Publishing is a business
Let me tell you about Harry. Not our Harry Bingham. Another Harry entirely. And let me assure you this is true to the best of my knowledge. Harry is a chap I met in Bedfordshire one afternoon at a show who describes himself on his business card as a writer and entrepreneur. Harry is a great chap but entrepreneur he ain’t. Well not a successful one in any event.
Or is he? I bumped into Harry again a month or so back and got an update.
At the Getting Published Day last Saturday one common theme across all of the speakers was that the book business is just that. A business. An industry. It is necessary to make a profit, necessary to achieve sales at a meaningful level. It was mentioned that a new book by a debutant author might get around £20,000 spent on launch and promotion. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a decent sum and I think we would all miss it if it vanished from our savings, but I’m equally sure that a new book by, let’s say Salman Rushdie, would receive rather more up front investment. But I also expect that we would all acknowledge that anything with that name on the front cover, regardless of it’s being crap, if it were so (not that I express such an opinion here or ever have) if well placed on the tables and shelves in shops, advertised in public pages and reviewed – positively - on all the right programmes would sell well. All it takes is money.
Let’s
get back to Harry. Harry wrote a book. I know he’ll forgive me
for saying this, but it wasn’t that good. Certainly well written
for the material, but not a best seller proposition. He wrote a
small book of tales about horses that had been circulating in his
family and his neighbourhood for years. Harry
isn’t really an entrepreneur, he is a farmer.
Now, straight away you can see that no agent or publisher is
going to do anything with this except at best send a politely
worded rejection. Which is what Harry found happened when he
tried.
But farmers are made of stern stuff in Bedfordshire. Harry spent a few bob and printed it himself. He got himself a couple of rural flavoured endorsements, one from an actor off The Archers and another rural ish literary type. He got features on the local radio and national radio (if we may so describe Farming Today). He set up his web site and he does book signings at various events.
In a blog the other day linked from this site a certain Crabbit Old Bat confirmed that an author who is doing well may receive 10% of the face price from their book when it sells. I imagine the margin may drop for debutants, but hold that number.
Harry has sold around 1,200 copies of his 2,000 print run at full price and is now discounting the rest.
I reckon the publishing business would rather look down on these figures with disdain. But let’s look at this from a different angle. C.O.B confirms that 10% return to author is normal for the writer. I conservatively estimate that after various costs Harry is getting 80% return. So pro rata adjustment to his sales of 1,200 makes that an equivalent of 9,600. Not earth shattering, but I’m sure they’ve had worse. Also he is discounting to move his remainders after sales of 60% at full price. Again, not a disaster. Not wonderful either, of course. But we are talking about a cheaply printed collection of quaint stories about rural folk and their horses here.
Now, from a business standpoint I call that, if not a success (and I am tempted to call it one) then it certainly isn’t a failure. Harry has shown a decent profit. But it hasn’t made a penny for the publishers or agents, has it?
Now consider Jason. I mentioned Jason a few weeks ago in another of my errant blogs. Jason writes graphic novels. These aren’t comics. They are dark and dangerous stories in the form of graphic novels. Jason is very very good indeed. He does all his own artwork by hand, he’s a talented artist and wants to work that way. He employs a printer to his own standards and specification, which is high and runs the whole show with a bit of help from his girlfriend, whilst holding down a day job.
Jason has won awards and has genuinely made it to being reviewed on national television. Unlike Harry with his horse tales, Jason is a real player (no disrespect Harry) and sells in respectable quantity. I don’t know for sure why he chose to go it by himself although having chatted with him at length I think it has much to do with production quality. Jason is a star in my eyes.
Neither of them has to carry the overhead that comes from agents and publishers. Obviously agents and publishers have the right to run their businesses how they wish and also to be paid for what they do. But when what they do is take on what they confirm to be under 0.1% of submissions, whilst continuing to pour money into work product they haven’t yet seen from names they know will sell regardless, then they surely can’t blame that other 99.9% of hopefuls if they choose another way. A way which technology is making increasingly practical.
I don’t believe that the 99.9% of aspiring writers that submit proposals and that don’t make it simply aren’t ready, or aren’t good enough. Not all of them, not by a long way. Too much complete crap gets put on the shelf for me to believe that. Too much work I’ve seen just around here isn’t considered when it can be so much better than that tells me otherwise.
It’s a business and the business is about making money, not producing literature. The safe route of another by “X” will sell sufficiently to keep us in business is best for business. This may be massively against the personal preference of so many individuals in these organisations, but companies are like that, as I will argue in another little essay, probably later this week if I get time.
It has been said that self publishers will find out how many friends they have by how many books they sell. Well, Harry is a great fellow, but he doesn’t have 1,200 friends and that level of sales makes business sense the way he did it. And Jason? Watch out for him.
I think that the mainstream publishing industry should stop looking down at self publishing and perhaps consider its position with a bit more care. I think some areas are less dismissive than others, but overall it remains disdainful. There are too many good writers out there who can’t smash through the ceiling that might go that route. And there are enough of them in that potential group that are genuinely good enough that if they do that they might just capsize the ship. Just as so many musicians have done by going their own way.
I’m not suggesting that I have said anything unique here. Probably there are many that have already formed such views, maybe even expressed them. I just wanted to write it down for myself. If I have bored you, I apologise. I may bore you with another instalment later.
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Nevertheless, there are indeed gems - as Jason's work clearly is - as well as niche books like your Harry's. And I've come across people (including on Saturday) who have sold more copies of their self-published books than many who have traditional deals.
The technology has opened up ways for people to ensure their writing is out there and available. As I see it, in these hardest of times, this is definitely something to celebrate. It does mean that you have to do all your own promo, distribution etc and this is very time and energy consuming. But I do think that the sniffy attitude you describe is shifting slowly. I've often recommended self-publishing to people who have written a book for personal reasons (eg memoirs) so that family and friends can have copies of Real Books on their shelves. Also for those people who are unwilling to compromise on content in order to give their book its best possible chance of a trad deal.
Opening up the process of producing books via the technology available and widening the options can only be a Good Thing IMO.
One speaker on Saturday plainly said that they will not consider certain work, regardless of quality, if it intrudes on the space that they consider "belongs" to one of their established names (I have paraphrased). Were I someone desperate for publication and in that space then I think that discouraging would be an understatement.
A few years ago, I read an article where it was alleged that a certain best selling author no longer had time to write his books, what with all his other commitments. He created a brief and the book was prepared by ghost writers and editors. This makes perfect business sense, it shows a profit and is entirely under control of the production manager. Unlikely to be late and the teddy will stay firmly in the pram at all times. And I bet they made oodles of money.
I believe it and wouldn't be at all shocked to learn that it still goes on. How does that reflect on the suggestion that quality will out? As a ghost writer perhaps? Or perhaps work other than memoirs and special interest niche books will increasingly find a market via the SP route. There is no shortage or organisations, such as the writer's workshop, who exist to help with polish and editing etc etc. If people are sensible and take advice to get their quality up to the max and in particular to not di anything really stupid then why not take the plunge with mainstream writing.
