A lot of my answers are exactly the same ones anyone could come up with if they thought about them for a bit, especially whilst bearing an understanding of the corporate world in mind. And I certainly don’t need to preach to any of my colleagues in the underground community, most of which are way more clued up than I am.

The purpose of my little diatribe is twofold - to hopefully catch some readers that haven't as of yet thought about the industry in a critical sense, and to offer some insight from the other side of the firing line (I worked as a bookseller some time in a large retail chain in England. Needless to say I don’t work there any more, otherwise the following outburst would have got me sacked.)

Mr. Hendricks brought these pointers up as a point for discussion. It’s a shame the people who should be answering these questions refuse to join the discussion, but for what it’s worth I’d like to offer my straight-up observations from the trenches. And they should be taken as just that; I’m neither an apologist for the industry I worked for, nor am I a revolutionary – just a simple dude aggravated by the state of play offering his two cents.

The questions posed below were from Tom Hendricks, editor of www.musea.us. The original article, presented as the ULA’s Monday report on 06/08/07, can be found here. It’s essentially the same list of questions included below.

 

1. Why does this hardback cost so much? Who can afford
buying these books? Is this really a good value?

I certainly can’t afford them. Even when I got 30% discount on all my books. I can count how many mainstream hardbacks I’ve bought in the last year on one finger… er, one. It was Palahniuk’s Rant (I subsequently wished I hadn’t wasted my money.)

I’d imagine that most discerning readers are the same – even if a book comes out that we’ve been itching to read for ages (in some cases, years), we won’t lay down our hard earned cash for the hardback even if we can afford it – a little thing known as principle. However, as long as Oprah or Richard and Judy give a book their seal of approval (damned hacks), there’ll always be plenty of people lapping it up. It’s this supply and demand that keeps publishers and the reviewers/critics on their payrolls laughing all the way to the bank.

As an aside, it's interesting to note that Oprah never says ‘actually, nothing I read this month was any good. Save your money’.

Now for the science –

A large chain will generally hike the price of any book up by roughly 50%. This goes for both hardbacks and paperbacks – order a paperback from the wholesalers for £3.50 a copy, you sell it on for £7. Order a hardback for £10, sell it on for £20.

Obviously, the profit margin for hardbacks is ridiculous – the £20 sale price reaches us after it’s been hiked up by multiple entities. Trace this back from the book store to the wholesaler to the distribution companies to the publisher, and you can bet your ass you’re paying over the odds for a book that originally cost next to nothing to make. Good value? After you’ve paid all the middle men, I think not. Obviously this model is applied to 99% of all consumer goods, so admittedly it's not exactly breaking news here.

Interestingly, a publishing graduate informs me that the production cost for a hardback is about equal to that of a paperback. They’re still both made of pulp, after all – unfortunately, a lot of people think that the plastic dust jacket is worth a tenner.

2. Why do you publishers only publish novels and non-fiction
books? Do you hate ALL plays, short story collections, poetry,
and zines?

Nah, publishers don't hate them. They don't hate or love anything - it's all business, and there isn't any money in fringe publications. Well, there is, but as far as publishers are concerned it isn’t established enough to take a risk – it’s all about playing it safe. That’s why your local store only carries famous poetry and drama titles, and next to no short story collections or zines (especially the latter). This really ties the hands of booksellers – I couldn’t have stocked my shelves with titles offered by struggling small presses which valiantly filled this demand, because I couldn’t get hold of them at prices that would ever be able to compete with large publishers. They hold the keys.

Ironically, if they were willing to work with and support the underground (it would be next to effortless to sort out a game plan for this, too), it’d be beneficial to everyone – booksellers, readers, and the publishing industry alike – but they’re too short sighted to see beyond the guaranteed dollar signs. In the mean time, people will search out good reads regardless (moreso with the advent of the Internet) and once in a while a good gem will pop up in a bricks-and-mortar bookstore. In fact, I think this happens more often than you may think, it's just a shame small writers and publishers can't get them to a wider audience and thus don't get paid an honest buck for their stellar efforts.

