Maybe a few decades ago this was the case, but one has to wonder with all the talk going around how much of it is not just talk. Do I dismiss all the horror stories I hear at panels? Pretend Black Wednesday never happened? Editors being usurped by marketing departments. Quality people being cast out purely on a monetary basis. Establishment of a "best seller" model at the cost of the mid-list. All the figment of a lot of imaginations?
I am not saying that the world you paint doesn't exist in some measure - but my impression that you are trying to whitewash the entire industry with this brush is, for me, about as unrealistic as someone claiming everything is a flat-out conspiracy. Writers entering this market need to understand that this is a business arena - not the Rock Candy mountain. It is a gray world - neither white nor black. That is all the point I am trying to make here.
Kerry
I agree that it's a grey world, which is why I was pointing out that it wasn't black.
The problem here is that people seem to have a deep need to believe in apocalypses -- print will die, publishers will die, the publishing industry is ruined, the increase in on-line self-publishing ruins fiction publishing, e-book prices are too high and this spells doom, big publishers are trying to crush small presses, etc. In reality, normal business practices and negotiations are occurring with a lot of prospects for potential growth. These often worry people and they often should -- it's sometimes people's jobs on the line. Authors cannot take for granted that the agents who work for them or the editors who work with them are going to take care of them or do a great job. They have to keep an eye out and take practical steps.
But that means having an understanding that book publishing, particularly fiction publishing, is a business of both art and profit, that it is not a zero sum game, that it relies on subjective assessments and speculative investments, not absolutes and guarantees, and that authors' editors are not out to get them. It requires understanding of how books are sold, not constantly trying to turn books into music CD's or movies or games or clothes or some other industry that does not operate in at all the same way or have the same parameters.
1)
Black Wednesday, or more accurately, several months of lay-offs in trade and educational publishing were frightening, but entirely expected and not nearly as bad as it could have been, given the disasters going on in bookselling at the time and that it was the worst recession since the Great Depression. When there is a sharp economic downturn -- and we've had quite a few the last thirty years -- they will fire staff. And they usually do it the same way they did this time -- liquidating and consolidating imprints and operations. (The good news -- they are less likely to send those jobs over to India than other industries and they fire far fewer people than other industries.) So it was not a new apocalypse. It was the same difficulty as in the past.
Over time, publishing has been unwisely reducing staff in the economic downturns and making remaining staff do twice as much work, especially in editorial where editors have less time to edit, as a cost cutting measure. And that's a problem, but it's a problem that wasn't going to get solved by the recession. Oddly enough, e-publishing is now helping push things the other way because they need to hire staff to manage and handle the electronic formats. That is why the e-book market cannot instantly spring into massive operation -- because they did not have that staff and that kind of business operation in place and have now been building it these last three years. The recession set everything back, but now it is slowly moving forward again.
2)
Editors being usurped by marketing departments -- it depends on what you mean by usurped. The marketing people basically run the place when it comes to the business side and always have. The editorial people have never been in charge of the publishers. The top executives almost always come from marketing, not editorial. But marketing usually lets editorial do their thing of finding the books. Where marketing gets bossy is non-fiction -- which is the main income provider of the publishers. All non-fiction acquisitions get run past the marketing people because non-fiction is a competitive marketplace for authors, because non-fiction is far more dependent on marketing and can be more effectively sold through marketing. Non-fiction is about providing information.
For fiction, marketing doesn't usually get consulted about new titles, but will sometimes put in requests -- our romance titles are selling, buy more romance please, stuff like that. And when it comes to an established author, marketing may weigh in on the sales record. It used to be a lot harder for publishers to get sales information about books published by other publishers. Now it's easier, which means that those sales records can have a bigger effect on acquisitions. But it's still editorial that goes out and finds the fiction and decides which ones to fight for and invest in. Marketing doesn't really care about fiction -- not in the way it does about non-fiction -- enough to really get involved.