*Here's my prediction for the future: many publishers will stop looking at submissions completely, and for new material and authors will focus on self-publishing successes who have proven their book is saleable and who have already done the graft to establish a market.
If you look at it from the publisher's perspective, it saves a lot of time, bother and money, minimises risk, and simply makes a lot of sense.
It seems to me that Authors are currently exploited within the mainstream publishing world due to the power that retailers and publishers have relative to the individual author. In the absence of an effective union, it may only be through the brave choices made by your Harry that we can force them to change. Have you heard of the FairRead campaign?
The creative process of writing a book often seems to get distorted by the commercial aims of the publishers. Debi makes a fair point about the lack of editing that harry may have done, but on the positive side of things at least we know this is the book he wrote and not something that has been dictated by the whims of a money-oriented publisher.
But... how much did it cost harry to do his 2000 book print run?
But it's a lot cheaper to set up a website and create a password protected pdf. Works on Kindle, works on everything I think.
I guess it is like music, many years ago I was a song writer and was offered publishing and sent out demos etc...one record label told me to get a new vocalist, of their choosing and they would sign me, difficult as the vocalist was my then wife.
Did I chuck her out eh band...No!
If I could as I have said before to make about £25,000 a year work would go bye byes.
How did publishers make time to source new writers in the past? Were there more hours in the day back then? Or was the profit motive a less significant factor?
It's all fascinating and the self-publishing industry is one to watch, that's for sure. I don't think it is going to give up and go away. And as Steve says, it may well serve as an effective filter for the traditional publishing houses to exploit.
Also, yes there will be casualties and it is their own money they will be venturing. But nerves of steel? Electronic publishing is dead cheap. Cheaper than publishing your own music by a long shot and there are some very successful bands that do it themselves.
I think that in the past publishers worked harder at the literature and less on the publicity. Now they sell a book, in the past I suspect they rather published a book and it sold itself.
The paraphrased quote 'One speaker on Saturday plainly said that they will not consider certain work, regardless of quality, if it intrudes on the space that they consider "belongs" to one of their established names' was simply an indication that this particular MS would have arrived on the wrong desk for their book and the author should continue pitching.
The publishing business is a business and only needs new blood when the old has congealed. Sorry, that was the message I received on Saturday. 99.9% of submissions can't all be not ready. The people running these businesses are human. Their priority is to stay in business.
That amount of investment is probably quite daunting for some authors, but I think it is reasonable that authors should show their faith in their own books. I'd like to see a situation where the author can seek investment to help with initial costs and in return offer that investor a royalty. That is normal for entrepreneurs in the business world and I don't think vanity publishing is an accurate description of that process. The terms vanity publishing and slushpile seem to be derogatory terms used by people who have a vested interest in belittling authors.
This already exists. It's called a publishing house, Ron.
Secondly, you have taken my one example of a horsey type of book, which I was using to make a general and more broad point and used it to imply that all self published books are like that. Whether they are or not and I don't think they are, the status quo does not have to remain so.
The simple fact is that any business, including my own, is hard to penetrate if you aren't on the inside. Fifteen years ago I worked for mainstream software consultancies until I'd had enough of making other people rich from the sweat of my own back and having to cowtow to people that brought nothing to the party but pain. I quit. Many people would think that would lead to me becoming a contractor, which is the industry term for an employee charging daily through an agency but otherwise looking like an employee. But I didn't. I am independently in business. I sometimes employ people when there is too much work on but largely I keep that which is earned from my own work and I do not live off other people's work. I suspect that this attitude underlies my attitudes to life in general. I am not a self publicist, I have a client base and I get business because I haven't yet let anyone down. In their own field anyone with the right skills and ability can do what I have done and I would like to think I could do in this field if I could only string together six uninterrupted months. I write thousands upon thousands of words annually. It so happens it's not for general publication.
There is a technology enabled change coming and I think that large parts of the publishing world may get found out in the next ten years. It's change. It's healthy.
Ron, I don't agree that 'vanity publishing' is used by people who want to belittle authors. On the contrary, it's the vanity publishers themselves who are derided, as they are quite happy to charge someone several thousand pounds to produce a pile of shoddy books that gather dust in the author's garage. There may not be any quality control, even though they claim that they'll offer it, they don't market the work, and they massage the poor author's battered ego to such an extent that the author doesn't ever question why the publishing world has continued to reject what is apparently their utter genius. In self-publishing, the author has control over the finished product and pays less for it. In vanity publishing, the author has no control worth speaking of, other than writing a big fat cheque. That, to me, is the difference.
The father of a friend of mine wrote some short stories in the early 1990s. He wanted to get them published and chose a company that was clearly a vanity publisher because they charged him £10,000 for the privilege. They told him that his manuscript was one of the best they'd ever seen, blah blah. It may well have been, but on the other hand if you're being paid 10 grand you might say all sorts of flattering things to ensure you get that money. Yes, the decision was entirely up to him and it made him happy to see his work in print, but I remember thinking it was an incredibly high price to pay. What's more, his family talked as though they were dealing with a mainstream publisher. I don't know if that was them trying to hide the truth or if that's what they'd been told.
Quite a long time ago Harry (not the Harry mentioned by Alan!) wrote a blog about a company he'd got his eye on for this very reason. As far as I remember, he sent them a chunk of Pride and Prejudice as a sample of his work. They wrote back full of praise. Did they know it was Austen they were reading? Did they even care?
As for 'slushpile', I don't think that's meant to be derogatory either. It's just a bit of publishing slang for the submissions pile. I've never heard colleagues use it as a way of sneering at authors.
The past is not the future.
As for the point 'The publishing business is a business and only needs new blood when the old has congealed', I repeat - new authors are being picked up, all the time, and there are examples on the Cloud. It's just that there aren't many of them. When times are as bad as they are now, agents/publishers are less likely to take risks on anything perceived as too different. Undoubtedly, that means that there are most likely some wonderful books that don't succeed on those grounds. And it also means that estaablished authors are able to be offered deals for books that would never be published if the author was not already well-known and with a wide readership.
My editor said my book was worthy but I was not a 'name' so while it would be discussed it would not be taken up. One only has to read the Sunday Times bestseller lists.
The arguments you advance from your standpoint argue the exact opposite from another persons. In the end, even if you attain all the high standards the odds are still against you. Better than buying a lottery ticket maybe, but still a long shot.
Have you read Blinding Light?
It all comes down to the same thing in the end: that self-publishing provides an alternative avenue which should be welcomed, but it's vital to know what it entails and what the drawbacks may be.
Maybe Penguin will receive so much dross they'll wish they'd never opened Pandora's box - or maybe they will discover a gem or two. It'll be interesting to see.
A couple of my friends are professional DJ's and produce their own stuff to sell on itunes; it is very different to self-publishing / publishing.
Agents or publishers decisions / choices are subjective (they also said this at the event), so if it's not to their taste or they have another author doing the same, then no matter how good you are you are not getting on their list! So, try for their competition!
