… and the other on a banana peel is an accurate description of the current state of oldpub.
Author Kristine Kathryn Rusch plumbs the exact depth of the hole.
There’s a shortage of paper, because it comes from China. The two largest printers of magazines and books in the U.S., Quad/Graphics and LSC Communications were going to merge last summer, but something got in the way. Now, LSC Communications has filed for bankruptcy. The second largest printer, Quad, has shut its book printing facilities entirely.
In some regions, major distributors have shut down or disappeared, while although others, like Ingram, are still operating, although with reduced staff.
Not that it matters, since most bookstores are closed, and not shipping books to their customers. To make matters worse, the books that are being delivered will remain in their boxes, only to be returned for full price credit when this crisis is over. That was a policy established to help bookstores in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the policy never got changed afterwards.
You read that last part right. Oldpub still uses the return system–an arcane form of consignment sales that’s a holdover from the 1930s. Is it any wonder newpub is eating their lunch?
And that’s not the only archaic business practice currently hoisting oldpub by its own petard.
Remember way back when the Justice Department went after traditional publishers for price-fixing? The entire idea behind fixing prices was to protect hardcover book sales. The traditional publishers were trying to establish a high price for ebooks, so people would buy the hardcovers first.
Even though trad pub lost that suit and the publicity wars from it, they kept a version of the pricing. Just today, as I was going through my collected research for this piece, I looked at the ebook prices for backlist ebooks from traditional publishers and only found one book—thirty years old—that had a price below $9.99. Most of the ebook prices ranged from $12.99 to $15.99. And in one case, the ebook I looked at (nonfiction, from a major press) was $23.99. Um…wow.
Regular readers of this blog will already be aware that oldpub is in the lumber business, not the story business. They bet all their chips on their paper distribution monopoly. Now along comes a crisis that stops the distribution of paper books.
Even oldpub’s fallback option–audio books–have collapsed as commuters are forced to stay home.
Now their myopic focus on dead trees, to the point of purposefully trying to throttle eBook sales, has come back to bite them hard.
Ebook sales are up to what some people are called “holiday season levels.” Open Road Media, which works with traditional publishers and does backlist ebooks for established traditional authors, was one of the few bright spots in the traditional publishing news of the past week. Open Road Media’s sales went up 50%.
But it’s too late for most traditional publishers to capitalize on the increased ebook sales. Traditional publishers’ prices are just too high, and they don’t have the manpower right now to change thousands of prices on the handful of platforms where they sell ebooks.
Oldpub hasn’t only missed the eBook boat, either. It’s now too late to salvage their bread-and-butter print book sales.
Finally, and this is something I’ll expand on in the next blog post, traditional publishers are pushing as many books as they can to a fall or early winter release. Publisher’s Lunch is maintaining a list of the books that have had their publication dates changed from May/June to much later in the year. More books get added all the time.
But you’ll note that the changes didn’t start until books that were supposed to be released this week—and even then, there were damn few of those. You’d think that traditional publishers would have immediately halted expenditures. If they thought books weren’t going to sell, they should have moved March and April books immediately.
But they couldn’t. The contracts were already at the printer. The books were already printed, bound, and stored in a warehouse, being boxed and ready to ship…to the closed bookstores.
Oh, the returns later this year will be astronomical. I’ll wager that normal huge sellers in hardcover like John Grisham and Stephen King, who have books hitting this month, will have the largest returns of their careers.
The question hanging over these tidings of oldpub’s doom is, “How will the Big Five’s implosion affect their authors?”
If you’re an author who’s not self-published, I’d sit down before reading further.
I would like to say that traditional publishers are smart enough to know what happened, but they won’t see the actual results of this period for months. And if history is our guide, they’ll blame the authors. That’s what happened to the authors whose books debuted in September, 2001. Those writers had to struggle to maintain careers, and most failed because of a precipitous drop in sales that had nothing to do with them or their books and everything to do with the terror attacks.
Classy!
The traditional publishing industry is falling into two or three years of complete reorganization. It’ll be a mess. The Big Five might not be five any longer. Viacom/CBS Corporation talked about selling Simon & Schuster before the plague hit the fan. Now, a corporation like Viacom/CBS might simply cut its losses. It might not be able to sell the book publisher. Or if it does, it might be a fire sale prices.
There will be mergers, consolidations, sales, and of course, job losses. Beloved editors will leave, and their books will be orphaned…or returned to the authors. For a while, the lists of books published every month will be a complete mess.
I have no idea if traditional publishers will even have room to buy new books for a while, with all of this pushback. Agents aren’t even sure if they should market books/authors to publishers right now.
KKR is gentler than I am. She suggests that oldpub authors petition their publishers to split royalty payments between them and their agents. My advice is more direct: Fire your agent.
In a crisis situation where agents cannot do their sole, dubious job, authors need parasites bleeding them for 15% like they need a broken glass enema.
I’d recommend that writers who aren’t published yet start exploring their self-publishing options. Indie (self) published writers are the ones who will survive as fulltime writers, not traditionally published writers—even if they get a big payday.
Nick Cole’s prophecy races toward fulfillment. The Big Five were already teetering on the brink thanks to the eBook revolution. Only their international megacorp owners kept them from plunging over the edge. Now those globocorps are slipping, too, and they’ll cut oldpub loose before letting it drag them down, too.
Writing for a living is the best job in the world. The only drawback is that most of your co-workers lack the sense to come in out of the rain. Publishers do nothing but take 50-85% of your earnings. At this point, signing with a publisher amounts to jumping in the lowering coffin with them.
Keep your rights. Keep control of your career. Don’t give money to people who hate you.
