Gonzalo Barr

Some realities about the professional writing life in the Twenties –

Fitzgerald never wrote what is now called a blockbuster. This Side of Paradise (1920) made the Publishers’ Weekly monthly best-seller list twice, reaching number four; The Beautiful and Damned (1922) appeared three times, reaching number six. The Great Gatsby never made the best-seller list and did not break 24,000 copies in 1925. Tender Is the Night was number two for April 1934, but did not sell 15,000 copies that year. In 1929 his royalties on seven books totalled [sic] $31.77; and eight Post stories brought him $31,000.

Ninety years ago, even fifty years ago (in Cheever and Updike’s time), a writer could make a living publishing short stories.  Numerous mainstream magazines published short stories and serialized novels and they paid very well. The late Fitzgerald scholar, Matthew J. Bruccoli, blamed the rise of television in the Fifties and Sixties for the demise of these magazines.

The [Saturday Night] Post and the other “slick” magazines…paid well because pre-television Americans had a large appetite for magazine fiction.  […]  During the Twenties, the Post’s circulation and advertising revenues enabled it to provide between 200 and 300 pages each week for a nickel.

Two to three hundred pages each week amounted to a minimum of 10,400 pages a year that the Post needed to fill. And that was only one magazine.  Fitzgerald’s work also appeared in Collier’s, Red Book, Ladies Home Journal, McCall’s, Metropolitan and Hearst International.  It is not surprising that Fitzgerald made significantly more money from his magazine writing than from his novels.   He was not alone.  The same was true of William Faulkner.  Even Hemingway could not live off the royalties on his novels until many years later.

Photo of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1937) by Carl Van Vechten, Lib. of Congress, Wikipedia article about F. Scott Fitzgerald; Source: Matthew J. Bruccoli & Judith S. Baughman, editors, F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship (1996), at 13, 14

David L. Ulin is the book editor of the Los Angeles Times and author of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction and The Fault Line Between Reason and Faith (2005).  He sees in the possibility of an upcoming recession an opportunity for publishers to focus more on the writing than the hype –

Clearly, literary culture, like everything else in contemporary society, is at a moment of extreme transition; that’s what makes this both a scary and exciting time. But it’s exactly why we need to avoid hype rather than embrace it, to look critically not at author platforms but at authors, not at the mechanisms of culture but at the substance of the culture instead.

[…]

We talk too much and listen not enough; we respond to personalities as much as we respond to prose.

Maybe that’s the way it’s always been, but with hard times upon us, it doesn’t seem too much to ask that this signal the start of a more stripped down, less self-absorbed period, in which we set aside the sound and fury and focus on the writing rather than the noise.

The rest of the article is here.

Photo: David L. Ulin, usc.edu; Sources: David L. Ulin, “Publishers, enough with vapid hype, let’s set aside the economic sound and fury and focus on the writing rather than the noise” latimes.com, publisherslunchdeluxe blog

France 24 reports that this fall there will be 676 novels (466 French and 210 foreign) published in France. This is slightly less than the 727 novels published last year. Observers still wonder how much attention each new title will be able to command with that many new titles on the shelves.

Despite a slight decrease in numbers, however, one particular issue continues to be debated. Does this seasonal profusion of book offerings actually, in the end, harm the visibility of some of these new publications? Do titles have the chance to find their public or do they simply languish unnoticed on the bookshelves?

“It’s a false debate that recurs every year. [But] there are no sales declines. The business is doing well,” says Christine de Marzières, acting head of the French Publishers Association (SNE), a trade association of book publishers. De Marzières adds that books are the staple of the French cultural industry, in terms of turnover.

A title that sells 20,000 copies is considered a “best-seller” in France.