Many fantastic writers have taken years to be published but maybe they weren't ready at the start, maybe they weren't mature enough in their writing (or immature as the case may be), perhaps they chose the wrong type of agents, perhaps they were not a nice person, perhaps they were smelly and weird?? I'm just giving examples of possible issues.
I can't help but feel that the agents / publishers that were there on the day did have a point "write a good book", I really believe that if you do this and you are always willing to learn and take critique, someone will eventually take you on. I can only speak for myself, but I would like the support / professionalism and knowledge of an agent behind me when my big day arrives because i'm a little nervous of the big wide world.
It is even trashed by the most compliant of national reviewers, gently of course and sometimes with faint praise, but still trashed. Just been browing the web. I can't find a good one. on both sides if the water
Well, that's exactly what you say to a publisher: I've invested £X,000 of my time in my book, what will you pay me to have a percentage?
But presumably Dragons-denny publishers would do exactly the same thinking as the normal kind: what return will they get for their investment? Going by the figures in the back of Harry's book, on average a publisher gets37% of the cover price of a book, OF WHICH NET PROFIT IS 5%. The writer's profit is 8%.
I've no idea what the normal returns on Dragon World would be expected to be, but a publisher might take £50-60,000 to publish a book in a moderate way - MUCH more than that to get a big splash (buying the front cover of the Bookseller, for example, is £10,000 all on its own). Your few thousand that you might otherwise put into self publishing isn't going to tip the balance for them from not-publishing to publishing.
Anyway, of course if a "fantastic" book is spotted and picked up it should bring success. Certainly, for better or worse, J K Rowling didn't quite starve while she waited, although I think she did become a bit peckish from time to time. But my point is that there is, due to the sheer numbers involved, an element of randomness in the whole thing. The readers at agencies are human, they do make subjective decisions. They may have a heavy cold the day they pick up your "fantastic" book. All I am saying is that, in the same way that I got the monkies off my back in my day job, it is becomiing possible in publishing without risking your life savings, if you have the drive, to try another path.
That's all it is. I'm not being evangelical, or starting a war or anything.
In days you'll have downloads galore. Seriously, that's my point. The cost is dropping with e publishing. And as Steve says. You might get noticed by the very people you want to deal with.
AlanP - Thinking about the Eiffel Tower thing, interesting!
Have you done this as you sound like you are talking from experience? I would be interested to see how many sales you get. Perhaps we should all do it & why haven't we? I dunno, i'm just a novice but i'm old fashioned (though I have a blog with work on it, and Twitter etc)
Oh, and by the way, don't forget, if you're dreaming of making a big e-hit, that anti-piracy, digital rights management and constantly patrolling the illegal filesharing sites and getting pirated copies taken down costs a fortune. One which the big publishers are willing to pay, even though they admit that piracy can never be eliminated but only managed. But the rest of us can't even afford to manage it. And the bigger the hit, the more likely it is that people will fileshare, in either happy ignorance, or from a conviction that everything on the Net is free, or a 'moral' determination to make it be so.
AlanP - I have already had an author from Canada/USA virtually copy my writing (Dark Story) but turn it into a fantasy short story and there is nothing that I can do about it. I'm flattered as this person has had their stories published, but I won't put up anymore which is a little sad.
Emma - I think you are right. I have had dealings with some venture capitalists, not in publishing. They can be utterly ruthless and their bottom line is often 100% return on capital.
As to your second point, Emma. Yes I agree wholeheartedly. The big difference with e-publishing and on line music ( a comparison I've been overworking) is that they don't expect to make money from on line sales. They make it from their six night gig at the O2 that follows.
The way I see it, it would be for the publicity in the first instance. An individual would find it hard to guard against piracy.
The music/books analogy isn't an easy one to make work properly - the way that people read, and listen to music, is entirely different. Not least (but not only) because you can't read and do anything else much.
The other thing about the Dragon's Den analogy is that the Book Dragon would have to know their market whereas publishers don't act as if they do. The Book Dragons would assess the book, and any offer would reflect the potential profit to be made. From what I gather, publishers offer an industry standard rate regardless of the quality of the book. That seems irrational.
To return to an earlier point about the Sunday Times bestseller list, the books are only on that list because the public buys them. Sure, they are often heavily promoted but luckily sales assistants aren't standing by with machine guns, forcing us to buy them whether we like it or not.
I have heard some other experts quote typical figures such as 7.5% / 10% royalties for paperback/hardback sales respectively, and I got the impression that there wasn't much scope for negotiation. From one or two publishers' sites I've also got that same impression. You're absolutely sure that's not the case then?
You can negotiate a higher royalty sometimes if the advance is very low - after all, you need something to compensate for the disappointingly small cheque - but you would still receive a percentage in that sort of area or lower. Scope for negotiation depends entirely on the contract you've been offered and whether you and the publisher imagine that you'll sell enough copies to earn back your advance and start earning royalties. For instance, some books may never sell enough copies to earn back their advance (though, of course, some of these become hits and surprise everyone), in which case it's in the author's interests to get a bigger advance and not be so bothered about the royalty. This is a sort of take-the-money-and-run attitude that is sometimes perfectly acceptable. I think we have to take a pragmatic attitude sometimes - what is more important, to get a book published by a respected publisher or to walk away from a deal because of feeling insulted by the low advance and royalty that's being offered?
Naturally, every author hopes that their book will sell and sell and sell, but that doesn't always happen for all sorts of reasons. Equally, publishers want to make money so they will do their best to sell those books, and they also want happy authors. They want authors whose books they can continue to publish - not a lot of one-offs who desert them for other publishing houses because they're offered really lousy deals.
Another area for negotiation in royalties is to take the swings and roundabouts approach - to take a lower figure on some royalties specified in the contract but a higher figure on others. This is where an agent is invaluable because they know what's worth asking for and what's worth ignoring.
Royalties were a lot more generous in the days before the demise of the Net Book Agreement. But I mustn't get started on the rights and wrongs of high discounts or I'll never get any work done!
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, ahhhhhh. Anywaaaay...
:o)
I've not given much consideration to the advance but I now see that it needs to be considered in tandem with royalties.
I'm also showing my ignorance by confessing that I'd never heard of the Net Book Agreement. I've just looked it up. That is very interesting. It does seem to have been a significant turning point, apparently leading to growth of big book stores and lower book prices, but a poorer deal for authors and a death knell for independent bookshops.
Do you know what sort of royalties authors might have expected before that agreement was abolished in 1997?
Do you think it has been a case of the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction i.e. couldn't the Net Book Agreement have been watered-down, to allow more flexibility in pricing whilst offering some safeguards for authors and smaller book shops?
The collapse of the NBA didn't change that: what it changed was how much books were actually sold for, because discounting became possible. That was the price of getting supermarkets to take books, so it did expand the market hugely, while narrowing what gets published, because it raises the bar a lot for how many copies a book needs to look like selling, before it becomes a realistic proposition for a publisher to take on. And as supermarkets concentrate on a relatively narrow range of titles, the gap opens up ever wider between the mega-sellers and the rest. And with publishers having to choose where to put their limited resources of time and money for sales, marketing and publicity, it ain't going to be the rest, so it becomes self-perpetuating.
