while the small independent presses will not. Depending on the author, the book and the level of financial expectation, the medium-sized publishers may or may not be on the agent’s ‘A’ list. Some of the medium-sized publishers, especially the larger ones, are perfectly able and willing to pay six-figure advances for the right book, and this is often sufficient to get them included on an agent’s ‘A’ list if the author and the book seem to match what the agent perceives to be the editor’s taste and the profile and strategy of the house.
Within this highly structured space of collaboration, competition and reciprocal interdependency between agents and editors/publishers, the ‘big book’ plays a particularly important role. Agents, editors and publishers all speak frequently and unselfconsciously about ‘big books’: they are the prized assets on which all of these actors are focusing their most dedicated attention. What counts as a ‘big book’ may differ from one agent to another and one house to another, but all agents and all houses want them. They are constantly in search of big books. But what exactly are big books and why are they so important in the field of trade publishing? Why does the preoccupation with big books become a key feature of the logic of the field?
The growth conundrum
We spoke in chapter 3 of the growth conundrum that confronts the senior managers of all of the large publishing corporations: how do you achieve significant growth year on year when the market is essentially static? Now there is one way of answering this question that the senior managers of most large publishing corporations have come to reject: they generally reject the view that they should try to achieve growth simply by increasing the number of books they publish. Why do they reject this view? Partly because increasing the number of books they publish would increase the demands on an already overstretched sales force. As the large publishing corporations absorbed more and more houses, most of the corporations (apart from the most decentralized) sought to achieve some economies of scale by amalgamating and rationalizing the sales forces. One consequence of this is that the sales teams ended up carrying more and more books – with every merger and acquisition, the number of titles they had to sell grew. It became increasingly difficult for them to give time and attention to all of the new books that were being launched each season.
Most of the large corporations responded to this problem in three ways. First, they increased the number of selling cycles. Rather than the traditional two cycles, spring and fall, most of the large corporations moved to three or more selling cycles per year. Three cycles became the general norm in the industry and other smaller houses followed suit. But for the major national chains, selling cycles became shorter still, and the reps for the large corporations began to call on the central buyers for the national chains as frequently as once a month.
Second, the large publishing corporations moved to a system of title prioritization. Not all new titles were treated equally, and the sales directors worked with the publishers of the various imprints and houses to work out a prioritization of the new books in each selling cycle. The sales forces of the largest publishing corporations in the US today will be dealing with 5,000–6,000 new titles each year – in effect, 5,000–6,000 new ‘product lines’. If they are working to three sales cycles, this means they will be selling around 2,000 new titles in each cycle. Given that they have a relatively short amount of time to sell the new books to any particular buyer, they have to prioritize; they can’t possibly deal with 2,000 titles in a single meeting, or indeed with anything like this number. So how do they establish their priorities? Tom, the sales director of a large US publishing corporation, put it like this:
Each day of the sales conference we’ll have a session with a core publisher from one of the groups. They come into a conference room, we show covers and so on. Let’s say the summer list will be 2,000 titles. We have our meetings and first of all, we don’t cover every title in the meetings. The publishers don’t even cover all their titles. So if the total number is 2,000, they will cover, say, 1,500. Then what I do is I sit down with my divisional directors, we take the 1,500 and I come up with what we call our ‘priority titles’, and that’s going to be about 500.
Which books feature among the priority titles and in which order depends on which part of the sales force it is – the reps calling on the big national chains will be prioritizing different titles from the reps calling on the independent booksellers. The easiest books to deal with are those by brand-name authors, the John Grishams and Michael Crichtons and Stephen Kings – these books are ‘pure numbers, we put out 60,000 of this here, we’re going to put out 35,000 there and that’s it, you don’t have to talk about it,’ explained Tom. The author’s name, the cover and the historical record of the sales of the author’s previous books in different channels are all you need to know. Then you have the books where the publishers have some reason to think that they have real potential in some particular channel, such as the independent bookstores. The publishers will say that this title – say a work of literary fiction by a promising novelist – is a priority title for the independents, and so the field reps will ‘work’ these titles in the independents, whereas a John Grisham or a Michael Crichton will not be a priority for them because they know that Barnes & Noble and Borders and the price clubs will take these books in large numbers. The final factor that helps them come up with their priority titles is feedback from the sales reps. The sales reps are not just selling: they are also the eyes and ears of the corporation in the world of the publisher’s most immediate customers, the bookstores and the retail chains. ‘We have an electronic bulletin board,’ continued Tom. ‘We’ve got all these reps out there meeting buyers and giving manuscripts and galleys to booksellers and things bubble up to the surface. All of a sudden we may get a sense that the buyers and booksellers like a particular book and that we should make it a priority.’
Given that the list of priority titles might include only a quarter of all the titles being published in that season, this means that as many as three-quarters of the books being published by the corporation are not being prioritized; they are not completely neglected, but they are not given the kind of attention and concerted sales and marketing support as the prioritized titles. This doesn’t mean that none of the non-prioritized titles will sell. Some will sell modestly. There will also be the occasional title that will surprise everyone – the ‘black swan’, the outlier, the singularity that lies outside the realm of normal expectations.1 With the benefit of hindsight it’s always easy to spot the bestsellers and to argue backwards from success – ‘The Da Vinci Code, that’s easy, we can do that again.’ But in advance it’s much more difficult and there are always going to be some books that confound expectations. ‘Why is it that this book we’re really hot on turns out to be an absolute bomb and then something we just didn’t expect at all takes off?’ reflected Tom, who has been in the business all his professional life. ‘We don’t know, we just don’t know,’ he repeats with emphasis. Like movies and other products of the creative industries, many books display what Caves aptly calls the ‘nobody knows’ property.2
Given that trade publishing is to some extent a ‘black swan industry’ where serendipity plays an ineliminable role and given that for many if not most books nobody really knows just how well they’re going to do, every trade publisher has to be prepared to gamble on some books where success is by no means clear. Every experienced publisher will know that bestsellers can emerge from quarters where you least expect them. This is why the story – recounted by an editor at one of the large houses – of the external management consultants who are invited in to advise senior managers about how to improve productivity and profitability in a publishing house after a merger is a standing joke among trade publishers:
Millions of dollars have been spent, untold numbers of hours have been chewed up analysing and arranging and rearranging. And eventually a report this high and this square gets dropped on the CEO’s desk and there is a cover sheet on top. And in some form or another within the first four bullet points, what it announces is that the management consultants involved in this study have finally solved the riddle of publishing. They’ve worked it out and here it is. You’ve given us 5 million dollars, here’s the answer: only publish bestsellers.
The ineliminable serendipity of trade publishing makes the management consultant’s solution risible, but the equally inescapable truth is that a large proportion of the books published by trade publishers – both the large corporations and the independents, medium-sized and small – turn out to sell in small numbers. ‘If the field reps don’t work it, if Barnes & Noble don’t go for it, it’s likely to be tough,’ said Tom. ‘I’ve sat through print meetings where we’ll look at the numbers and we’ll say, “Jesus, nobody likes this book.” But, you know, the publisher’s paid and they’ve got an advance out there, they go ahead and publish it. The likelihood is we will wind up getting 70–80 per cent of it back in returns.’
While recognizing that they must always allow for the possibility of the black swan, most large trade publishers have responded to the harsh reality of the marketplace by trying to reduce the number of titles they publish. This enables the sales reps to focus their efforts on a limited number of titles, and reduces or limits the number of titles that are going to be relegated to the non-prioritized list. It also allows the marketing budget to be divided up among a smaller number of titles, and enables the marketing and publicity staff to focus their energies. ‘The game is to maximize,’ said one sales director in a large house. ‘We try to maximize sales in the least number of books.’ Publish fewer books and sell more of the books you publish: this is the mantra that is chanted in nearly all of the large publishing houses, and in many of the medium-sized and small publishing houses too.