Image:  Detail map of Paris, france.com, which I use here for no reason other than I used to live near the corner of Rue Vavin and Rue d’Assas a long time ago, where my room overlooked the palace gardens across the street; Source: Julien Le Bot, “Overview of Fall ‘08 publishing season,” France 24 (Sept. 16, 2008), publisherslunchdeluxe blog

Sven Birkerts, in his excellent book of essays and memoirs, The Gutenberg Elegies, described his days as a bookseller for the Border brothers in Ann Arbor, Michigan. If Jack Eckerd revolutionized the pharmacy by placing the prescription counter at the back, forcing customers to walk through a convenience store to get there and sparking millions of dollars of impulse buying, the Border brothers changed bookstores by adding the café. Now even small bookstores have espresso bars to keep customers from skipping over to Borders or Barnes & Nobles.

The English bookseller, Blackwell, announced that they are going one further by installing a machine that can publish on demand one million titles. Anna Richardson, in her blog at bookseller.com, reports that the machine is called, appropriately, the “Espresso Book Machine” and is made by On Demand Books in the US. But unlike Italian espresso makers, this machine looks like a large and boxy photocopier. According to The Independent, a novel takes about seven minutes to print.

The big news here is that customers will have more titles from which to choose. The bad news is that we may see these machines replace the bookstore with aisles and shelves and books you can pick off the shelves and page through. Real books take up space. The cost of leasing retail space has risen tremendously, forcing many independent bookstores and even some chain stores to close. Would it be that strange to buy a book from one of these machines esconced in a little space like an ATM? It would be no more strange than ordering a book on line, I suppose.

Blackwell plans to keep stocking books on shelves for the moment. With the cost of leasing real estate continuing to rise, though, do not be surprised if bookselling becomes a predominantly web-based enterprise or one that operates out of little kiosks just large enough to house one of these machines. The sign above the kiosk will read, “Books,” even though there won’t be any.

Sources: Arifa Akbar, “Millions of books to choose from – yours will take only minutes to print,” The Independent (June 21, 2008)

The mainstream media is ideologically incapable of seeing the glass half full. Take any event, any fact, any decision, and they will always end each thought with the preposition “but.” Which is why I was intrigued at the generally positive news in the Independent that Spaniards are buying more books than ever. –

Publishing houses say business last year broke all records, and they predict even better results for 2008. The sector was said to be euphoric ahead of Madrid’s annual book fair which opened yesterday. Open-air book fairs have become media spectacles, but also massively popular events where fans queue to meet their favourite author, and clasp books as a comfort in uncertain times.

Publishers are “euphoric?” Nice, if it’s true. The problem with the article is that it cites no figures, no numbers at all. You don’t know how many books were sold last year or how that number compares with sales in previous years. You don’t even know the percentage rise in sales that caused publishers to become so giddy.

Now, go to the El país website and the news there is, well, different. –

Las ventas de libros en las librerías de España sufrieron un estancamiento o un ligero retraimiento entre 2002 y 2006, según un estudio del Observatorio de la Librería, realizado por la Confederación Española de Gremios de Editores de Libros (CEGAL), que agrupa a 1.500 librerías. El estudio, presentado ayer en la Feria del Libro y que se ha llevado a cabo a partir de una muestra realizada entre 622 librerías de toda España, pone de manifiesto que el resultado económico de las ventas va desde un beneficio de un 3,13% en las librerías muy grandes hasta las pérdidas de un 1,82% de las más pequeñas.

* * *

The sale of books in Spanish bookstores suffered from stagnation or a slight decrease between 2002 and 2006, according to a study of Observatorio de la Librería, carried out by Confederación Española de Gremios de Editores de Libros (CEGAL)(Spanish Confederation of Book Editors’ Unions), which includes 1,500 bookstores. The study, which was presented yesterday at the book fair, and which was based on a sample of 622 bookstores all over Spain, [revealed a wide margin, from profits] of 3.13% in the larger bookstores to losses of 1.82% in the smaller ones. [translation mine]

No mention of euphoric publishers there. How do you reconcile these two accounts?  Were sales flat between 2002 and 2006, before they rocketed upwards to oxygen-poor heights in 2007, causing publishers to feel euphoric?  Or was it merely a case of publishers seeing the glass half-full and bookstore owners, whose union commissioned the survey cited in the Spanish paper, seeing the glass half-empty?