3. Why do most non-fiction books seem like 10 page essays that
have been padded into long winded tomes?

While I agree wholeheartedly, I actually find that the greater cancer in the non-fic world these days is the massive deluge of The Boy Called It clones – the ones with the innocent child looking pleadingly at you from the cover and the blurb which reads something along the lines of ‘Author X suffered years of beatings, neglect, loneliness and bad breath. Hear her whine on about it for 400 pages and discover how she got through it all, became a stronger person and a C-list celebrity’. I go to my local store and I can’t move for the damned things.

Boo-hoo. Pass the tissues.

4. Why is there so much waste, so many returned books (books
that don't sell and must be returned to the publishing company)?

It’s one of the few industries in which the bizarre practise of sending unsold stock back to whence it came on mass, and getting a near full refund, exists. A really good article which dissects the process can be found here: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05154/515469-28.stm

I think the journalist hits the nail on the head with this little summary:

The industry's current economic model pushes publishers to generate a small number of blockbuster hits. But picking winners is a quixotic enterprise, and as publishers ship an ever-increasing number of books to stores, hoping to hit the jackpot every time, stores are sending an ever-increasing number back.

I remember when Ian McEwan’s Saturday came out. Being a middleclass housewife’s favourite author (pretty much our main customer demographic), we ordered nearly a billion copies expecting them to fly off the shelves at an incredible rate of knots. It turns out that all of McEwan’s prior self-important wankery was leading up to this novel, the cumshot of his career. Remarkably, he didn’t fool anyone and we were left scratching our asses while wondering what to do with twenty crates of total dross, only toaoaafskkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk

Sorry, I just fell asleep on my keyboard. Even thinking about that book sends me to the sleep.

5. Is the New York Times Bestseller List really accurate? The
music business has had to redo their lists to make them based less
on opinions and more on facts. Is it time for the NYT to redo how
they determine their list? And how DO they determine that list.
Is that really fair to all?

Is the NYT list fair? Yes and no.

It is fair in the sense that it is compiled from a massive cross section of sales outlets, and rightly bases its findings on customer purchases and not bulk orders by retailers. So, with that in mind, the NYT list does reflect what people are buying quite accurately, and any gross anomalies rarely pass through without the editors picking them up and addressing them.

Of course, this does not in any means reflect the quality of titles appearing on the list. I used to be able to predict with 90% accuracy the contents of next week’s bestsellers list here in Britain, purely because of the self-feeding advertising cycle – if you work in a large chain and you get told that the publisher of Book X has paid a huge sum (we’ll get onto this later) to put Book X slap-bang in the front of the store at a reduced price, it follows that Joe Public is going to buy it by the cartload. The bigger the sales figure, the higher it gets in the charts, and the higher it is in the charts, the more Joe Public takes notice of it.

To demonstrate, you can take the top half of any given NYT list and compare the books therein with your local store: how many of them are currently on massive promotional drives?

6. Why are few Indie books ever reviewed by the mainstream
(excluding a few University titles). And why are no zines ever
reviewed? There are more zines published then novels.

For me, this isn’t actually a major concern, though it’s possible that the issue is more prominent on your side of the pond.

As far as I see it, there’s plenty of reviewers that seem dedicated in doing their job properly, and a self-serving collective of reviewers working for publications which don’t have the same ethos. Those guys have their own circle-jerk going on that the Indie community couldn’t care less to join in, and those reviewers aren’t going to pull their heads out of their asses any time soon. Thankfully with the interwebz and other resources, we’ve got all the tools necessary to go about our own business and ignore them.

7. Is there publishing payola? For example when a Warner Book
is reviewed in a Warner owned magazine, and the author
featured on a Warner TV talk show - is that fair or is that
undisclosed Publishing Payola. The FCC has already fined
Warners for music payola. Is there publishing payola here
too? And what about other major book publishers?

