This page has been migrated from an earlier version of this site. Links and images may be broken.
Bookslut points to an article in The Times by Libby Purves on how bookstores (in the UK) have publishers caught in a prisoner’s dilemma when it comes to promoting books, and as a result readers are stuck in a market for lemons. Here is an excerpt:
Reports have “revealed” the so-called secret fees paid by publishers to booksellers in order to get books stocked, “chosen” and recommended by the big book chains. > >
That W H Smith’s “book of the week” title, which attracts you as if it had won a prize, has been bought and paid for. The publisher handed over £50,000. Waterstone’s Book of the Week accolade is £10,000, less for ecstatic mini-reviews. Borders charges for “fiction buyer’s favourite”. Smaller sums buy other levels of prominence; only some local staff “picks” are related to actual content. It is not uncommon for a catalogue to recommend a title warmly before the compiler has even seen it. A pre-Christmas push costs £200,000 and a big campaign double that. One publisher told a newspaper: “We’ve got to play by the rules because we need them.” It is considered suicidal not to join in.
…Seventy per cent of promotional budgets go on furtive payments to bookshops. The message to the author is: “Nobody would read you if we didn’t pay, so shut up grumbling.” To the reader the message is: “You are a fool pig, guaranteed to go for the shiniest swill-bucket.” To the newspapers who publish bestseller charts it is simply: “Gotcha!” > >
Most of these charts cover sales in one particular week, so they favour the fast-selling and heavily displayed. They are no index of pleasure or even real popularity. It is not uncommon for a book to reach high rank one week and live off that glory (“surprise soaraway bestseller for tragic Gwendolen”) when in fact it has shifted fewer hardbacks than another book that never got near the top 20 because it sold more gradually.
Well, so be it. Bookselling is a trade; it is sad but not criminal that it operates like one, cutting deals to maximise profit. It is sad but not surprising that big booksellers do not care that their practices are widening the gulf between hyped authors and the rest, squeezing out new writers and truncating the careers of those who fail to return the publisher’s investment fast enough. They do not care that the literary double-or-quits economy prevents the slower, organic growth of writing careers. > >
The responsibility spreads wider, though. You would think that, knowing how skewed the trade has become, book page editors would question the status quo as journalists do in every other area. You would think that their mission was to seek out interesting new books while scornfully ignoring hype-fests. There is little evidence of this, except in some odd and praiseworthy corners. Journalists like to feel they are up there with the “buzz”, even if the buzz is largely artificial. Where reviews do diverge from the well-trodden track of the week’s “key” books, it is often only into a cosy circuit of settling old scores, or bigging up friends who will soon return the favour. This is often undeclared, which shocks the strait-laced American media (read the _New York Times _arts ethical policy online, boys, and hang your heads).
Newspapers and magazines are also magpies, attracted to the glitter of the young, the pretty, the well-connected, the celebrity. If Keira Knightley publishes a novel tomorrow it will not go short of attention, while if a new Orwell or Greene emerges from the ranks he may fall back unnoticed. There are some flukes, but even notable “word of mouth” successes often turn out to be no such thing. And the moment an unhyped book starts to move, the big chains will be on to the publisher with display offers they dare not refuse. All success becomes a commodity.
This fits with what I’ve seen, and with my argument in Chapter 9. Other reports (which I can’t find now) suggest that compared to ten years ago, more books are published now than used to be, and more titles are carried (in some form or other) by bookstores. But the total volume of books sold is about the same as it used to be, and of that amount more goes to just a few bestsellers. It’s what happens in a market when you don’t know what you’re buying. Book buying is going, apparently, from being a high-information market to a low-information market.
On the down side, it’s kind of a depressing view of the book industry. On the up side, it’s a great excuse if No One Makes You doesn’t do that well.
Libby Purves, by the way, wrote my favourite parenting book, How Not To Be a Perfect Mother.