3)
Quality people being cast out purely on a monetary basis. Establishment of a "best seller" model at the cost of the mid-list. -- People are never dumped on a purely monetary basis. If they were, publishing would be much more efficient. And publishers have always been hunting for bestsellers, again not a new thing. Fifteen years ago, Simon & Schuster brought in a consultant who concluded that the best thing the publisher could do to grow at the rate the corporation wanted was to only publish bestsellers. After the consultant left, the staff fell down laughing because while it would indeed be nice to publish only bestsellers, nobody can accurately predict to do that. Plus, there are several kinds of bestsellers, including long-term backlist bestsellers, not as flashy but way more valuable. And the hunt for bestsellers has to include variety in fiction -- they must cover a broad spectrum from university friendly contemporary drama to romance and have different styles in every area to cover the spread of readers. When you view fiction readers as monochrome and predictable, then you're not paying attention to the realities of the market.
Fiction publishing is gambling. (Non-fiction is slightly less risky gambling.) You invest in an author, who may very well leave you later, and you may lose money for awhile or not make a lot of money and then may make more money. What you want is a fast burn bestseller who right away makes you money and who then keeps having bestsellers (not a guarantee,) but the reality is that most sales success comes from slow burn. So they'll gamble, but on who and for how long is always in flux and depends on individual titles. When there is a sharp economic downturn, again, such as the worst recession ever, mid-list authors lose the time to get their audience numbers up to the next sales bracket because the publisher is hemorrhagging money as the advance cash flow dries up from the booksellers, and some of the mid-list authors get dumped. Some of those get picked up by other houses, some don't. Sometimes a publisher completely screws it up, as Night Shade did with Liz Williams' Inspector Chen series -- and that was a bestseller.
Despite the problems mid-list authors are facing today because of the economy and lack of vendors, it was way worse in the 1990's when the wholesale market began its collapse and went from like 600 companies to six, with vendor outlets drying up. That's when fiction, which was very dependent on paperbacks in wholesale distribution, took enormous blows to sales. They dropped so many mid-list mystery authors then, for example, it was a wonder they had any left. But it built back up. And that's why romance invested heavily in paranormal romance -- they took a blow and were trying to build up sales. And that paid off for that sector. So again a reality that authors have to deal with, yes, but not new, not the apocalypse.
Large publishers don't want to wipe out small publishers. They quite often want to buy them if they're successful, but it's not like the booksellers. For example, Jaimy Gordon's novel
Lord of Misrule won the National Book Award. It was published by smaller press McPherson. Even before Gordon won the award, McPherson sold paperback rights to Vintage and Vintage bought the rights to Gordon's next book from the author. McPherson isn't mad about this at all. They own the license to the award-winning novel and get half of all the money Vintage makes off of it and Vintage can sell it in much larger numbers with more distribution. The hardcover edition of McPherson's is also flying off the shelves. Academia will supply a steady market for both hc and paperback. McPherson can now fund a number of its other authors plus attract new ones with a higher profile. It can sell other books on its list to Vintage for reprint. Its business has grown at least 10% if not more. And Vintage is happy to have a working relationship with McPherson, which might supply them with another NBA winner. It's pretty much a win for everyone and helps grow the market in general.
No one with any brains would want to work in book publishing. You get paid crap money, the hours are long, with few perks, everyone is mad at you all the time and don't thank you much when you do something right. You have minimal status, celebrities have no interest in you, there's no job security, etc. Even magazines, facing their worst time ever, are way cooler, richer, more peaceful places to work. And there's little incentive for people to try and become fiction authors. The odds of making money at it are like a lottery and the experience is akin to entering a wind tunnel. But people do it because they do have a commitment to it. And that's part of the business along with the profit-making business stuff.
If you're hearing stuff at conferences and you're concerned about it, maybe we should make a thread for discussion of it (though we've touched on some of these issues in the past.) There are a lot of horror stories; I can give you lots of them. But you have to have context to them.
The big issue that authors face is always distribution. But that seems to be the issue authors are least interested in talking about and learning about.
Imagine a copy of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy that more closely resembles the Hitchhiker's Guide.