And of course huge discounting on some titles has, actually, had the effect of pushing some prices up. The hardback cookery book is now £25 because the publishers know that the majority of Nigella's, say, will be discounted at 40% or more, and up the price to try to make a decent amount from it nonetheless. Which is hard on bookshops who can't afford that discount, and have their Nigellas looking very expensive in both absolute terms, and relative to the Tesco copies up the road.
Harry's book explains all this incredibly clearly - I think you'd find it interesting.
So Advances are now seen as the main part of the contract? I didn't realise that.
Yes, I liked the snippets from Harry's book, so I've been pondering buying that. I was slightly disappointed with my investment in the Writers And Artist's Handbook - as I've not read 99.5% of it. I only really wanted a list of publishers of short stories, but everyone said how important it was that I have it. Indispensable etc.
As for NBA, I wished you'd mentioned this earlier Emma whilst I was banging on and on about a FairRead campaign. I read that in 1962 The Restrictive Practices Court ruled that the NBA was of benefit to the industry, but they changed their mind in 1997. Was it simply pressure from powerful retailers?
So the big retailers have won, small retailers have lost. Readers have benefited on price, but lost on variety (and quality?). What about publishers? I suppose the publishers who do well are the ones who are best at sucking up to the retailers, as they currently pull all the strings.
There are also occasions when the advance paid out is so high that the publisher knows it's unlikely that the book will sell enough copies to earn back its advance, even if it is a bestseller. (I'm not sure if you know about this - when an advance is paid on a book, that book then has to earn enough revenue to match the money paid for the advance before any royalties are due. So the publisher has to recoup their outlay on the advance before they hand over any more money.) In the case of a high advance, the publisher will do their best to start getting back some of their money by negotiating serializations in newspapers or on the radio, and so on. In the case of books by presidents and prime ministers, it's the only way they can do it.
This has happened to me, although on a very modest scale, I hasten to add! I used to write an annual series of horoscope books. I was paid well for them because they were hard work and involved writing over 350,000 words in six months, followed by proofing all those words. I had a contract for an advance and royalty, but the profits on the books were so small (they were sold at 99p a copy) that the royalties earned were too low to ever match the advance paid out, even though the series was shifting over 600,000 copies a year in the UK alone, not including foreign sales and premium deals (these are deals where a book is sold for a company as promotion, such as a herb cookery book being repackaged for a company that sells herbs and spices). I wrote these for a decent, principled independent publisher who weighted the contract in favour of the advance, because we all knew the books would never earn a royalty.
I agree with what you say about the effects of the abolition of the Net Book Agreement. That's how it strikes me, too. I also think it's led to books being regarded by the public as commodities to be bought at a knock-down price, rather than as a craft and a labour of love. Some of the people who run the mighty conglomerates that have swallowed up so many independent publishers also seem to think along the same lines - books are 'product'.
Back in the days when the NBA was in force, authors still received royalties in the area of 7.5 or 10%. When I began in publishing in the late 1970s (I was very young!!!), the standard royalty at the big company where I worked was 7.5% on paperbacks, rising to 10% after a certain number of books had been sold, and 10% on hardbacks rising to 12.5% after certain sales had been achieved.
What was different in the days of the NBA was that the royalties were paid on the published price, which never varied. (Book club deals, in which the cover price was lower, were accommodated in the contract and usually received a lower royalty, but this usually balanced out because the sales were mostly good.) So if your book cost £10 in the shops, you got a percentage of that figure.
Post NBA, authors almost universally now have their royalties paid on the price received by the publisher when they sell the book to a bookshop (whether online or in the high street). This means, of course, that if the book costs £10 and is sold without a discount, the author is paid a percentage of the £10 received by the publisher. But if the book is heavily discounted and is selling at, say, £5.48 on Amazon, the author will be paid a percentage of £5.48 for that copy. I can testify to this - I've had royalty statements showing large sales but at such a high discount that the resulting royalty figure is rather disappointing.
I am sure that some safeguards could have been introduced when the NBA was axed, such as a guarantee that books could only be discounted by a certain amount in order to safeguard authors and bookshops. (Because even Waterstone's is struggling at the moment.) At the time, in 1997, the Internet had yet to explode in the way it has, so perhaps no one could see which way the wind was blowing. Such safeguards could still be introduced but I would imagine that the trade is wary of them in case they reduce sales by reducing the discounts. In my experience, it's only people in the publishing business who know that it's the authors who mostly foot the bill for these high discounts. The public is blissfully ignorant, and probably doesn't really care anyway. I have a friend who praised The Book People for their wonderfully low prices, as though they deserved to be canonized for their generosity. She thought they were the ones taking the hit in revenue. She was stunned when I told her what was really going on.
Also, I'm having some doubts about this FairTrade-type idea for books. On one hand I think consumers would support it and be willing to pay a little extra out of fairness for the author. But in practice is it open to abuse? hmmm...
In an effort to get extra book sales, publishers go to the supermarkets.
The supermarkets, as they do with everything, drive the price down.
So how is this possibly good business?
Do they buy in bulk? If yes...
Is there a returns policy? If yes...
Then I cannot understand the business model, it makes no sense.
The publisher loses; over production of a product that fails to sell
All the risk is on the publisher
When there was no supermarket market;
The publisher set a price that meant not only did they make a profit but there was funds there for "R&D"
In theory abolishing the Net Book Agreement benefited the reader; prices were lower
But there is a freakonomic truth; poor publishers means fewer authors; fewer authors means poorer choice for the reader. The books may be cheap but there is insufficient diversity due to the narrowing of "successful" product lines (Misery Lit, huuge at one point; chic lit still huge, detective novels still huge; quality sci-fi? fuck all.)
This would intimate a niche market; a business opportunity for a small indy publisher.
And small indy anything has small indy finances
So "the author" still struggles; there is just not enough money in the industry to expand the number of "writing as a profession" professionals beyond those we all know. (I bet we could all name them - ignore the one off celebrity names but get down to the pure fiction authors that make a decent living.)
The timing for ePublishing is perfect and that could mean a complete industry shift.
The quality issue? Non-existent when matched with the power of viral sales (although... bizarrely... really really bad copy may make millions when allied to the term "epic fail"...?!)
When I first joined The Word Cloud I had two absolutes in mind;
Physical proof of my passion and ability (no jokes about unwanted pregnancies, thank you) and, curiously, professional absolution. A publisher and book sales gave me both of these.
And if any of you were around in my wet-behind-the-ears days you will remember my first ever blog; About the horror that was kindle and how I would never sanctify it because I loved *books* too much.
Well... I'm not ashamed to tell you; I'm faltering.
Am I good enough? Or is it that I just haven't asked Serendipity for a date?