Now if you’re going to publish fewer titles and still achieve your growth targets, you’re going to have to do your best to ensure that some of the books you do publish sell exceptionally well. This is the basic organizational necessity that underlies the preoccupation with ‘big books’. You’re going to have to try to buy some ‘big books’, and you’re going to have to try to discourage your editors from buying too many ‘small books’. Some ‘small books’ are fine; they can add diversity to the list, they might win a prize and add lustre, or symbolic capital, to the house. Moreover, you need a certain quantity of books ‘just to keep the machine going’ – to create a critical mass of frontlist titles, to feed into the paperback lines and so on. But too many ‘small books’ will dissipate energy and fill the list with books that are unlikely – even allowing for the possibility of a black swan – to fulfil your growth targets. One London agent put it like this:
What the publishers are doing is that they’re putting more and more of their eggs in the baskets of well-known celebrities – the Robbie Williams, the Steven Gerrards – where they feel they can get a lot of media attention and can sell in large quantities. They want a small number of big books in order to meet their ambitious sales targets and it doesn’t help them to play around with these small books, as it were, because they just may go nowhere and you’re going to find it hard. The sales process of your reps going out there, talking to Tesco’s and talking to Waterstone’s, they can sell Robbie Williams like that, but to get them to sit down and listen to the story of a sprinter at the time of the Boer War is hard. It’s breathing too valuable oxygen. I was talking with an editor at one of the big houses recently and he said, ‘I don’t like having this conversation with you because I want to publish this book, I love the story but I know what’s going to happen when I go to the acquisition meeting. They’re going to say, “Why are we bothering with these little books that are going to breathe all this valuable oxygen both creatively and promotionally.” And also, if we buy it at that level, we can’t afford to spend anything in the marketing budget. Tesco’s won’t even bother to take it. Whereas Lewis Hamilton, OK, sure, we’ve paid a million for it but the door’s already open when I arrive; I don’t have to bruise my knuckles trying to get it through.’
While some aspects of this account are specific to the UK, where the supermarkets have become such an important retail outlet for trade publishers, the dynamic that leads the large houses to focus more and more on big books, and to pass over the ‘small books’ that ‘breathe valuable oxygen’, is the same on both sides of the Atlantic.
So what are big books, exactly? Simple, you might think: big books are bestsellers. Intuitively plausible though that may seem, in fact it is wrong. Big books are not bestsellers for the simple reason that, for most big books (though not all – more on the exceptions below), at the time when they are being sent out by agents and bought by publishers and are being treated by both as big books, they have not yet been published and no one knows whether they will actually become bestsellers. ‘We don’t know, we just don’t know.’ So big books cannot be bestsellers. At most they are hoped-for bestsellers, which is not at all the same thing. The difference between a big book and a bestseller is the difference between aspiration and reality. The difference is the outcome of the temporal gap between acquisition and publication coupled with the inescapable indeterminacy of trade publishing. The big book exists in the space of the possible, nourished by hope and expectation; the bestseller exists in the space of the real – hard numbers that can be scrutinized by everyone post factum, an incontestable fact.
Given the organizational need for the large publishers to focus more of their attention on big books, and given that big books are not bestsellers but merely hoped-for bestsellers, there is a great deal of room in the field of trade publishing for what we can call ‘buzz’. Buzz is a performative utterance,3 a type of speech act that is a pervasive feature of the field of trade publishing (and of other creative industries too). As a performative utterance in the field of trade publishing, we can give it a precise definition: buzz is talk about books that could be big. It is not the same as ‘hype’. Hype is also a performative utterance which is common in trade publishing, but there is an important difference between buzz and hype. Hype is the talking-up of books by those who have an interest in generating excitement about them, like agents; buzz exists when the recipients of hype respond with affirmative talk backed up by money. Hype is like fishing with the most attractive fly you can find: the agent tries to present his or her book in the most favourable light, stressing its positive features and overlooking any possible blemishes. Buzz happens when you start to catch fish: editors and publishers react positively, respond to the agent’s speech acts with affirmative speech acts of their own that may either put money on the table or begin serious talk of money. It is, in this very specific sense of the term, pecuniary talk. And the higher the figure, the greater the buzz.
It follows that at the heart of trade publishing there exists what we could call a web of collective belief. Since for many of the new books that are being offered by agents and bought by editors and publishers, no one really knows just how well they will do, a great deal of time and effort is invested in one party seeking to persuade the other that the book being offered is, indeed, a big book, or at least sufficiently big to warrant a serious degree of attention from editors, and a great deal of weight is placed on what other people – especially trusted people – think and say about the book and how big it is. Big books do not exist in and by themselves: they have to be created. They are social constructions that emerge out of the talk, the chatter, the constant exchange of speech acts among players in the field whose utterances have effects and whose opinions are trusted and valued to varying degrees. In the absence of anything solid, nothing is more persuasive than the expressed enthusiasm (or lack of it) of trusted others. So the more buzz there is, the more excitement there is around a book, and the more that excitement is backed up with offers of hard cash, the more likely it is that others will become excited by it. This is the contagion effect in the field of trade publishing, and it is hard for those involved in the field, even those on the margins of the field, not to be seduced by it.
Valuing the valueless
So if you are an editor or publisher in a trade house, how do you form a view about a book or a project when there are few solid anchor points? How do you determine the indeterminate? How do you place a value on the valueless – on that which, at the time when you’re considering it, has no clear and specifiable value?
First and foremost, you rely on your judgement based on a reading of the proposal or the manuscript. You will be looking for certain things depending on the kind of book it is, but ultimately it is a very personal reaction on the part of the editor, ‘your instinctive passionate embrace of the item that is on offer’, as one agent put it. If it is a debut novel by a new writer you will typically look for the familiar traits, character, plot and ‘voice’, placing different weights on them depending on the kind of novel it purports to be. In the case of non-fiction, topicality is obviously important, but so too is freshness, originality and the distinctiveness of the authorial voice. ‘To me it’s always about voice basically,’ said a senior editor who acquires both fiction and non-fiction for one of the imprints of a large publishing corporation. ‘To me it’s not that much different if it’s fiction or non-fiction; I work on it the same way. Even if it’s fairly analytical or something, it still has to be an author who you feel like you’re kind of in good hands with, and they have this, whatever, special spark of genius that you want to be stuck with for 300 pages. The sense that they’re brilliant both in the way they’re thinking and the way they’re putting words together. You know you don’t always get 100 per cent of both and so you’re trying to find the balance.’
However, even in those cases where you sense a distinctive voice, that ‘special spark of genius’, you have to be able to combine your passionate embrace of the book with a vision, a practical sense, of how you would publish, market and sell the book to turn it into a success. This includes a vision about how many copies you think you could sell at what price and how much you should pay for it. A book that sells only 4,000 copies can be profitable if you don’t pay much for it, but for most editors at the large houses in New York, 4,000 copies would be a worst-case scenario. ‘I would never go into a project thinking that if we do everything right, that’s our ceiling.’ Although specific targets are seldom discussed, a senior editor at an imprint in a large US publishing corporation may be notionally expected to buy 8–12 new books a year, most of which could be expected to ship out between 20,000 and 50,000 in hardcover and at least one of which could be expected to do much better. ‘At the level I’m at now,’ said one senior editor who had been in the business for just over 12 years, ‘I think I’m expected to bring in one book a year let’s say that is legitimately a blockbuster that’s going to ship over 100,000 copies.’ In practice, if you’re projecting that you’re going to ship more than 50,000, you’re assuming that you’re going to get up to 100,000, ‘so anything over 50 becomes 100’.
When an editor reads something and feels inclined to pursue it, he has to make a case for buying it. Whether this case needs to be presented to an acquisitions meeting or simply to his boss varies from imprint to imprint and corporation to corporation, as we noted in an earlier chapter; but regardless of the specific procedure for decision-making, the case needs to be made. In part the case will be based on the ability of the editor to convey what is special about the book and the vision he has for it. One editor put it like this:
I’m bringing [the publisher] something where I’m interpreting where it can go and who I think will come to it. And, you know, sometimes he’ll have issues about where I think it can go, where he doesn’t see the magnetism of the voice. Sometimes I’ll just be asking him ‘Do you see that? Do you see what I’m saying here?’ and if he says no, that’s just fine. I think in these cases it’s the idea itself – I sort of imagine there’s a market and he doesn’t. But I guess more often what happens is we can both sort of come to terms on agreeing that there’s a market but someone else across town sees a different, bigger market, or they’re willing to lose money on that project for whatever reason. Normally what will happen is he’ll ask me, ‘What do you want to do? How much do you want to pay?’ I’ll come up with a number and he’ll either say, ‘Mm, I was thinking of something higher’ or ‘Are you crazy?’
The number this editor comes up with ‘is just based on my sort of ballpark sense in my head of what it’s worth’. Of course, he can do a P&L, but the P&L all depends on the numbers you plug in to the spreadsheet and most experienced editors don’t need to go through the motions. If he sees this as a big book then sales and publicity or marketing will get involved at the acquisitions stage. ‘You don’t call on them if it’s just, you know, a novel that’s going to sell 7,000 copies. But if you’re going to have to be asking them to get out this many hundreds of thousands of copies, and if from the very beginning they’re saying that’s going to be a big problem, then at the very least you need to know now that you’re facing resistance.’