The publishing payola mentioned is painfully apparent. As far as I know however, the laws vary massively between the UK and America (Tom Hendrick’s own research into payola is much more extensive than mine, and can be read on the various articles published here.)

I just talked to my old man who has a law degree (he even wears a suit sometimes, so you know he knows what he’s talking about), and he muttered something about the above examples example getting through loopholes due to independent media protection laws. He also asked when I was going to get a haircut, but that’s irrelevant.

If Warner owns (not merely sponsors) the publication, it can say what the good-god-dang it likes about its own books. Doing a bit of research, it seems to be the case that the payola laws regarding music are a lot more straight-forward than those governing other media. A lot of the time the powers-that-be exploit this grey area in ways that range from unethical to downright abhorrent, and unfortunately there's not a great deal we can do to stop it.

8. My pet peeve is kids books written by celebrities. How do you
justify publishing these horrible books? And speaking of horrible
books, how do you justify all these political promote-my-career
books? Do you get political favors for printing these?

Those books are insipid. Especially the children’s ones.

Again, it’s a sad state that most (though I must stress, not all) publishers will knock out any old dross if it’s going to bring in the green. See the theme forming here? If Bloomsbury could convince Rowling to relinquish her used toilet paper, they'd send it straight to the printers knowing it’d sell. But, y'know, someone out there is buying all this tat, so why wouldn't publishers sell it? Sometimes it's important to look at it from that point of view.

9. Here's a question about who gets reviews. Why do some
dinosaur authors ALWAYS get reviews no matter how bad their
latest books are, while other lesser known writers, doing much
better work, never get reviews?

I’m convinced that whenever Martina Cole wants to write a new novel she just opens up a new word document and hits Ctrl + V, but people will still lap it up like good little consumers regardless of what cookie-cutter produced it. If people are buying it, reviewers will review it. If reviewers review it, people will buy it. Indy writers are left to stand outside the circle yelling and waving their hands around, wondering how the hell to get on the first rung of the ladder.

When it comes to dinosaur authors who went off the boil a long, long time ago, I guess people are always going to buy the next novel just in case they miraculously return to form. Although I’ve got a great amount of respect for him, this could probably be said of Stephen King (and the same reason why I bought Hannibal Rising not too long ago. I know, I’m a dolt.)

*Update - I've since retracted that last comment about King. He's still got it going on.

10. Why don't you talk about the quality of writing more? Why
don't you quote more of the actual writing so us readers can
judge? Why all this personal info about the reviewer in the
review? Who cares?

Agreed. We don’t need to hear that shit. If you’ve been given some precious column inches, they are not there for you to blather on about yourself. It’s supposed to be a review, not a autobiography of some schmuck intern.

It gets my goat even more when interviewers do it.

11. Why don't you talk about the business of publishing, and how
the industry is not doing well at all. And why are there no new
exciting authors, just the same old authors that have been around
for decades?

I think it’s a crying shame that there are some really interesting publications which talk about the inner workings and goings-on in the publishing world – I’m talking really in depth stuff - except such papers aren’t available to you or I, the general consumer. For instance, one great magazine here in the UK is The Bookseller, but if you manage to score a subscription to it… well, someone must’ve been doling out the sexual favours.

Why The Bookseller, an inherently fascinating rag, isn’t available to anyone other than industry workers is a mystery to me. The only thing I can stab a guess at is, as you say, the industry is not doing so hot at the moment and they don’t want people to know that. I know for a fact that the large chains in England are is running scared – if you watch close enough, you’ll notice that a lot of the bookstores in your area are starting to put a noticeable emphasis on selling you gift wrap and stationary to help boost their sales. This sounds uncomfortably like a death rattle to me.

Why are there no new authors? They pop up every now and then, and we’ll keep finding them as we always have, it’s just a shame we’ve got to do all the donkey work to find them. It also sucks from the author’s point of view, and as I mentioned, they don’t get the sales and support they rightly deserve as a result. I think this will change (and in fact, has been changing) over time as people turn to the net to find original media, so I'm optimistic about that light at the end of the tunnel.