Before I leave you with the impression the writer for the Independent wrote an article that reported unabashedly good news, let’s take another look. The article begins –

House sales have plunged, automobiles have tanked, and credit is throttled, but Spain is experiencing an unprecedented boom in books. Once the nation that read fewer books than any other in Europe, Spaniards have become voracious readers, devouring more books than ever before.

In other words, Spaniards are reading a lot more, but the country is still going to hell.

Photo: Herd of sheep, unknown; Sources: Elizabeth Nash, “Spanish bookshops buck the trend with soaring sales,” The Independent (May 31, 2008), “La venta de libros se estanca en España,” El país (June 5, 2008)

The Economist this week has more on the results of the Zogby survey that I posted about earlier. The moral of the article: that the rising cost of printing books may eventually force more publishers into making their catalog available as e-books. Still, readers resist the technology.

Though they are an improvement on a computer screen, e-book readers remain crude simulacra of books. A poll released by John Zogby at BEA found that 82% of Americans strongly prefer paper to pixels. …

But Kindle and its kind are merely the first generation of a product that is sure to evolve quickly in the coming years. Eventually, e-books point the way towards a cleavage of content from platform, threatening publishing with the wholesale change that has hit the music industry.

…Unlike digital music or video, digital books require consumers to change their consumption habits. … An economic slowdown may play to the new technologies’ strengths. The costs of printing and shipping paper and cardboard are rising. … Publishing has only two indispensable participants: authors and readers. As with music, any technology that brings these two groups closer makes the whole industry more efficient—but hurts those who benefit from the distance between them.

Only time will tell, of course. I’m old enough to remember quadrophonic (I had one in my room) and eight-track (had that too) music systems. Both systems disappeared even before portable typewriters went the way of collectable relics. Maybe it’s my age, but no “platform” beats the feel of a book and no screen can improve on the way the printed word lies on a page.

Source: “Unbound: Publishers worry as new technologies transform their industry,” The Economist (June 5, 2008)(requires subscription)

The polling firm, Zogby International, reported the results of a nationwide survey. The survey polled 8,218 adults online. Seventy-seven percent of those polled stated that they bought their books online. Seventy-six percent bought from large chain booksellers. Only 49% preferred independent bookstores.

Eighty-two percent said that they liked to read traditional books, while 11% admitted to being comfortable with e-books.  As I wrote before, you cannot compare the experience of reading a book with that of listening to music.  (See also here.) Don’t expect any i-Pod-like phenomenon to occur with e-books.  From the same survey, only 3% said that they owned an e-reader and an equally anemic 4% planned to buy one.

Half of those surveyed bought fewer than 10 books for themselves.  Fourteen percent bought more than 20 books.

Forty-six percent said that they spent the same time reading this past year as the previous year.  Twenty-three percent said that they were spending more time, while 30% said that they were spending less.

What makes people buy a book?  Sixty percent relied on suggestions from friends and family.  Only 49% relied on book reviews.  Fifty-two percent admitted to choosing a book by its cover.  Thirty-five percent were swayed by another author’s blurb.

Thirty-eight percent said they went “very often” (43% “somewhat often”) into a bookstore knowing what they wanted.  Eighty-nine percent said that they bought books by authors they had already read and enjoyed.  Translation: Almost 90% of buyers are return customers.

Two points:  This is a survey of adults online.  It does not include other readers who are not online.  I suspect the number of readers who patronize independent booksellers is higher among those who spend less time online. Stated differently, I wouldn’t be surprised if people who spend more time online (and thus would likely participate in an online survey) do more shopping online than the general population. It makes sense, doesn’t it? So that’s a bias that’s been built into this survey from the start. And, as with all surveys, it only records what people think of themselves, how they think they behave.  It does not record how they actually behave.