So a great deal depends on the editor’s reading of the proposal or the text and his ability to articulate, to the publisher or to those in the acquisitions committee or both, a vision for the book which they can be persuaded or induced to share. Of course, the editor may fail, and may fail for different reasons:
There are certainly times when I brought my boss a series of books where, if every time I’m sort of estimating that book’s commercial prospects higher than he is, it just kind of makes sense that at a certain point he’s going to have to say, ‘Look, the last five we’re taking flyers on, we can’t do it this time.’ That’s not that frustrating to me. What’s more frustrating I guess is when I feel like I have a sense of what it can do that’s not necessarily borne out by the past history of book publishing and I’m not able to convince him. For the most part I think that it’s my responsibility to be articulate enough to present that vision. But there are definitely times when I feel like I’ve been articulate well enough and he’s just not going for it. That’s the most frustrating. The rest is a sort of slow, low-level frustration.
While a great deal depends on the editor’s ability to articulate a vision for the book and sell this vision to his boss and to others within the organization, there are certain things that the editor can draw on in order to help form a judgement and build a case for the book. It’s not all just a matter of what the editor and others see in the text. So what are these other things, and how do they help to determine the value of something which, at the time when it is being offered by agents and considered by editors and publishers, is a mere hypothetical asset whose value is strictly unknown?
There are at least four things that an editor can draw on and that will help to determine the value of this valueless hypothetical asset, apart from the editor’s own reading of the text and the vision he can articulate for it.
The first thing, hugely important in trade publishing, is the track record of the author – the ‘track’, as it’s commonly known in the business. Before 2000, the track record of an author was a restricted form of knowledge – restricted to the author, to his or her agent and to the publisher who had published the author’s previous books. The partial exceptions were the books that made it onto bestseller lists like that of the New York Times, which surveyed hundreds of retail outlets to estimate which books were selling the most copies and published the rankings but not the figures. The retail chains and bookstores themselves would have their own records of the sales histories of an author’s books, records that became increasingly reliable with the computerization of the retail sector and the introduction of EPOS – electronic point of sale – systems, which record all cash register transactions. But the sales records of the retail outlets were incomplete, since they captured only the sales made by the retailer whose records they were, and they were not available to those outside of the retail organization, such as editors and others in the publishing houses. In those circumstances, there was a great deal of scope for agents to inflate the sales of an author’s previous books when they were going out with a new title. They could exaggerate the sales of an earlier book when they were pitching a new book to a publisher who had not published the earlier one, in the knowledge that it would be difficult for the publisher to confirm or dispute the sales history (unless the new publisher was on good terms with the previous publisher and could call them to check the figures). The track record of an author was a contestable variable that was known to some, surmised by others and always subject to exaggeration in the interests of inflating value.
With the advent of BookScan, all of this suddenly changed. BookScan is a service provided by the Nielsen Company, an information and media company that was originally founded by Arthur Nielsen in 1923 and acquired by the Dutch group VNU in 1999. Nielsen specialized in market research, in developing methods for tracking the volume of sales in the marketplace and in measuring the size of radio and television audiences (the so-called ‘Nielsen ratings’). The rolling out of EPOS systems across different retail sectors from the 1970s on opened up the possibility of providing much more accurate information on actual sales by collating point of sales data from a plurality of retail outlets. Following the success of SoundScan, which tracked point of sales information for music, Nielsen launched BookScan in the UK in December 2000 and in the US in January 2001. In essence, BookScan works like this: Nielsen purchases point of sales data from as many significant book retail outlets as it can, collates, regularly updates and manipulates this data so that it can be presented online in a clear and easily navigated way, and then sells access to the collated data by charging subscription fees to publishers and other clients in order for them to access the data on their website, varying the fee according to the size of the company. All the collated data on the website is accessible to all the clients who subscribe to the service, which means that the weekly and cumulative sales figures for every title are viewable by every client.
Thanks to BookScan, the sales history of any book published after 2000/1 is now public knowledge and the track record of any author is transparent to all – or, to be more precise, is transparent to everyone who has access to BookScan, which in practice means individuals who work for organizations that subscribe to the service. The game of concealment, selective disclosure and calculated inflation is over. Now there is nowhere to hide. Authors carry their sales histories around with them like a noose around their neck – although, curiously, this is a noose that they may not see, or may not know just how loosely or tightly it grips their neck, since they often know less about the sales histories of their books, and less about the consequences of different sales histories, than those in the industry do. But noose it is. If your first few books do well and show a nicely upward trend in terms of sales, you will be just fine, but if your first book disappoints and the second one tanks, you’re in trouble: you’re going to have a hard time persuading anyone that your next book is going to be a bestseller.
The advent of BookScan has undoubtedly changed the rules of the game, and in making the case for acquiring a new book an editor will routinely check the sales history of the author’s previous books and build this into their calculations. They know that their publisher and sales and marketing directors will have access to the BookScan figures and may check the editor’s expectations against the track. They also know that, when it comes to selling the book into the retail chains and bookstores, the buyers are likely to consult BookScan as well as their own in-house computerized sales records. So there is no point ignoring this: BookScan provides the one form of hard data available to everyone, the statistical common currency, that can defuse an agent’s hype and temper an editor’s imagination. But there are significant limitations.
The most important limitation is that BookScan does not collate data from all retail outlets. The UK version is more complete and reliable than the US version. BookScan UK’s ‘Total Consumer Market’ (TCM) collects sales data from all major high-street chains, independents and supermarkets as well as internet sites, from Amazon to travel and other specialist sites; it claims to cover over 90 per cent of all retail book purchases in the UK. BookScan in the US collects sales data from the retail book chains, including Barnes & Noble and Borders, from a sample of independent bookstores, from Amazon and other internet companies, from Follett, Costco, Target and various other retail outlets. However, BookScan does not have access to sales data from Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club and from other outlets like food and drug stores which, for certain kinds of mass-market books, can account for a substantial proportion of overall sales. ‘On a new general interest hardcover release we’re probably 70 to 75 per cent of the total market,’ explained one senior manager at Nielsen’s US office; ‘on the mass market, we’re probably around 50 per cent.’ BookScan’s figures are most reliable, in terms of providing an accurate picture of total sales, when dealing with books that sell primarily through traditional book retailing outlets, like Barnes & Noble, Borders and the independents, as well as through Amazon. ‘For a lot of publishers on a lot of books, mid-level books, we could have 90 to 95 per cent of the market because they don’t sell those books in food and drug stores and they’re not in the Wal-Marts.’ But the more commercial the book is, and the more likely it is to sell through non-traditional book retail outlets, the smaller the proportion of the overall market their data will capture.
Apart from the incompleteness of the data, there are obvious dangers and limitations in relying on the sales histories of an author’s previous books when it comes to thinking about a new book by the same author. Historical sales can be an unreliable guide and can lead you to underestimate or overestimate the sales potential of a new book by the same author. The industry is awash with examples of both. Dan Brown is probably the most famous example of an author whose track record was a very unreliable guide to the future. His previous books had sold modestly in hardcover and paperback – ‘There was no Dan Brown readership,’ as one senior publisher observed. Based on the historical track record, the advance that was offered by Doubleday for his new book was very modest by industry standards – $400,000 for a two-book deal. The fact that this new book, The Da Vinci Code, went on to sell over 18 million copies in cloth in the US alone is a poignant reminder of how misleading it can be to rely on the historical track record of an author.
The other limitation of BookScan data from an acquisition’s point of view is that there are of course some authors who have never published a book before and therefore have no track record. Does this mean that, in the brave new world where hard BookScan data have redefined the rules of the game, the first-time author is in a structurally disadvantaged position? An aspiring writer with no numerical credentials: how can he or she hope to be taken seriously by an industry seemingly fixated on numbers?
Ironically, in a world preoccupied by numbers, the author with no track is in some ways in a strong position, considerably stronger than the author who has published one or two books with modest success and muted acclaim, simply because there are no hard data to constrain the imagination, no disappointing sales figures to dampen hopes and temper expectations. The absence of sales figures sets the imagination free. The first-time author is the true tabula rasa of trade publishing, because his or her creation is the book for which it is still possible to imagine anything and everything. He or she could become the next Dan Brown or the next Patricia Cornwell or the next Ian McEwan. Or could vanish like a meteor in the summer sky.