Because the supermarkets sell by the truckload, and to the majority of the population who wouldn't be exposed to the book otherwise. The increase in sales means that the narrower margins are more than worth it. It also means that the print runs are much longer, which makes an IMMENSE difference to the unit cost of the book, which is what its profitability is rooted in. So having a supermarket-sized print run means that all the books you sell through any outlet are more profitable than they would be otherwise. Plus, you can't get into the bestsellers lists if you're not in the supermarkets, or the odd one-off promotion like the WHS/Smiths £2.99-with-the-Times one.
Do they buy in bulk? Yes
Is there a returns policy? The whole book trade works on sale-or-return, at least for frontlist. There is a move for backlist to be firm sale, but I don't think that's gone beyond the biggest of the Big Six, Hachette Livre.
Then I cannot understand the business model, it makes no sense.
Nothing makes sense by any other business model. The book trade is a law unto itself. There's no other industry where, to quote Harry quoting publishers, "The default is failure": most books don't make a profit. On the other hand there are few other industries where the brands aren't owned by the producers: publishers gamble money on promoting a brand - you, the author - who can up sticks at any point and go to a rival. And all sorts of other oddities.
All the risk is on the publisher. Yes. One of the problems is that books, for supermarkets, are marginal. They add value to the shop, but the shop doesn't live or die by how well they stock and sell them.
All the info above from Emma and Spangles is accurate and hopefully very helpful. A high advance is wonderful - it's real and tangible and puts food on the table. I've never regretted having a decent advance for my two book deal. OTOH, the higher the advance, the more copies need to be sold in order to add up to that advance. Most books don't sell out their advances and the more they fall short, they more they are perceived as unsuccesful. But then, the more a publisher pays as an advance, the more effort and resources they're likely to devote to marketing and promotion ... But then again ...
Honestly, you go round and round and this way madness lies IMO. What I personally always come back to is the feeling that there are many reasons to write: because without it you'd go crazy, because it gives you pleasure, because you love the process, because it works as therapy ... are just a few. Anyone's who is writing solely to become rich and famous needs an urgent reality check. Anyone who feels they can only define 'success' in terms of getting a traditional deal with a mainstream publisher is selling themselves short.
I know that I'm starry-eyed (as well as being prepared to live in poverty!) but if someone looked into a crystal ball and said I would never get another book published, would I stop writing? No, I wouldn't. Because I'd be lost without it. It's what I do. So meanwhile, I hussle and bustle, making money wherever I can and do my own writing whenever I have the chance. That way I concentrate on the aspects of being an author that I can control instead of battering my head against the corporate wall.
Human creativity is a good thing, per se. In fact, I'd argue that it's when humans are creating that we're closest to the divine, wherever you think divinity resides. But that good is separate from the good of creating really good art (which not everyone will be able to do. And both are separate again from the business of creating art which someone thinks they can sell.
As Harry says in the book, even if you're good enough to be writing work of saleable quality, the dead centre of your creative self is very unlikely to be in the same place as the dead centre of the industry: for most of us it's about working in the overlap between the two circles, and how you do that and that's going to be different for everyone.
But none of that should negate the human value of the creative act in itself, and the human value of going on working to create better and better work. I think it's up to each of us to work out how those values can or can't work with the size and shape of the overlap we're going to have to fit into.
Will a change come through authors sticking their fingers up and choosing to self-publish? Could there be some NBA/fairTrade approach to fix a level of income? Will publishers decide to stand up to Retailers? Will supermarkets realise they are damaging parts of the industry and voluntarily decide to change?
If we're talking fiction and to a large extent trade non-fiction, then self-publishing is below the radar for publishers. Why would a writer, good enough AND SALEABLE ENOUGH to be conventionally published, choose to self-publish? If they push their self-pub efforts to the max (using time and money which could otherwise be going towards writing the next book) they just might achieve 2% by SP of the sales they'd get through a decent, unspectacular success by conventional publishing. And if the writer isn't good enough and saleable enough to get a mainstream publishing contract, then the publishing industry doesn't even notice any finger-sticking going on.
Of course there are writers who feel that the overlap between what they want to write, and what the industry will publish, is so small that they would much rather hold to their centre, and not try to work in the overlap - and then they self-publish in whatever form. That's up to them. But knowing that's happening won't make a single person in the industry miss a single minutes sleep.
Could their be some NBA/fairTrade approach to fix a level of income?
No - we share (fairly or not, depending on your perspective) in the publisher's income. Seems fair to me, although I agree that the proportions could do with a bit of tweaking.
Will publishers decide to stand up to Retailers?
They do their best. The trouble is that retailing power is in so few, such powerful hands.
Will supermarkets realise they are damaging parts of the industry and voluntarily decide to change?
A few years ago Tesco suddenly increased the number of titles they decided to take per year from 2,000 to 10,000, widening the range to five times. I suspect it was on the back of that that they bought my first, for example, which isn't at all an obvious supermarket book, and it was undoubtedly good for a particular stratum of the trade to suddenly become possible supermarket candidates, with the big increase in sales which might result. But for supermarkets books are marginal: they're a relatively easy sell. It's not as if you could persuade all milk-suppliers to refused to supply milk: then Tesco really would have to do something. The only time it worked was when Asda and Bloomsbury got into a row with Harry Potter, and it was Asda who backed down, because no one can afford not to have Harry Potter. But there aren't many authors in that category, if any.
You could argue that the online sellers do as much or more damage, but they also have enormous benefits, keeping the long tail in print, giving the brave and innovative presses (which are what fuel innovation in the industry) a straightforward route to the reader, and so on.
There are standings-up-to going on - Hachette Livre had a big run-in with Amazon a couple of years ago. But they prefer to have their fights out of the limelight.
There is the French route: I think I'm right in saying that their retailers aren't allowed to discount more than 5% of cover price. But apart from it being very un-British ;-) to be so controlling of a cultural market, I think you'd find many French writers (not to mention other European industries) envying the nation of shopkeepers for the sheer volume of titles that are published: the most per head in the world, by a very considerable margin. So you could argue the French system would actually reduce the number of authors who got published, not increase it. Discounting fuels sales, even if some consequences are unfortunate.
At the Society of Authors' AGM last week, this was the topic for the debate. At the end, it was clear that no one could predict what the likely impact of new technology will be. At present, it looks as though the impact of e-readers, for example, could open up reading to people who rarely read real books ie a widening of potential readership with the new stuff not impinging too much on established publishing. The meeting started with a quote which could have been written now about the death of books. It was in fact related to the panic that abounded when the printing press was invented.
Nothing stays the same. The future could always hold doom or fantastic potential. I'll ignore the former, hope for the latter, and meanwhile just keep writing.
The thing about self-publishing, it seems to me, Ron, is that most professional authors don't have the time to take this route. We are writers. We know how to say what we want to say. What we may not know is how to choose the best jacket design (and a decent jacket and spine can make all the difference in the world as they say 'Pick me up, I'm fun', whereas some jackets say 'Leave me on the shelf, I'm boring'). We may not know how to choose the best typeface. And so on. And I know we've discussed quality control further up this blog, but it is so bloody important! I am happy to buy a self-published book if it's good, but I don't want to buy one where the author doesn't know how to spell or construct a sentence or proofread. Because if it's full of errors of that sort I will wonder what other errors it contains.