12. Why don't you talk about shelving fees? Just like
manufacturers have to pay fees to get their stock on the grocery
store shelves, mainstream publishers have to pay for good display
space in some chain bookstores. But readers don't know about
that. Why?

Because it’s an outright scam, and if the majority of readers cottoned on to that then they lose one of the sharpest arrows in their quiver.

A couple of great (and shocking, you might find) articles exposing the details of this can be found here:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/06/no_such_thing_as_a_free_christ.html

http://money.uk.msn.com/investing/articles/morecomm...

In the latter article, I do really like Anthony Cheetham’s honesty. I fly a bit of a flag for Quercus Books… having spoken to a few of their reps and seeing how they do business, I can say with reasonable certainty that their hearts are in the right place.

13. Why is the cover art of your books so covered with
promotional text, and ads, that it ruins what little cover art there
is left?

I’ve got a book lying around somewhere (it's a really good book, but I’ve forgotten what it is) which has the following line taking up nearly the entire bottom third of it:

“Funny” – The Guardian

Er, thanks for that, Guardian.

Maybe we should start putting 72 point, one word reviews in Newspeak on all our books? “Doubleplus good!” The Times.

The thing that always confused me, and I’ve never found an answer for it, is how brand new books get printed up with “His/Her New Bestseller!” on the covers… how the hell can they be bestsellers before I’ve even put them on the shelves?

14. Why are almost all mainstream books either action books
geared toward men readers, love stories geared toward
women readers, or kids books geared toward children? Why does
every book have to fit a predetermined format?

And what about cook-books written by celebrity chefs aimed at middle-aged women? It might be just me getting more bitter as the years roll on, but this seems to be getting worse and worse as of recent.

I’m going to cut the industry some slack on this one – if the majority of readers didn’t blindly buy into this crap, it wouldn’t be an issue. The public almost parody themselves - before customers came to the counter, I used to be able to guess what they were going to ask for. Not because I’m a genius, just because it really is that easy – in the guys, you can spot the Chris Ryan (blechh) or Bernard Cornwell fans from a mile off. Same thing with women and Jodie Picoult.

15. How did this author get his book deal? Who did he know?

The aforementioned magazine, The Bookseller, often has really candid interviews with authors in which they cover these details (I mean, really candid – sometimes even giving exact figures on their advances and things of that ilk).

16. Why are all your books so boring?

I think it's going a bit far to call all mainstream books boring - that, if I may be so bold, could be classed as a bit of an elitist statement. But I concede it is a challenge finding books that aren't a rehash of whatever's popular at the given time. When I worked as a book clerk, one of the greatest things about it (it sure wasn't the pay) was being in a place where I could take all the time in the world to physically sift through everything. I got pretty intimate with a lot of the stock that we weren't trying to ram down people's throats, and that put me in a good position to find the gems amongst the silt.

Nowadays, it isn't that easy. I either get my reading from the internet (isn't the Gutenberg Project awesome?), my local library or, when I want to buy modern fiction, from recommendations by people I really trust.

17. Why have the major literary organizations become so elitist
and so much against indie writers.

This beats me too. I think the mainstream and the underground publishers could have an awesome, symbiotic relationship if they (the industry and components thereof) just chilled the fuck out a bit and paid more attention to the products they kick out, not the pennies coming in. They’re like cornered leprechauns fiercely guarding their pots of gold. But again, there's always people trying to make money, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

18. Why do you the book industry, refuse to respond to any of
these issues? How long do you think you can avoid all tough
questions?

For as long as the industry model works, and the money keeps pouring in.

Thanks for reading! Perhaps you learned something? Perhaps you disagree with any of the points raised? If you'd like to add to the discussion, please do e-mail me at zeke @ titty biscuits dot com. I'll endeavor to get back to you right after I finish cleaning the bathroom.