This does not mean that, with the first-time author, there is nothing on which the editor can draw to help build a case – there is, and we shall come to this in a minute. But does it mean that the author who is already up and running will always be judged through the lens of the sales figures of his or her previous books, that their sales history is their fate? Yes and no. The sales figures are there as a public record and editors and others will always familiarize themselves with the sales performance of an author’s previous books before bidding on a new one. But it is also always open for an editor – and, indeed, an agent – to make the case that a new book by an author is the exception that will break the mould. There are many different ways in which this can be done – the author has decided to write a different kind of book for a different kind of reader; the publisher of the previous books didn’t understand the author and didn’t have the right vision for the books and their market; or, simply, this new book is just much better than the previous books and in a different league. Here’s an agent in New York describing a case when she went out with a new book by an author whose previous two books had not sold well:
The first one sold not many and the second one sold next to nothing and he wrote a third manuscript after a long gap, much struggle and despair and knowing that it was his last throw of the dice. I sent it out and the editor at one house said, ‘Just don’t fudge, what are his sales? I can get them from BookScan, you know.’ ‘You don’t want to know them,’ I said, ‘you really don’t want to know them.’ But I told her the numbers and she came back and she said, ‘Oh yeah, I checked and you know, you gave me accurate numbers. They’re terrible!’ ‘I know, can we just pretend they never happened?’ They decided to buy it, they paid a lot of money and they just decided to ignore his track record. They put a ton behind it and went out to booksellers saying ‘I know he hasn’t sold and I know he has a lousy track record but trust us, this is the book.’ It’s admirable when a publisher will do that because they’re running against all sorts of numbers and what everyone says is going to happen to that author’s career and just saying, ‘Well, we love it.’ They can do it when they have something that’s flamboyantly exceptional in some way. They have to be able to tell a story about it, in-house as much as anything, and if someone brings up the past they go, ‘I know, I know, but now he’s written his masterpiece.’ But then that puts more pressure on the book and makes it more important that it works out. And in turn, if it doesn’t, God only knows. Last throw of the dice.
The second thing an editor can use to form a judgement and build a case is ‘comps’ – comparable books. Considerable time and energy is invested by agents and editors in trying to come up with other books to which the new book they want to sell as an agent or buy as an editor can be compared. The comparisons can be made in many different ways – plot, style, genre, voice, subject matter, argument or some combination of these and other factors. There are few clear-cut rules, but the one rule that does matter is that the book chosen as a comp should be a successful book. There is no point choosing as a comp a book that bombed out – it would simply defeat the purpose. Identifying comparable titles is essentially an exercise in building best-case scenarios by analogy. The selection of comps can’t be so simple and brazen as to be implausible because then it will carry no conviction, but it serves no purpose unless the book chosen as a comp has excelled in some way. It’s a fine line to tread. ‘The tricky thing is that you know you can’t really compare a book to a runaway success,’ explained one senior editor. ‘Like you have to find a sort of solid success.’ Solidly successful, but not so successful that no one will believe you. So you can rule out The Da Vinci Code straightaway. But a solid success, like The Lovely Bones or The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, would be an attractive comp.
Everyone knows that there is an element of speciousness in the citing of comparable books but everyone plays the game nonetheless. Why? Agents obviously do it because they want to sell their books to editors and publishers and citing comparable books is a way of putting a positive gloss on a new book, getting potential buyers to think of it in terms of another book (or other books) whose eye-watering sales figures are available to everyone on BookScan. But editors do it too. Sometimes they use the comps cited by agents, but more often than not they come up with their own, and they do this for various reasons. First because they too have to have a way of getting a handle on the potential sales of a new book, and how else can they do this except by referring to the sales of the author’s previous books or by looking at the sales of other books that share some significant features in common with the new book, even if they were written by others? But equally importantly, the editor does it because the editor is, fundamentally, a salesperson within his or her own organization. An editor who wants to buy a book has to be able to sell it to others within the organization – not just his or her immediate boss, the publisher, but also to sales, marketing and publicity staff. They have to be able to persuade others that this is a book worth doing and that they should get behind it. And a crucial part of making the case is to be able to see not just what is special and unique about a new book, but also what it shares in common with other books whose track records are known or knowable. ‘So if you think a book is really just special because it’s so special, it can be hard to make the case,’ the senior editor explained. ‘But the fact is you’re going to have to make that case all the way along the line. Not just to your boss but to the sales people, to the publicist to make sure they get the good publicists working on it, and so on.’
While every new book is in some sense unique and its future sales are strictly speaking unknowable, those working within organizations need to find ways of hedging the indeterminacy in order to attach some value to the new book in advance of knowing what the real value is. Thinking by analogy is one way of hedging the indeterminacy of the new. It gives the editor a way of trying to estimate sales, gives the publisher a way of trying to assess whether the editor’s vision for the book is realistic or feasible, and gives sales and marketing staff a way of thinking about the book, assigning priorities, allocating resources and, eventually, selling the book to buyers, review editors and others outside of the house on whose fate the book will to some extent depend. All the way along the line, those who are dealing with the book will be thinking in terms of comparable titles, because thinking by analogy is one of the few tools available to them for hedging the intrinsic indeterminacy of the not-yet-published book.
The third thing that the editor can use to form a judgement and build the case for a book is the author’s platform. We encountered the notion of platform in chapter 2 when we examined the way that agents prepare a book and an author for submission: platform, we said, is the position from which an author speaks, a combination of their credentials, visibility and promotability, especially through the media. We noted that this factor is particularly important for non-fiction books, and especially certain types of non-fiction like fitness and diet books, but it is also relevant to works of fiction. Why is platform so important for an editor when he or she is seeking to form a judgement about a new book and to build a case for buying it?
It is important for two reasons. In the first place, the author’s platform creates a pre-existing market for a book. If the author is a prominent journalist, news anchor, politician or TV personality, then he or she will already be known to a large number of people who constitute a potential market for the book and to whom the book can be promoted. So the importance of the media for trade publishers is not simply that they provide the means for marketing and publicizing books: the role of the media is more fundamental than this. For the media are the milieu in which an actual or potential author creates a platform, that is, demonstrates their ability to reach an audience and becomes to some extent – however modestly – a visible and identifiable persona in the public domain. So-called ‘celebrity publishing’ is simply an extension of this fundamental dynamic, a special case where the ‘author’s’ platform becomes not just one factor to be taken into account but the overriding factor, indeed the principal reason for publishing the book (‘author’ being in inverted commas because many celebrity books are in fact ghostwritten by others).
The second reason why platform is important to an editor, especially for non-fiction books, is that it matters to those within the organization to whom the editor has to sell the book – the publisher and the sales, marketing and publicity staff. And it matters to them not only because it creates a pre-existing market for the book but also because it gives them the basis for building the marketing and publicity campaign. Trade publishers rely on publicity and marketing to drive sales. Getting books into the bookstores is one thing, getting consumers to go into the bookstores and buy the books is another, and the difference between the two is returns. Anything the author can bring with him or her in terms of platform is going to help the marketing and publicity staff build a campaign aimed at driving sales and reducing returns. For certain kinds of books it helps if the author is presentable, articulate and telegenic, would perform well on radio or television, and so on. These things matter in trade publishing because visibility is the oxygen of publicity and, in an increasingly crowded marketplace where the spaces of the visible are shrinking for publishers and authors (a theme to which we shall return), you need all the help you can get.
The fourth thing that an editor can draw on to help form a judgement and build a case is what other people think. And at the end of the day, this is the most important factor. Of course, the editor’s own opinion of the proposal or manuscript and his or her vision for the book matters greatly, and the weight they carry tends to vary with the seniority and track record of the editor. A new editor will often have a honeymoon period when they are given considerable leeway to buy new books, but generally speaking, the more senior the editor and the better their track record in picking books that turn out to be successful, the more weight the publisher and others will give to the editor’s opinion. The power and influence of the editor tends to be directly proportional to their track record of success, where ‘success’ is measured primarily in terms of sales and secondarily, depending on the imprint and the house, in terms of prizes or other forms of recognition. Numbers matter – the sales record of the author’s previous books as well as the sales of books that could plausibly be considered as comparable titles. Platform matters too. But at the end of the day, it is a specific combination of judgements and opinions, of who thinks what and what they think about it, that determines whether a house will buy a book and, if so, how much they will pay for it. This is the web of collective belief.
