INSTALLMENT 24: 1 APRIL 82

 

The Saga of Bill Starr, Part I

Because we all understand the invidiousness of believing the myth that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, let me this week hold the strands of barbed wire down and assist you in stepping over into a seemingly greener pasture, where we will meet a man named Bill Starr, a novelist who recently took a very innovative and courageous action in aid of demonstrating just how weed-choked is the terrain where contemporary writers live and try to earn a living.

One supposes it is in large part due to the huge successes of—at best—a dozen works of fiction each publishing season, that the conceit persists among the laity that writers all live existences of grandeur, glamour and freedom from such fiscal angst as that shared by plumbers, farm workers, cab drivers and secretaries. Would that it were so. Sadly, it ain’t.

As one who has earned his living behind a typewriter for going on twenty-seven years, I can assure you that with very few exceptions most writers eke out barely a subsistence living. It is, to apply a remark by Bogart in a different context, a mug’s game. Even the best writers still struggle like crazy to make a decent income. We will, of course, exclude from these comments people like Harold Robbins, Judith Krantz, Sidney Sheldon and Rosemary Rogers who, in my view, are not writers: they are creative typists.

For the mass of laborers in the literary vineyards, even getting a book accepted for publication, even having it produced by a reputable house, even having it released to the nation’s bookstores and newsstands, does not guarantee that it will make a cent, beyond the advance monies paid, for the scrivener who labored to set down those words.

The reality of book distribution and promotion and display is a doleful one. (For purposes of this essay only, I will restrict myself to the vagaries of paperback publishing, saving for another time the horrors of hardcover realities.)

At the moment I write this, which is today, according to the statistical bible of the publishing industry, LITERARY MARKET PLACE, there are approximately forty major paperback houses. This is a wholly inaccurate figure, of course. I’ve probably missed a batch. I plucked out only those names I recognized as releasing titles on a regular basis. But each of those firms issues titles under a myriad of imprints. And those are just the mass-market houses. Additionally, there are all the specialized presses, the university presses, the trade edition publishers and the hardcover houses with trade or mass-market editions of titles they’ve already marketed in hardcover.

Of the dozen-to-forty major paperback houses, the release schedule includes between six and fifteen titles each month. The estimate (conservative, I wager) of total paperback titles flooding the racks each month is between 125 and 175. Two hundred seems to be a not-impossible figure. Newsstands get new shipments of titles twice a week.

And here’s the staggering reality: the average shelf-life of an average paperback is between 5 days and two weeks.

What I’m relaying here is the simple fact that if my latest book gets to your nearest 7-Eleven spinner rack today, by this time next week…it’s gone. And that doesn’t even mean it was sold. What it means is that it had front-cover display for about five days, and then when the new batch of books came in it was put at the back of the pocket (where most people won’t look for it, because they think all five of the pb’s in that pocket are the same), and then—if I’m lucky and the clerk at the 7-Eleven knows my name—it gets shunted down to the back of a pocket at the base of the spinner rack (where no one looks because they don’t want to bend over that far), and ten days to two weeks later it is pulled and is “stripped” for return credit. (Stripping is the procedure whereby the front cover is ripped off and returned, and the book itself is supposed to be pulped. In fact, this frequently does not happen. In fact, the stripped books are bootlegged to a second hand shop or some other knockoff joint. But that’s yet another bit of illegal tomfoolery that circumvents the intention to make it easy for the pb retailer so s/he doesn’t have to ship back an entire load of postage-heavy product.)

The system works in variants of what I’ve delineated above. B. Dalton and Waldenbooks and independently-owned bookstores have their methods; drug stores, magazine shops, newsstands have theirs. But it all works along those lines.

So given the foregoing, which books get the push from the publisher? Well, Bantam Books will put massive promotional efforts behind something like PRINCESS DAISY because they shelled out 3.2 million dollars to the hardcover publisher, Crown, for the paperback rights. They will not, obviously, get quite so frenetic about promoting a mystery or science fiction or western novel picked up for $3000, or an original book commissioned “in-house” for an advance of even $10,000. When you sink or swim on the sales of a single title, you attach the life preserver of publicity and tv commercials to the Big One and, while it may be chill to put it this way, the rest of the list can dog-paddle for survival.

Yet until recently, virtually every book contract contained the following phrase: “Publisher will expend best efforts in marketing the title.”

“Best efforts” is a catchy phrase. While a poet or an academic might find that a Spartan circumlocution, those of us whose brains don’t dribble out of our ears would take it to mean best efforts. And that purely presents itself, say in relation to PRINCESS DAISY, as two hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of newspaper, magazine, television and radio ads, huge dump-bins at point-of-purchase, die-cut book covers in three or four assorted styles, wide-ranging promotional tour for the author to babble on tv talk shows…the whole range and depth of possible ways to get you, the potential buyer, to rush off for a copy. That, by me, is best efforts. Because if a dreary item like that Judith Krantz novel can draw down such loving attention from a publisher, then it’s obvious the publisher is capable of such efforts; ergo, that becomes the definition of “best efforts” for that publisher.

But as we can see from the fact that anything much below the fiduciary-interest level of a Krantz or Robbins or Rogers book gets, at best, cursory promotion (gone in 5 days to two weeks), we are dealing here with hyperbole. Best efforts if you have written a book for which the paperback house went neck-deep into debt; but dog-paddle if they paid for the book out of petty cash.

But what if a writer who squoze his guts out writing a book he cared about deeply, who sold it to a paperback house believing he had at least a shot at promotional parity, found the 5 days / two weeks reality unbearable? What if such a writer, seeing his labors stripped and pulped before they had a chance to reach what he (in his arrogance) believed was a reading public hungering for his creation, decided to fight back? What if that writer, so naive in the ways of the slicker world, did not understand that it’s a shell game with the odds hung against his ever making a dollar in royalties, and he decided to take on the Status Quo? What then?

Well, gang, since you’re here with me on the other side of the barbed wire, in here with the weeds and the mesquite that looked like green grass from over there outside…since I’ve got you over here and have explained the terra incognita you needed to understand before I could whip on you the saga of Bill Starr…I guess you will forgive me if I break this construct in half and come back next week to demonstrate that if you care enough, if you get mad enough, you can whup ass on City Hall. Or, in this case, Pinnacle Books.

Return, if you will, next week at this exact location, here in the weed-choked pastures of publishing, for the story of Bill Starr and a book called CHANCE FORTUNE.

You say you’ve never heard of that book?

How interesting.

You’ll hear about it next time. I promise you.