Most of all, we certainly do not have the time to promote our books - to sell them into bookshops up and down the country, to essentially act as our own publishing reps, so we can recoup the outlay that we spent on writing the book and getting it published ourselves. Because it costs money to physically write the book. Unless we're writing it in our spare time, we are spending time on it that could be spent earning money, so we need to be paid for that time. So it's not just about getting our work into print so we can say 'Look, this is my book!', we need to get the public to buy that book in enough quantities to recoup our initial outlay and make a profit. Otherwise we have to stop being professional writers.
In my own case, I spend every day at my desk. I need to be paid for that time otherwise we don't eat and there will be no electricity to keep my Mac working. So I am happy to keep writing for publishers who pay me to do my bit and who then (hopefully) do their bit in promoting my book and getting it distributed. If I were to abandon that route and start self-publishing as an act of defiance, I wouldn't have the time to write my next book because I'd be so busy trying to sell my last book. As far as I'm concerned, it's an option that would never work.
It does look like quite a laborious and probably loss-making undertaking to self-publish. But I would possibly consider it owing to the principle at stake. I see authors getting 10% of the proceeds and it doesn't seem right. And I don't think it seems right to most people. Alan used the music analogy, and I can remember buying a Showaddywaddy single for about a pound and thinking how unfair it seemed that the band would get less than 10p of that. Of course I have to take on board what successful authors like yourself and Emma have to say and you do not seem to feel exploited at all. But perhaps because it is not all about money, as Debi says, you don't feel any need to fight for a better (fairer?) deal?
And don't forget that the publisher only receives roughly half the money from each book's sale because the bookshop/retailer will take the rest. (And the same rule applies to self-published books. The retailer will still take a percentage of the cover price.) The publisher must then recoup their production costs from the revenue that they receive on the copies that are sold. And as Emma pointed out earlier, very often publishers make a loss on the books they sell because they don't sell enough of them to cover those costs.
Do I feel exploited? No, not in the slightest. To be honest, I sometimes feel pissed off when I think about how high discounts can affect the royalties I receive. But there is nothing I can do about that so, frankly, I don't waste a lot of time getting het up about it. I have been lucky perhaps in always working for publishers that I like. Some publishers are mean, some are generous. If they are very very mean, I politely decline their offer and write for someone else instead. I do not feel exploited because I don't let myself be exploited. I know which publishers are the exploiters (such as paying £200 as an advance on a full-length non-fiction manuscript, FFS! Bloody sharks!) and I avoid them like the proverbial.
But a better/fairer deal? I truly think most publishers do their best to be fair to their authors, and most editors and designers slog their guts out trying to make the finished books as good as possible. As I've already said, the publisher takes the financial risk at the outset, and they often catch a financial cold as a result. Yes, there are all sorts of things I wish publishers would do, such as no longer producing books by I'm-a-celeb-for-5-minutes that cost a bomb in advances and make a loss because they're remaindered six months later, thereby affecting other decisions that the publisher wanted to make.
But that is the way the publishing world works at the moment. All I can do is tend my own little authorial garden in the best way I can. And thank God every day that I am able to do it. Because, as you have no doubt noticed, I love the publishing industry. It's my home. I've had a lifelong love affair with it and it shows no signs of fading. I love every mad bit of it. Even the frustrations caused by what a friend has always called, using a Jonathan Ross voice, 'The wonderful world of pwublishing'.
What's not fair isn't so much how much authors are paid, it seems to me, but the short careers that most books and most authors have, particularly terrific writers who aren't well-adapted to become jacks of slightly more trades, and therefore have to stop writing. That is where publishers have, arguably, allowed themselves to be too narrow (as witness their recent moaning that agents aren't giving them interesting enough scripts any more. Guess why? They've only themselves to blame, you might say.). But for them to have more money to gamble on surprising, off-beat new voices, they'll have to publish more of the really lucrative books: big names, sleb names, sure-fire stuff. So next time you're feeling snarly at someone's advance, or advertising, remember that the point is to make tons of money so they can afford to publish the rest of us.
Going by Harry's figures, I make 8% of the cover price (and my overhead is minimal), the publisher makes 5% (manufacturing is 15%, overhead 9%, distribution and marketing 8%). The bookseller's overall share is 55%, but Harry hasn't broken that down in its turn to overhead etc. etc. I'd be interested to know what their profit is on the cover price, but I'd be surprised if it's more than 10%.
To make 2% more than the publisher, and 2% less than the retailer doesn't seem outrageous to me
One thing I feel obliged to comment on is the discussion concerning Advances. This is an interesting concept in business terms and I will return to it. But, for now, there is no business logic in paying more for something than it can be sold for. So when established authors say that you can get an advance that is more than the eventual sales would have justified and present this as a good thing, I simply can’t agree. The basis for any business is that it shows a profit, or at least doesn’t make a loss. Any business.
Moving on. It may seem brutal and cruel to say this or even disrespectful to the people here who know much more about the current business of publishing than I, but there is no sense in shouting at the rain.
Ebooks are bringing about a technological change and history shows that technological change cannot be resisted. You have three choices when faced with such a juggernaut.:
• Adapt and trot along in the wake or get right on board if you can
• Give up and do something else entirely
• Stand in the way and get rolled over
The way I see it, as laid out in the various discussions that have taken place in this thread is that the publishing industry has been shaped by a combination of economic imperatives, market forces and technology.
The technology involves the printing of the written word onto paper, binding it into a book persuading bookshops to sell it and transporting it in vans all over the place. This requires capital investment up front. The publisher does this part.
Market forces have for many reasons brought about a significant increase in the number of aspiring authors. Lack of employment prospects is one such cause, but there are others and frankly I don’t think that is the most significant. This oversupply of aspiring authors has led to the rise of the importance of the agent. Most publishers don’t read a slush pile. They have outsourced it to agents. I contend that this has little to do with quality and much to do with economic efficiency, which is where my third bullet of economic forces comes in. Agencies filter input for them at no overhead. They don’t have staff on the payroll and agents are paid essentially on results. As the agents become swamped for the same reasons that the publishers did it becomes harder to get their attention too. There is a yawning void between the tales of aspiring writers striving for recognition with their hopefully polished work that may or may not be any good and the string of rejections they endure, sometimes like a badge of honour, and the tales one hears and which are often included in printed acknowledgements of the lengths that an agent goes to in order to make the work of an established name sellable when their first submitted draft simply wasn’t up to it. This is business sense. Agents also need to live and can’t cope with the numbers. Working on an established name is playing the odds. An industry separate from agencies is steadily building to help aspiring writers. And it is the writers themselves that pay the fee. They are backing themselves with their own money and hoping that they will receive encouragement and perhaps a little help onto the lower rungs of the business.