The web operates in different ways from house to house and book to book – it could be thought of as a net with varying degrees of extension. The net is made up of opinions, beliefs, judgements and talk about these opinions and beliefs, whether that talk is expressed orally or in writing (which, these days, usually means email). The least extended version of the net may involve just three individuals – the agent, the editor and the editor’s boss (usually the publisher). Each will have an opinion, usually based on a reading of the proposal and all or part of the manuscript plus a consideration of the three other elements, analysed above, that are commonly involved in judgements of this kind. The weight accorded to the opinion depends on whose opinion it is and on their respective power, both real and symbolic. If it is an imprint or house in which the ultimate power to decide is vested with the publisher, then his or her power will override the beliefs or opinions of the editor. But if the editor is a senior and experienced colleague who has been at the house for many years and has a good track record of picking successful books, then the publisher may well defer to the editor’s judgement on a particular project; even if the publisher has reservations, he or she may give the editor the benefit of the doubt on this occasion. It is a negotiation in which the editor makes a case and the publisher considers it, forms his or her own judgement by looking at some of the material and decides, in discussion with the editor, what to do – sometimes in an informal meeting in the publisher’s office, sometimes in an impromptu conversation in the corridor, sometimes in a brief email exchange.
However, even in this smallest version of the web, there is always a third party who contributes to the deliberation – the agent. From the perspectives of the editor and the publisher, the value of the agent is not simply that they provide the initial filter that selects some authors and books and screens out others: the very fact that they are supporting the book, and the way that they support it when they are sounding out the editor’s interest on the telephone or over lunch and when they send the proposal or manuscript with a cover letter or email, are vital contributions to the web of collective belief. In the first place, who the agent is matters: some agents carry much more weight in the field than others. Some agents have built a reputation and accumulated large stocks of symbolic capital by virtue of the authors they have managed to sign and the books they have chosen to support. Others, especially those young agents who are new to the field, will have much less symbolic capital and their support of a project will mean much less, though their lightweightedness in the field can be offset to some extent by the reputation of the agency for which they work. An editor will always take account of who the agent is when they are considering a new book because they know that agents have different track records, that their track records are part of what makes up their reputation and that their reputation matters when it comes to making the case for buying a book.
This is particularly true at the large publishing corporations where nearly all new books are agented. Chris was the publisher at a small independent house in New York before he moved to become an editor at an imprint in one of the large publishing corporations. He had previously tried to avoid agents whenever possible: as the publisher at a small independent, he tended to view agents as a source of trouble who, as soon as they became involved in the acquisitions process, tended simply to up the ante. But now that he was working for one of the large publishing corporations, he saw agents very differently. When he wanted to sign up an author he had published in the past, he actively encouraged her to get a well-known agent, and when he told his boss that the author was represented by this agent, his boss was much more enthusiastic about buying the book. Of course, it meant that they would have to pay more – the author, who had previously published with the small independent, would have been delighted with an advance of $25,000, but now, with this well-known agent involved, they would have to pay $100,000 or more. But that didn’t matter. The fact that this well-known agent was representing this author, lending his reputation and accumulated symbolic capital to the author and the book, was in itself a sign that the book was worth buying. His support was an integral part of the web of collective belief, was used as such by the editor and seen as such by the publisher. ‘When I was at [the small independent house] I always thought of agents as my enemies,’ said Chris; ‘now I see them as my friends.’
The problem for new or young editors at the large houses is that they generally will not be the first port of call for those established agents who have the most credibility in the web of collective belief. When the established agents have a big book, or even just a book for which they have reasonably high expectations, they will tend to go first to those editors or publishers in the various imprints and houses with whom they have established relationships and who they think will have the most clout within the organization – that is, the greatest capacity to sell the book within the organization and get others to back it with enthusiasm, commitment and cash. New and young editors generally find themselves receiving submissions from the newer and younger agents – that is, through the lateral networks that develop in the field between editors and agents of the same cohort or generation. This may put them in good stead for the future, since they will form strong and lasting relationships with some of the agents who may eventually become powerful figures in the field, but it weakens their position in the present. The only way around it is to work, slowly and steadily, on building relationships with those agents who carry more weight – try to have lunch with them, explain the kinds of books you’d like to buy and, from time to time, show them that you’re capable of getting the support of the organization by making an offer on a scale they would regard as serious.
While the least extended version of the web of collective belief involves at least three players, the editor, the publisher and the agent, it very often involves many more. The web is often extended by the fact that an editor will commonly consult others within the organization. He or she will often ask another editor, a colleague, to have a look at the proposal or read part of the manuscript, just to get another opinion from someone whose opinions they value and whose judgement they trust. The bigger the book, the more people they are likely to consult – not just other editors but also, for bigger books, sales directors, marketing and/or publicity directors and, for those books that have paperback potential, the publisher of the paperback imprint. All of this consultation is done in-house; very rarely does an editor at an imprint in the large publishing corporations consult someone outside of the house. It is simply not done – ‘It’s considered bad form,’ as one editor put it. Why? Why do editors in the large publishing corporations rarely if ever send proposals or manuscripts to external readers? Partly it’s because they are pressed for time: they often have no more than a couple of weeks to consider a proposal or manuscript and it would be difficult to get reports from outside readers in that time. But more importantly, the opinions of external readers are just not the kinds of opinions that matter in the web of collective belief that characterizes trade publishing. Unlike academic publishing, where the intellectual quality and originality of a book is a major consideration and consulting external readers is a routinized way of assessing quality, in trade publishing it is assumed that satisfying a good editor (or good editors) is a sufficient test of quality. If a proposal or manuscript passes this test, then what matters most in the deliberative process is the assessment of the market for the book and its sales potential, and those working within trade houses generally assume that the views of external readers are unlikely to be of any help in this regard. ‘An academic can often make a much more pointed and acute judgement than I can about the strengths and weakness of an historical argument,’ explained a senior editor at one of the imprints in a large corporation, ‘but I also have to think about the commercial appeal. It isn’t an industry where you have to have the highest possible intellect to succeed as a good writer and good publisher. We’re not a rarefied kind of club for the elite; it’s just not what publishers are. So you’re going to rely on your instinct about what a book could sell or whether we can sell it. It’s not going to come from an academic.’
So how does an editor know how many people they need to consult in-house? Partly that depends on how big the book is. But how do they know how big it is? For any editor who knows their job, the signs are there at an early stage – who is the agent, what is the buzz, who is the author and what is his or her platform, what is the track record of the author’s other books, what are the sales figures of comparable titles, what expectations were signalled by the agent when he or she sounded out the editor or submitted the proposal or manuscript?, and so on. There are many different ways that an agent can signal expectations. If the agent is showing it to only one publisher in the first instance, he or she will often indicate how much the publisher would have to pay to pre-empt a book and ‘take it off the table’. If the agent is going for multiple submissions, he or she will often say something along the lines of ‘we’re looking for support in the mid-six figures’. These and numerous other signals, some explicitly stated, others conveyed by a wink and a nod, help to define the bigness of the book and determine the value that the agent expects it to have. But they pale in comparison to the one mechanism that serves more than any other to define the bigness of books and determine their value before anyone knows what their value really is: the auction.
The auction is commonly seen as an economic mechanism that is used by the agent to maximize the advance paid by the publisher, and it does indeed perform this economic role admirably. But the auction has another function that is symbolic rather than economic: it is a device for generating buzz and extending the web of collective belief – in short, a buzz machine. Indeed, the very effectiveness of the auction as an economic mechanism actually depends on its effectiveness as a symbolic device for generating buzz and collective belief. If a book is submitted to multiple publishers and only one publisher expresses an interest in buying it, there will be no auction. The possibility of an auction arises only when it becomes clear that a plurality of publishers are seriously interested in acquiring the book, in which case it is immediately apparent to each of the publishers that there are other houses that ascribe sufficient value to the book to want to bid for it. In the web of collective belief that characterizes the world of trade publishing, this in itself helps to validate the editor’s judgement – it shows, as one editor put it, ‘that you’re not the only one’.
When the auction gets underway, the agent may go back to the bidding parties and tell them what has been offered by another (nameless) party, asking them if they want to reconsider their own offer in the light of their competitor’s bid, and may continue this process until they have found the highest bidder before presenting the options to the author. Each time an agent does this, the publisher is, in effect, reconsidering their own assessment of the value of the book by taking account of the value perceived by one of their competitors in the field. The auction is a continuous process of re-evaluating the value of a book, testing one’s own judgements and opinions against the judgements and opinions of others and adjusting them in this light. The higher others are prepared to go, the more likely it is that you will be inclined to think that you should go higher too. Since the value of the book is at this stage intrinsically indeterminate – it could always be worth more, though it could be worth less too – it can be difficult to draw a line beyond which one is no longer prepared to go. Auctions have an addictive quality, precisely because the value of the book is indeterminate and the assessment of its value is shaped by the web of collective belief.