The survey was commissioned by Random House.

Sources:  Josh Getlin, Los Angeles Times, in zogby.com (May 31, 2008)(accessed Mar. 19, 2010), publisherslunchdeluxe blog

Technology has made it economically feasible to publish editions as small as fifty copies whereas before the minimum number was 2,000 or 3,000. This means increasingly specialized titles that would never have had a chance in the world of mass market economics can now see the light of day. Stephen Page, chief executive of UK publisher Faber & Faber, ponders the significance of this new technology for the reading public. Orphans books, works that are out of print but not yet in the public domain, can be reprinted. New works for smaller audiences also benefit. In the long run, we will likely see more diversity of titles, rather than less.

Gutenberg might not blink if you told him that we could now make a single book for a single person. He would need a chair to fall into if we could tell him that we could do it within hours of an order from anywhere in the world. POD is exactly that and is perhaps the most exciting book technology of our time.

The rest of his essay is here.

Source: Stephen Page, “Faber Finds: Your Own Private Printing Press,” The Telegraph (May 31, 2008)

Bowker reports that the number of “unclassified” books printed in the US last year was 134,773. “Unclassified” books are mostly publications of works in the public domain, short-run titles, and “on-demand” books. Traditional book publishing remained flat compared to the year before. In 2007, 276,649 new titles and editions were published, compared to 274,416 published in 2006.

In a press release, a Bowker spokesman said –

Adult fiction continues to be a reliable category in the US book publishing industry and one of the niches that a number of publishers have counted on through the peaks and valleys of the past several years. On the other hand, it’s noteworthy that juvenile title output, which makes up more than one out of every 10 new books introduced into the US market, was down again slightly last year and has now seen steady erosion in each of the last three years since its Harry Potter-influenced peak in 2004.

Did I read that correctly? Juvenile books make up nine out of every ten books published in the US?

Not all the news is mixed, though. Bowker also reports that there were 50,071 new fiction and literature titles published in 2007, an increase of 17% from 2006 and almost twice what the number was in 2002. The number of new literature books published last year was 19% higher than in 2006.

Image:  Gutenberg’s press. Screw presses down platen on the type.  Francis Rolt-Wheeler, The Boy with the U.S. Inventors (Boston: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co., 1920), etc.usf.edu; Sources:  “Bowker Reports U.S. Book Production Flat in 2007,” marketwire.com (May 28, 2008), publisherslunchdeluxe blog

Nielsen BookScan is said to represent no more than seventy percent of actual book sales. Some believe that the number reported represents an even smaller percentage. Yet the media treat BookScan numbers as if they had the accuracy of an overzealous bookkeeper.

That’s not to say that publishers make money on every book, but the number of books sold is probably closer to the amount of the first printing than is usually reported. If it weren’t, publishers could not stay in business for long.

Poets & Writers magazine makes this observation –

…BookScan numbers have become the literary equivalents of a movie’s opening-weekend box-office receipts. Had such a system been in use a century ago, one wonders if Hemingway would have even been signed to Scribner’s in the first place. What if Perkins had known that Hemingway’s collection of short stories, In Our Time (Boni & Liveright 1925) sold 500 copies in its first season.

This is a variation on the Even-Jane-Austen-Would-Be-Turned-Down-Today, which causes the afflicted person to dream about a golden age that never existed and, conversely, to view our own time as only the latest stop on mankind’s inevitable descent into barbarity.

My advice — this is just me talking — serve yourself a drink, take a good long look, and count your blessings. After all, when Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises in 1926, Alexander Fleming had yet not discovered penicillin and the Eighteeth Amendment was still the law of the land.

Photo:  Hemingway, Lady Duff Twysden, Hadley Richardson, unknown man, Harold Loeb, (second from left) circa 1925, John F. Kennedy Library; Source: Poets & Writers (May/June 2008), articles on penicillin, Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, Wikipedia