Now, no-one would suggest that a business like the writers workshop should operate for nothing. That would be stupid. Neither should it be suggested that they are doing anything wrong. They are answering an existing demand. Nevertheless writers are backing their work to the extent of several hundred pounds, perhaps more, in order to eventually get a good enough product before an agent let alone the time spent starving in their garret to write it in the first place.
Let’s leave that thought hanging there for now.
There now comes striding onto the stage a potentially massive change with electronic publishing. Ebooks, if you like. At a stroke it removes one of the pillars upon which the precariously balanced business of books was standing and replaces it with something rather odd. The makers of ebook readers are not fundamentally dependent on the books, let’s call it the content (in IT terms). They are interested in selling the equipment, let’s call it the hardware. They can deliver content cheaply because they have a cheap platform, ie electronic delivery.
Being a business and business being business they will maximise their profits. Which means a further squeeze on operating costs. We all know that an established name can get away with any old rubbish for at least three or four titles. Yes they can and do! So these new publishers, be they existing publishers, Amazon, Apple or Sony will cut costs where they can. One obvious area is developing new authors. And they can, so they will. I don’t say this is a good thing, or a bad thing. I think it’s inevitable. The business will cut its costs because the technology means it can.
About advances. Fifteen years ago I quit a well paid job and set out to establish my own business. I had my reasons, I will simply say that it was my choice. I wasn’t fired, made redundant or anything like that. I was sick of the charades. It was a bit of a leap into the dark. Not entirely, I admit, because I did have a contract in place with my first client. But to this day, no-one makes an assessment of what my work will be worth before I deliver it. I am never paid in advance. I wasn’t fifteen years ago and it was quite nerve wracking for a while. These days it’s less so, but I still am not paid before I deliver, before my work has been tested in the furnace as it were. I don’t understand advances I’m afraid, not from a business standpoint.
Technology means that things will change. Not should change, they will change because business will make it happen. As Harry and Emma pointed out in posts that have come in while I have been drafting this, the margins are low in the current structure. The old ways of doing things are creaking and groaning. As almost a side effect individual writers will increasingly be able to use that technology to publish their own work, perhaps direct to Mac, Amazon etc. It’s possible already, just doesn’t happen that much. But because they can, they will. They will back their product with their own money. They already do with their time or even more directly paying for mentors, advice etc. From their point of view, why wouldn’t they? They will because they can.
Debi pointed out the article in The Independent and it makes most interesting reading. It ends on a question, as these articles should:
“Who'll be the first to charge for a money-based, author-reader relationship that dispenses with agent, publisher, retailer, editor, production department and glamorous publicity director?”
This is not an “if” question. It’s a “when”.
We have to get over the myth of the artist creating from the depths of their soul and living solely on the fruits of selling the result, because it is a myth, and always has been.
Everyone beyond that handful needs another source of income, whether it's journalism, reviewing, teaching, ghost-writing, editing, writing formula fiction under pseudonyms, a non-writing day job, a share in a partner's or a parent's income or running a b&b or a market stall. You choose what and what kind of compromise you want to make - and consider yourself lucky that you can. It's still the best job in the world, even if it can't ever be more than half a job.
Crossed with Alan - advances aren't really a shot in the dark. They're either based on the manuscript before them, or on a proposal and some proof that the writer can deliver. We're more like farmers than consultants: if I supply goods to a supermarket, they have to pay me (unless they can wriggle out by one route or another; I know they do). It's not my problem if they over-order and can't sell as much as they bought from me. (though it may well mean they don't offer me another contract.) I've delivered when I deliver them what we've agreed they'll buy - in my case a completed manuscript.
The trouble with dispensing with agents is that agents know far more than I do about selling my rights.
The trouble with dispensing with publishers is that they know far more than I do about how to get my book out there and persuade people to read it.
All the same things will always need doing, and most authors who respect their talents will not want to waste their time grappling with stuff they're not good at. I suspect that what might happen is that the trade will become more fragmented, and we'll use our agents more, to control all the bits for us. Whereas hitherto we sold all the rights to a publisher and used their in-house departments to do all those things, we'll increasingly use agents to sell not only foreign rights, but e-book rights to specialist e-book publishers, also to engage publicists directly (which many authors already do), and only sell to publishers the bits of the process that they do better than anyone else: marketing physical books into the trade.
Emma, I don't think moaning will help, but if you do believe there are worrying trends within the industry then surely it is in your interests to support any move that aims to improve things.
But advances. I don't rail against it, but I don't understand it and must take you to task on some of your arguments. In my businesss I am known to be good. I am known to get people out of significant holes an dsave them shedloads of money. That's why they hire me. They can predict that when I have done what I do they will be better off within a range of financial potentialities. But I still have to do the work first. They still have to see it, then they pay me. This morning, for example, I just received a cheque for work I did last December. I saved that client over a million pounds and they have just paid my fee of a few thousand. Almost a year later. OK that's extreme. I am usually paid a month or two after delivery. never before. That's normal in almost any business. Work first, payment later.
I know an ex-supermarket buyer professionally. Do you know what they do to farmers? They force them to follow their promotional offers and if their perishable goods don't sell they don't get anything for them. They can't even get them back on sale or return, because it's rotting. He quit because he's a human being and couldn't stand it any longer.
My whole point in kicking this off is not to say that things are heading for a rosy new dawn. It's quite the opposite. I think that there will be blood on the floor as an upheaval takes place. There will be no choices. It won't be possible to say, people don't want to do this, so they won't. I won't draw cheap parallels with your illustrious ancestor excpet to point out that adaptation to changing environment is essential.
Can I also tell you about something that happened when I was 19 yrs old. I was working as a buyer for an IT company where technology changes and is updated monthly, even weekly. My MD purchased thousands of VR headsets against my better judgement! Everyone said that they were the future, that gaming would all be Virtual Reality in the next couple of years. Ahem, here we are 14 years down the line and I still do not see every child at home with a VR headset on! My point is, though we can guess and prepare, noone can predict the future.
If Craig hadn't pointed out something that I agree needs fixing I probably would sent that particular book out. But I have to fix it first.
Kiki, don't you want to do something to help the little bookshops? Don't you think authors should get a little more credit for their books?
As I ordered Harry's book on Amazon yesterday I did have a little nagging thought "is this right?" And that nagging doubt was created by the dicussions on here. And that nagging doubt makes me more inclined to pop down to a little bookshop nearby, if there is one!
Much as I love a healthy debate I have to get my book done :(
And Ron. It has been very interesting to see that this web site still has some passion about writing and the business that goes with it. I had wondered a while back, but now I am happy. However, Kirie has a point. Everything to say has been said for now I think.. Anyone wanting to copy anything by was of discussion do so. On Monday, if I remember, I think I'll zap this.
I must have misunderstood your original point, because that's what happens to a writer. You do the work, deliver the book and get paid. Some of it. The rest on publication. (I though you were arguing that we shouldn't get paid until and depending on the book selling. I do know what the supermarkets do to farmers.) I'm probably being thick, but I really don't see how that's different from anyone else. Yes, you get paid on signature of contract, but either that's the same as on delivery, or it's a perfectly reasonable deposit by the publisher to pay for work that you can't do unless you've got something to live on....