In deciding whether to go into an auction, to stay in and how high to go, an editor is concerned not just to win a competition for a book and add it to their list but also to nurture and protect a set of relationships that is vital for their own success – namely, their relationships with the key agents in the field. Here the interests of the editor don’t always coincide with the interests of the publisher or the head of the division, since the editor is also competing with other editors in the same house, a competition that can be stressful and intense. ‘My God,’ said one senior editor working for an imprint in a large corporation, ‘the biggest competition around here is which editor is going to get the submission from the important agents. And that’s why turning things down is hard, because you just know that if you turn something down that’s kind of a big-deal book for them, they’re probably not going to submit their next book to you. They’re going to pick one of your colleagues.’ In a field where agents control access to content, an editor’s relationships with the key agents are their lifeline: they simply cannot afford to screw this up. So they may find themselves deciding to bid for books, and asking for permission to bid at levels that even they feel are excessive, simply because they don’t want to offend important agents and they want to be seen and known around town as somebody who bids, and who can, if need be, bid high. ‘If I have a book that there’s a lot of interest in and I could go either way on, I’m probably going to go forward with it because I want to be a player,’ this editor added. ‘Often you’ve been in an auction and you just hope you won’t win. Everybody does it.’
The more a publishing house ends up paying for a book, the bigger that book tends to be for the house concerned. This is not exactly an ‘iron law’, as Andrew Wylie would have it, but it is probably as close to an iron law as you’re likely to find in this field. There is undoubtedly a correlation – albeit rough and always susceptible to exceptions – between the scale of the advance paid and the bigness of the book. Much more is riding on a book for which $500,000 has been paid than is riding on a book for which $50,000 has been paid, and the expectations, preparations and prioritizations within the publishing house are adjusted accordingly. Ironically, this creates a perverse incentive within the large publishing corporations to pay more for books rather than less, because the more you pay, the bigger the book is and the more likely it is that it will be seen and treated as a big book all the way down the line, from positioning within the catalogue and the allocating of marketing spend to prioritization by the sales directors and the way the book is worked by the reps.
There is only one hitch: a big book is not a bestseller; it is merely a hoped-for bestseller. It is the editor’s and publisher’s best guess, a judgement based on their personal response to the proposal or manuscript that is filtered through their experience and supported by various things including the author’s track record and platform, the sales of comparable titles and the web of collective belief. But it could be wrong. ‘In a world where the value of a thing is not established,’ said one agent, ‘it’s not like somebody says “Here is a diamond of this size with this many facets.” You look at the diamond and you go, “Ah, that means it’s worth this much.” The book that you’ve just paid $300,000 for could be worth a million. Or it could be worth $25,000. That’s the risk you take.’
More often than not, the guess is wrong. It’s a gamble, a roll of the dice, which pays off in some cases and fails in others, and the challenge for the publisher is to try to ensure that you win enough times to compensate for the books that fail, and that, when you do win, you are able to turn it into a success on a scale that will make up for all those failures and make a serious difference to your top and bottom lines. ‘Book publishing is a business of hope to a great extent,’ observed one former CEO. ‘You have to be an optimist, you have to believe that the occasional investment will have a disproportionate payoff and some do.’ So what proportion of new books succeeds and what proportion fails in the typical output of the large publishing corporations? The answer to this question depends on how you understand ‘success’. If success is understood from a strictly financial point of view in terms of profitability, then the broad answer is probably around half and half, though only a much smaller proportion of frontlist titles do really well. The business managers at the different corporations have different views on the precise breakdown, but this account, summed up by the business manager at one of the large New York houses, is probably a fairly accurate picture of the industry as a whole: ‘On the new hardbacks we’re putting out each year, probably half lose money and half make money, but only 30 per cent really exceed what we’re looking for. And it’s really the top 10 per cent that make all the difference. A smaller number of books are now accounting for a larger share of the revenue.’4 Of course, no editor or publisher will buy a book with the intention of losing money, but roughly half of the books they buy will. For many of the books they buy, they really don’t know in which percentile it is going to end up – whether it’s going to be in the 50 per cent that lose money or the 50 per cent that make money, or the 30 per cent that exceed expectations, or even the 10 per cent that sell exceptionally well and make the difference. They may have a good hunch but there are always books that surprise even the most seasoned editors and publishers, either by exceeding their expectations or by selling much more poorly than anyone thought. Fortunately for trade publishers, not all is serendipity.
The comforts of the brand
While frontlist publishing is inherently risky, there are two areas where trade publishers can count on more reliable revenue streams – brand-name authors and backlist. Both forms of publishing are extremely important for trade publishers because they provide the counterweight – the ballast, as it were – to offset the inherent riskiness of frontlist publishing.
Brand-name authors are important for two reasons: first, their sales are predictable, and second, they are repeaters.
Their sales are predictable because they have readerships that are loyal to them. Readers become ‘fans’ of a particular writer, or of a series of books by a particular writer, and they want to read more. The publisher can therefore count on a market that is to some extent captive, and the sales of the author’s previous books become a good guide to the sales of the author’s next book. If the author’s career is developing satisfactorily, the publisher can count on cumulative growth: each new book will sell more than the previous one, and the overall trajectory will be a steadily climbing curve. In a world where so much frontlist publishing is a crapshoot, predictability of this kind is a gift.
This kind of loyalty is more common in fiction than in non-fiction, and more common in commercial fiction than in literary fiction. It is more common in fiction than non-fiction because many readers buy non-fiction books for other reasons – for example, because they heard the author speak or they read about it and are interested in the topic. And it is more common in commercial fiction because this is an area where genre publishing is normal – thriller, detective, romance, science fiction, etc. – and where brand loyalty can be developed particularly effectively. Readers of literary fiction tend to be more selective in the books they buy and read, and will move from one author to another with less sense of loyalty to a particular writer. Hence the development of brand-name authors is primarily a feature of fiction publishing, and the more commercial the fiction, the more common the practice. But there are exceptions. There are some non-fiction writers who display the characteristics of a brand, especially if they are media celebrities who have an established fan base, such as celebrity cooks with a regular TV show, like Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson. Brand-name non-fiction writers of this kind can be just as valuable to trade publishers as the more common brand-name commercial fiction author.
Brand-name authors are also repeaters. They write a book a year, or maybe a book every two years. This means that the publisher with a number of repeaters can plan their future programme with much more accuracy and reliability than a publisher who is relying on the normal hit-and-miss business of frontlist trade publishing. They know when each of their repeaters will deliver and they can plan their publishing strategies for each author and each book in order to maximize their sales potential – each year a new hardcover, which is subsequently relaunched as a trade or mass-market paperback, etc. The regular, predictable output of repeaters enables the publisher to build the author’s brand over time, feeding new books into the marketplace at regular intervals to maintain the interest and loyalty of existing fans and to recruit new readers. It also enables the publisher to build the backlist, since the better known the author is, the more valuable his or her backlist will tend to be, as new and existing fans turn to earlier books in order to sate their appetite for their favoured author’s work. So the publisher with brand-name authors wins on both fronts: predictable frontlist hits that can be turned into staple backlist titles.
There are some trade houses that were built on the development of a programme of brand-name authors. Putnam is one. An old American house dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century which had published some celebrated books in the 1950s and 1960s such as Lolita and The Godfather, Putnam was taken over by MCA, the multimedia entertainment conglomerate, in 1975. MCA wanted steady growth and steady cash, and Phyllis Grann, who was brought in as publisher in the late 1970s, delivered this by importing into the world of trade publishing a model that was used by MCA in other sectors of their entertainment empire. ‘I was in the repeater business,’ explained Grann. ‘Putnam was built on repeaters. It was incredibly profitable.’ She found commercial fiction writers who were publishing with other houses, brought them over to Putnam by paying good advances and lavishing personal attention on them, and then worked closely with them to build their brand and their sales. ‘It was like the old MGM studio system. We made it very hard for them to leave.’ They wrote a book a year and publication was spaced out so that new books by big-name authors were not competing in the same slot. The sales force developed strong relationships with the accounts and worked hard to push each new book up the bestseller lists, so that the author, not just the title, became more and more visible. At the same time they kept the author’s backlist constantly in front of the public. The model was hugely successful. ‘We had 33 per cent growth in some years. I mean we really did grow.’
