2. PUBLISHING'S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

Last time I promised to tell you the secret of getting published. Of course you all knew that there isn't really any secret--you just have to write and write and keep submitting and if it's any good somebody will find it. Maybe not the first story or book, or the second, but eventually. I also told you not to quit your day job even after selling. Now I'm going to tell you why, and also the most unreported big news story of the past year.

Mass market book distribution in this country collapsed at the end of 1995. Over 500 independent distributors and booksellers, the folks who put the books out on newsstands and on wire racks and in Wal-marts and 7-11s and all the rest in North America, and who have been the stalwarts, responsible for 60% of all book sales in the U.S. and Canada, collapsed and went broke almost at once. It wasn't exactly planned, but when they were in very bad shape they were pushed. When the dust settled, there were only 5 of these left for the whole English speaking part of the continent, and when you add the 3 people who decide what goes in virtually all the chain bookstores, well, we now have 5 people determining the fate of 60% and 3 people 40% of the market. Not just shelf space and position; these people determine what gets published.

1966 went down as the worst sales in the history of commercial book publishing in the U.S. And you never even noticed--but you will.

The problem was, for 40 years the system was based on the mass market paperback. That's where the money was, and they were primarily impulse buys. The bookstores are where people generally went to specifically pick up or order books and authors they wanted. The racks were where folks wandered in who were interested in getting something to read and were attracted by a cover or a blurb or had word of mouth or reviews jog their mind when they saw a name.

The problem with impulse buys is that they (any impulse buy, not just books) have a point where there is price resistance and fewer people buy. After a while, fewer and fewer buy, until sales plummet. The distributors cut their orders hard, but after a while they do not generate enough cash to meet their overhead--salesmen, deliveries, inventories, etc. The price point for the mass market paperback after which there was price resistance proved to be $4.95. When the base went to $5.95, sales curved down. When the price went even higher, people simply stopped buying, or, at least, they bought one book instead of three or four. The distributors dumped any books that didn't sell out fast; publishers who had paid big money for titles found those titles no longer selling. Authors with large followings suddenly discovered that they weren't even being PUT on newsstands because they'd failed one or another test of selling out a rack. And when the distributors were hurting and squeezed hard, Wall Street moved in and bought them up or forced them into bankrupcy in a series of well-coordinated maneuvers.

Distribution outside the bookstores is now in the hands of a few people who are salesmen with no background in nor love of the book business. They barely read. They want to maximize profits for their space and so they want only blockbusters. One of those very few was quoted recently in a trade press as saying "Scifi, horror, that crap. It barely generates fifty million a year. That chicken s**t isn't worth my time or trouble. We don't want any." And he's looking at other genres as well. He wants million sellers. Racks of Stephen Kings and Danielle Steeles. If he needs to fill in some blanks in his racks, it's understood that those are fillers only. Publishers have moved to the same philosophy since nobody wants anything else. Blockbusters and then very cheap books that can be put out as filler but which have so little invested in them that if they all flop it doesn't matter. The great, vast, solid professional writers who carried fields like SF in the past are told to find jobs and take big pay cuts or are told not to apply at all. In one year, many of us have gone from all the publishers bidding for our work to nobody at all interested in buying anything. Not just me, but almost anybody, from the old guard to the new turks, who are the ones you think of when you think of contemporary SF, fantasy, and horror.

And there is no good news here.

What can you do? Well, it sounds like a cliche, but one thing you can do is go to your bookstores and order books by your favorite authors. Even if the titles aren't on the stands, order them. Make the names of your favorites show up in the computers of those companies. Otherwise, be prepared for JURASSIC PARK IX and similar artistic endeavors; you won't be able to buy what the publishers won't buy.

Short column this time, because I have to work hard to fulfill some outstanding contracts and get some money to pay bills and taxes. I do not, however, know if I will still be doing this a year or two from now. I wanted to, and after 20 years I expected to be past that (and if I were ten years older that would have been true), but, today, instead of getting together to talk about the SF field and editors and trends and the like, when SF and fantasy and horror writers who don't have good jobs outside the field or spouses who do, the talk these days is more on whether it is possible to get jobs at our age or, thanks to a lack of benefits these days, if we're going to be eating at all.

Happy Easter, folks. This ain't no April fools, I'm afraid.

Anybody need a 52 year old ex-teacher and pro novelist with computer knowledge?

Next week's columnist is Kris Rusch.