Ron the thing with supermarkets (and they're not all living in clover - Morrisons nearly went bust, and Somerfield too.) is that books don't matter to them: I don't suppose there's a soul who would stop shopping in Tesco if they stopped stocking books. They wouldn't stock books at all till they could discount, which is where the NBA comes into it (or rather, went out of it.)
Perhaps I was wrong about advances. I thought some authors got an advance based on the proposal and outline, ie before they have written the book.
(And yes, the farmers analogy doesn't work. We can take our book to another publisher, whereas it's too late for the sprouts.)
Debi, that's interesting. I've never had an advance split into four. It's usually into three: signature, delivery and publication. And usually there is a huge gap between the signature payment and the delivery payment because I might have six months or so to write the book. Occasionally, my agent negotiates only two payments if the publication is a long way off (such as over a year after delivery) and the advance is very modest, so I might receive half on signature and half on delivery. Perhaps it's different because I write non-fiction? This is fascinating!
If supermarkets choose to subsidise their sale of books from their profits on other goods nobody would be able to compete. Isn't that a distortion of free trade rather than an inescapable logic of markets?
So if you rule out NBA and a fairtrade approach (booo), how is it possible to keep the small bookshop in business (or bring it back)? Raising people's awareness? Subsidies?
The supermarkets have increased the overall demand for books, because they sell to people who don't go into bookshops, but do go into Tescos every week. So people who buy books on the whole buy more, and people who didn't buy books now do. Supermarket sales by value of ££££ are 10%, but in terms of numbers of copies are 14% of the whole: i.e. they sell an awful lot, but very cheaply. And that awful lot of copies are of a relatively small number of titles: a middle-sized bookshop might stock 10,000 titles, a supermarket 40. Hence the way that if your book does get into the supermarkets, you can hope it'll sell tons. (Won't make you tons, because of the high discount, mind you. But it's worth it.)
They don't subsidise sales with profits from other products: they're ruthless about a title having to earn its keep on their shelves by making a profit, because there's just about no book they HAVE to have. It's not like Coca Cola or Kelloggs... And they're ruthless about covers and so on: one of the buyers says she turns her back on the display, and sees which covers she can remember: those are the covers which work, and which inform their decision of whether to take a new title or not. Hence the oft-repeated canard that the big buyers control covers. They don't. It's just that they may exercise their right not to take a book if they think the cover means it won't sell, and the publisher can choose to take that on board or ignore it.
BUT, the supermarkets are still only 14% of the total even measured by volume: the chain bookshops are 34% and the indies 9%. What keeps the (good) indies in business is what keeps your local deli in business: they're not the cheapest, but they really know their stuff, they have a wide range of odd and interesting things you won't find in Sainsburys, they're a delight to spend time in, they can order things in for you tomorrow (sooooo much better than Amazon or Waterstones), they know what's on their shelves and can go and get it. Oh, and they support their local authors. Waterstones has finally woken up and realised that they need to go back to behaving more like an indie, and less like a supermarket, and so far it looks as if it's working.
My local indie is actually one of two shops, one in Dulwich and one in Wandsworth, which as Londony Clouders may know are socio-demographically almost indistinguishable. I was in one morning when the Hodder rep was there, and hearing the owner talking about how many of which books the two different shops would need, was an education in knowing your customers... As was hearing his partner on another afternoon handselling books to a woman without children herself, who'd come in needing a Christening present for a niece and a fistful of books to give her nephew to take with him to boarding school... That's how a good indie stays in business. That and working in tandem with local authors - I've just pitched my Writing Historical Fiction panel to them, for an event...
If you don't have a physical indie to go to then the next best thing is to buy from Foyles online - they're an indie, and the flagship of the new indie initiative to band together and deal with the publishers as a group.
Alan's example demonstrates that supermarkets are capable of using their 'leverage' to put suppliers in a difficult position. Fairtrade was developed to counter that though wasn't it? So in the book analogy there would be a cooperative of publishers (or a cooperative of authors, I'm not sure) who would have a symbol that they could put on books, which would be a mark of quality and a mark of fairness. Supermarkets wouldn't necessarily need to stock any less books, they could just stick to the cheaper non-fairtrade books if they didn't think people would pay more for the fairtrade book. Where's the flaw in this?
Ron / AlanP, if you haven't been already, get yourself to the Hay festival next year. It is amazing, there are hundreds of indie book stalls and shops, it's heaven! Bath has my favourite book shop in the world, you would love it there too :)
TBH, the supermarkets get blamed for so much, but that's not really accurate. The threat to the indies is a cocktail of the supermarkets (big, big discounts but only on an extremely narrow range of titles), the online sellers (who have a range which no bricks-and-mortar bookshop can match, but where 'browsing', such as is possible, always drives towards the bigger sellers) and the big chains, (who have the 3-for-2s and other discounting, and brand identity).
And some indie booksellers are bad, and badly run by un-businesslike people. Or were. They're the ones which went to the wall first. The two I mentioned further up, however, are owned by a pair of ex-Waterstones people, so they know what they're doing, and left when Waterstones stopped letting them do it.
A propos discounting, even the supermarkets shoot themselves in the foot when it gets out of hand. Believe it or believe it not, NO ONE in the trade - not publisher, not wholesalers, not booksllers - makes money out of the new Harry Potter, because the discounting is so outrageous and all the hu-ha of the launch is so expensive for all parties (staffing shops at midnight, huge security measures etc. etc.). They take a loss, and make money on the backlist, and later sales when the discount returns to normal
Re self-publishing and reliance on Agents and Publishers, my personal inclination is to trust the professionals to do what they do best. There's a huge part of me that recognises the slog of pitching and promoting and the impossibility of coming anywhere close to matching the effort any professional publisher could muster. Yeah there's hope that lots of local promotion might get you noticed nationally, but it's in the same category as Fabio Capello picking me for England if I had a kick around in the park.
Re traditional publishing v e-books, I can only see opportunity. Embracing new formats and technologies need not be at the expense of hard copy book to admire in the high street. Portraying this as cavaliers v roundheads rather plays to the dramatic. I agree that no-one knows what the future holds but I do think there is room for old and new - and I expect both to evolve.
Finally, re self-publishing v having an agent who secures a publishing deal, things will change. My writing group had a great talk from an Agent who was diversifying into supported self-publishing. This was in addition to continuing traditional publishing and involved a menu of services the author could choose to invest in. The services included publishing costs, editorial services, design, media training etc and (from memory), after costs were recovered the author got all receipts. The model relied heavily on self-promotion by the author - which won't be suited to all. I thought it an interesting development.
Of course publishing is a business. There will always be a tension between art and the profit and loss account, but I have yet to meet a writer who's inspiration or need to write is sourced from the financial rewards on offer.
Lots of questions. Perhaps they're answered in Harry's book, which i'm looking forward to reading. If not then I will suggest they are covered in a companion volume, "More... Getting Published".
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