The model pioneered by Putnam in the 1980s and 1990s was soon imitated by others. Some houses sought, as Putnam had done, to poach established writers with clear track records of success, but some also tried to create stables of new writers who would become successful repeaters, developing a kind of ‘nursery’ in which an author’s brand and career – and, at the same time, their readership – could be nurtured over time. One senior editor at a commercial fiction house in the UK which used the nursery model explained how she had helped to develop the career of one of her more successful writers – let’s call her Sandra Post. When she received Sandra’s first novel as a submission from an agent, she read it not only for the intrinsic interest of the material but also with a view to whether Sandra was someone whose career they could develop, whether she could work with her and whether Sandra would respond to the kinds of comments and criticisms she would be making. When the first novel was published, the emphasis was placed on the cover image and the title – ‘the most important thing is the atmosphere, your relationship to the feeling that it evokes in you – good title, good image.’ The author’s name was in small letters and discreetly positioned at the bottom of the jacket. But once the hardback had had a good reception, the cover for the paperback edition was completely redesigned. The author’s name was now positioned at the top of the cover and printed in bold and embossed lettering, sandra post – ‘Now we’re starting to build.’ A shout line was added to the front cover and extracts from glowing reviews of the hardback were printed on the back cover and in the prelim pages. They also took the author to their customers by bringing her to sales conferences where she could meet and talk to the buyers for the major chains, ‘because if you have her in your room with your five buyers, that’s it, that’s 90 per cent of the trade in that one room. And so you start to build her profile in the trade and get them to buy into it.’
The first book was a great success in commercial terms with over a million copies sold, in part because it was picked by the Richard and Judy Book Club, but the publisher then faced the question of how to build on this with the second book. One thing they did with Sandra’s second book was choose a very similar title – two words, same number of syllables in each title. The cover was designed in a similar way with a similar script, the author’s name was bold and embossed at the top of the cover but the shout line was different to avoid confusion.
There has to be that subliminal connection to the people who read [the first book]. Hopefully we’ll get the readers of [the first book] to come to it and maybe some new ones who didn’t. And as time goes on her name will get bigger as she becomes a brand rather than the title being the brand. And once you’re in a brand so to speak, or in work where you’re building a brand, then every time you publish a book you have to try to find the new readership. You’re constantly trying to find new readers. So first of all you’re having to transfer some of your paperback fans into hardback buyers, and then you have to replace those paperback fans that you’ve moved over and add some more. We have to analyse how to do that, and for each author the plan is different. And it’s even down to the tiniest detail about when you publish and which week you publish and who’s up against it and the space you get in the shops and the marketing you can do.
By developing a carefully orchestrated strategy for each author, the publisher tries to build the author’s brand in the minds of their customers – the key buyers at the retail chains – and in the minds of readers, endowing the author with ever greater name recognition and, if all goes according to plan, gradually expanding the fan base of loyal readers.
While the repeater business is an effective way to build a publishing programme, especially in commercial fiction, there are two significant downsides for the publisher. First, advances. The more successful a brand-name author is, the stronger the position the author and the agent are in when it comes to negotiating advances. The agent knows perfectly well how valuable the brand-name author is to the publisher and is able to use this to leverage higher advances. What this means, in effect, is that the advance ceases to be a guarantee on future royalty earnings and becomes an ‘over-guarantee’, that is, a premium paid to the brand-name author for the benefits that accrue to the publisher from having him or her on the list. This reduces the profitability of the author’s books and puts pressure on the publisher’s margins, since it means that the brand-name author is taking a larger share of the publisher’s revenue.
‘As a rough rule of thumb,’ explained the CEO of one large publishing corporation in New York, ‘I would say that 15 or 20 years ago, the author and the publisher were much closer to splitting the revenue after costs of producing a title at 50:50. Now it’s much more like 75:25, or even 80:20, in favour of the author.’ In contractual terms, the author will typically get 15 per cent of retail price on a hardcover book, which is essentially 30 per cent of the net revenue (assuming a discount to the trade of 50 per cent). ‘But if the book doesn’t earn out – which is frequently the case, in fact usually the case with the major authors – there is what I call an over-guarantee,’ the CEO continued, ‘which means that although your contractual royalty is 15 per cent, you’re probably actually paying 20–25 per cent, which means that right off the top, half of the revenue that’s coming in is going to the author. And the publisher still has to pay for manufacturing the book, all the promotion and everything else. So the author is coming out way ahead of the publisher at this point. It’s no longer a 50:50 split.’ In this respect, the trade publishing business has some similarities to the movie business, where the big stars get enormous sums of money off the top, which can run to $15 or $20 million in a picture that might cost $50 million to produce. ‘And it’s the same in the book business, because the economics of the business are such that every publishing house needs blockbusters. They in the long run do produce income. They are the surest form of income. But the blockbuster author is getting a bigger and bigger piece of the pie because of that.’
While the brand-name author produces the most reliable form of income for the publisher and can therefore make a big difference to the top line, their contribution to the bottom line is constantly being squeezed by the capacity of the author and their agent to command higher and higher advances, and therefore a higher and higher proportion of the revenue. The more successful the author becomes, the more important it is for the publisher to hold on to them, since to lose them would create a revenue hole that would be hard to fill; and yet holding on to them means that the publisher is likely to experience intensifying downward pressure on their profitability, since the margins they are able to achieve on their books will be squeezed more and more over time. A large publishing house can absorb this downward pressure on profitability, provided the revenue is high and they don’t have too many of these ‘subperforming margin people’, as one CEO described them, on their list. ‘A big author, even if it’s throwing off a 10 per cent margin where your average is 40 or 45, eventually gets you through your overhead – 10 per cent of a big number is a big number. And then you can afford a 10 per cent margin book because it’s incremental. But the challenge is not to kid yourself that you can afford a whole bunch of 10 per cent books, since pretty soon you’ll have a 30 per cent loss.’ This CEO put a limit on the number of ‘subperforming margin people’ his publishers were allowed to have on their lists. ‘We’re giving each publisher an allowance. You can have so many lower performing ones, and then either you have to find a way to get them to be higher margin or you’re not going to be able to buy. Then once you use your allowance up, that’s it, don’t come to me because I’m not approving any more of those that year.’ You may need some of these big-name authors in order to achieve your top-line revenue targets and maintain the standing of the house, but the more you have on your list, the more your bottom line will suffer. That, in short, is the price publishers pay for the comfort of the brand.
The second downside of publishing brand-name authors is that there is always the risk they will leave. Brand-name authors are in a strong position in the field, and their agents can play publishers off against one another in an attempt to get them to pay over the odds for the revenue streams that will be generated by their future books. Thanks to BookScan and other sources of data, a publisher seeking to acquire a brand-name author will have a pretty good idea of the historical track record of sales and will be able to calculate by how much they would need to increase the author’s market share in order to justify the premium they would have to pay to wrest the author away from his or her existing publisher. If the author is dissatisfied with some aspect of the services provided by his or her existing publisher, the hand of the predatory publisher will be strengthened, but in this highly commercial sector of the publishing field, the scale of the advance – and therefore the size of the premium that the publisher is willing to pay – is of paramount importance. From time to time, the big brand-name authors will move houses – in 1997 Stephen King moved from Penguin Putnam to Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, having turned down an offer of $21 million from Penguin Putnam for his next book; in 2001 Michael Crichton moved from Knopf to HarperCollins, signing a two-book deal reported to be worth $40 million; in 2006 James Patterson changed his publisher in the UK, moving from Headline, an imprint of the Hachette Group, to Random House in a deal that committed the author to deliver eight co-written books in a year. High-profile moves of this kind are a testimony to the poaching game that is played out constantly in that sector of the field where brand-name authors are leveraged by large corporations seeking to grow their revenues and increase their market shares in a market that is largely static. While poaching clients is viewed as foul play by most agents, poaching authors is seen as part of the game by publishers – with the important proviso that, for the brand-name authors, it is only the large corporate publishers, or imprints owned by the large corporations, who can afford to play.
The managing director of an imprint at one large publishing corporation explained how she’d successfully poached a brand-name author only to find, some years later, that he was poached by a competitor:
I thoroughly enjoyed his thrillers and I didn’t think they were reaching anything like the market they ought to. So I talked to the agent because I knew he was being underpublished. And they said, ‘Mmm… may be interested.’ And months later they sort of said, ‘Actually, you know, would you like to discuss it?’ He wasn’t happy with the publisher he had – he’s a very strong-minded man. So he came to us for a not insignificant amount of money. We got him straight onto the hardback bestseller list with our first outing, we got him to number one with the second book and completely transformed his career. We set ourselves hurdles that we knew we needed to overtake. Because the significant thing if you are poaching is: only do it if you believe you can do something better than the current publisher. Because if it’s just a question of poaching the turnover, actually it’s going to go horribly wrong, because you’re going to overpay for the current turnover. So if you can’t increase the sales, don’t do it, leave it – and that’s not a rule everyone follows.
Having got him to number one on the bestseller list, it wasn’t long before other publishers were wooing him in turn. At a certain point one of the large corporations offered him ‘X percentage more’ in terms of the advance for each of his books, an increase that his existing publisher didn’t feel able to match, not because they didn’t have the resources – their pockets were certainly deep enough – but because on their reckoning this would tip it over the point at which it was a profitable publishing proposition. But of course the loss of such an important brand-name author left a significant hole in the sales of the house that lost him. So what did they do to fill the gap? ‘About two years before he left we knew that day would come,’ explained the managing director, ‘so we put in place strategic plans to replace that turnover at a profitable level.’ This meant working hard to attract new thriller writers and build them up. Every major house has a wish list of authors they would love to publish and the departure of a major brand-name author opens up space in the list for the house to promote authors whose brands are not yet so well established. But in the short term, the revenue gap created by the loss of a brand-name author can be difficult to fill. ‘I won’t deny that it’s challenging,’ the managing director reflected, and she expected to take a big hit on the top line in the short term. But her hope was that by promoting some of their existing authors and perhaps poaching a few from elsewhere, as well as expanding their publishing programme in other areas where they felt there was some unmet demand, they would eventually be able to make up the lost revenue and at the same time do so in a more profitable way.
The second area where trade publishers can count on reliable revenue streams is the backlist. The virtues of the backlist are numerous: the revenue is relatively predictable and stable from one year to the next; the major investment costs have already been made and any unearned advances have usually been written off by the time a book becomes a backlist title (and certainly by the time it becomes a deep backlist title); marketing expenditure and promotion costs are minimal; and returns are generally low. With backlist titles the publisher is simply reprinting books to meet ongoing demand and the only costs they incur are the costs of printing, the costs of warehousing and distribution and the royalty payments to the author (and, in the case of books no longer in copyright, not even the latter). Backlist publishing is therefore much more profitable than frontlist publishing. Not only does it make a relatively stable contribution to the publisher’s top line; it also makes a disproportionately large contribution to the bottom line. It is the closest thing there is in publishing to printing your own money.
So why don’t publishers do more of it? The simple explanation is that building backlist is a slow and laborious process, especially in trade publishing. It takes a long time to build up a list of books that backlist well. Good backlists were built by publishing houses that were founded in previous centuries, or in the earlier part of the twentieth century, when the conditions of the field of trade publishing were very different. Most of those backlists have now been acquired by the large publishing corporations, which bought up houses and imprints partly in order to acquire the kind of backlist that would be very difficult to create ex nihilo today. ‘Everybody’s out looking for little niche backlist companies that you could just lay into your company because you could do it for nothing, you know, almost no additional expense,’ said the CEO of one of the large publishing corporations. ‘But those are now pretty much gone.’ So there are very few opportunities left for the large publishing houses to grow their backlist by acquisition. They have to build the backlist organically, which takes much longer and is much more difficult to do.
But there is another factor that has tended to depress the value of the backlist in the world of trade publishing – namely, the revolution in the retail sector. The rise of the retail chains has set in motion a series of changes that have tended to reduce the value of backlist publishing to houses. Let me highlight three.
In the first place, the hardback revolution, which we analysed in chapter 1, has led to a long-term erosion in the sales of mass-market paperbacks. The traditional trade publishing model – whereby a new title sold in the thousands, possibly in the tens of thousands and only in rare cases in the low hundreds of thousands in cloth, and was then released in a mass-market paperback edition which could go on to sell in the hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions – was increasingly replaced by a new model in which the initial hardcover edition was itself mass marketed and could sell in the hundreds of thousands and even in the millions. But this meant that the market for the subsequent mass-market paperback was being cannibalized by the initial hardcover edition. Hence most trade publishers have generally experienced a significant long-term decline in the sales of mass-market paperbacks.
Second, publishers who had invested heavily in developing lists of classic titles that were out of copyright, like Penguin’s Classics and New American Library and Random House’s Vintage Classics and Modern Library, found themselves facing growing competition from the retail chains themselves, in particular Barnes & Noble, which began publishing its own editions of out-of-copyright classics. As a retailer turned publisher, Barnes & Noble was able to compete with the big trade houses on advantageous terms. Since they owned their own retail space, they could undercut the prices of their competitors – Barnes & Noble’s Classics edition of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, for example, sells for $4.95, and $4.45 to those who belong to Barnes & Noble’s membership scheme, compared to $7.95 for Random House’s Modern Library edition and $8.00 for Penguin’s Classics edition. They could also give their own books greater prominence and visibility in their stores, and allow them to stay on the shelves and display racks for longer. Barnes & Noble’s move into the publishing of classics undoubtedly hurt those trade houses who were publishing classic editions – ‘They simply stopped buying our classics,’ commented the CEO of one of the large houses, which now had to rely on other retailers to sell books that had previously sold well through Barnes & Noble. With Barnes & Noble’s acquisition of Sterling Publishing, they began to compete with publishers in other areas too, such as generic four-colour books like ‘The Book of Horses’, ‘The Book of Roses’, etc. As illustrated reference works, these books had traditionally backlisted well, but publishers like Penguin’s Dorling Kindersley found that competition from Barnes & Noble was eroding sales of generic books of this kind.
The third reason why the retail revolution has tended to depress the value of the backlist is that the major retail chains have become increasingly frontlist oriented, and the discount stores and supermarkets, which have become increasingly important players in the retail market for books, are strongly oriented towards frontlist bestsellers. The field of trade publishing as a whole has become increasingly focused on frontlist bestsellers, and the amount of time that any particular title has in order to prove itself in this highly competitive arena has diminished over time. To some extent this development has been compensated for by the rise of Amazon and other online booksellers, which have proved to be ideal outlets for older backlist and more specialized titles that are unlikely to be routinely stocked by bricks-and-mortar stores. But whether the migration of backlist sales into the online retail space will fully compensate for the marginalization of backlist titles in the bricks-and-mortar chains remains to be seen.
Despite these developments, backlist publishing remains hugely important, indeed vital, for trade publishers, and it helps greatly to offset the inherent serendipity and unpredictability that characterizes so much frontlist publishing. But trade publishers vary enormously in the extent to which their revenues break down by frontlist and backlist. Some trade houses like Hyperion, the publisher owned by the Disney corporation, are overwhelmingly frontlist driven; they have relatively small backlists, amounting to no more than 20 per cent of their sales, and they are hugely dependent on their ability to publish a number of frontlist bestsellers every year in order to meet their sales targets. Other publishers like Workman, whose What to Expect When You’re Expecting has become the standard work on pregnancy with more than 14 million copies in print, are largely backlist driven; backlist sales account for as much as 75 to 80 per cent of their revenue and frontlist bestsellers play a much smaller role in their publishing programme. The big corporate publishers lie somewhere in between. For those corporations with large backlists, like Penguin and Random House, backlist sales typically account for between 30 and 40 per cent of total revenues; for those with smaller backlists, like Simon & Schuster, the proportion is more like 25 to 30 per cent. This means that for the large corporations, somewhere between 60 and 75 per cent of the revenue generated each year must come from new books. ‘Every year I have to reinvent 70 per cent of my revenue,’ as one CEO put it. That creates a pretty powerful incentive to acquire big books and do everything you can to turn them into bestsellers.
1 Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007).
2 See Richard E. Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 3 and passim.
3 I borrow this term from J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, 2nd edn, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). A performative utterance is one in which ‘the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action – it is not normally thought of as just saying something’ (pp. 6–7).
4 Greco, Rodriguez and Wharton give a slightly different account of the breakdown between success and failure on the frontlist of trade publishing: ‘Our research indicates that 7 out of every 10 frontlist hardbound books fail financially (i.e. they do not earn enough to cover the author’s advance and other editorial, marketing, and overhead costs), 2 books break even, and 1 is a hit’ (The Culture and Commerce of Publishing, p. 30).