By Richard Curtis



For many publishing people, the world as they had known it ended in
the summer of 1996. On a warm brilliant day I sat down at a table in
a Spanish restaurant for what I thought would be a typical lunch with
the publisher of a mass-market paperback company. I found him slumped
head in hands over a seriously stiff drink. "What's the
matter?"

He looked up, miserable. "You haven't heard? The wholesale
independent distribution business is imploding. Hundreds and hundreds
of drivers have been let go."

I groaned, beckoned to the waiter and pointed to my friend's glass.
"I'll have the same."

The collapse of the distribution system that fueled the mass-market
paperback revolution was a trauma from which the book industry has not
recovered to this day. To appreciate its impact requires a brief description
of the way books were distributed after the post-World War II paperback
revolution that swept the U.S. publishing industry.

By long tradition, trade or general interest hardcover books have been
offered to bookstore buyers by publishers' sales representatives.
The store buyers select which titles they order and the number of copies
they will stock in their stores. Though released year-round, hardcovers
are offered on a seasonal basis in publishers' catalogues, which
are issued several times annually. Whatever the reality may be, the
theory is that they will have a decent shelf life and, if popular, remain
on display for months or longer. This business model has not changed
fundamentally from the last century to the present time.

Mass-market paperbacks (as opposed to the larger trade paperback format)
are a very different matter. Introduced in 1939, "pocket books"
took hold in the '50s and '60s, but publishers soon realized
that the hardcover distribution approach didn't work. They needed
a different sales model and turned to the one used for magazines.

Every month, magazines were shipped to depots ­ "agencies"
­ around the country. Drivers picked up the magazines at the agencies
and visited stores on pre-assigned routes in towns and cities. Most
of the stores were not bookshops but rather supermarkets, candy stores,
newspaper stands, and bus, train or airport terminals. Each month, these
salaried employees collected the previous month's unsold publications
and replaced them on the store's racks and shelves with new stock.

To paperback book publishers, this existing distribution network was
the perfect vehicle for delivering their product to a far-flung readership.
Thus it came to pass that paperbacks began hitching rides with magazines.
And that too is how they came to be released on a monthly schedule.
After 1956, when the leading magazine wholesaler went out of business,
a number of entrepreneurs set up shop as independent wholesale distributors
("ID's" or "rack jobbers"), handling mostly
books.

Because they were a monthly phenomenon, paperbacks did not enjoy a long
shelf life; the exigencies of returning paperbacks, when the distributor
cleared the racks to make room for the next month's releases,
made for an ephemeral existence. What is more, the unsold copies were
usually not redistributed or remaindered. Because paperback publishers
had to pay freight for returned copies, many of which were dirty or
damaged, the stores found it more efficient simply to strip the covers
off the unsold books, send the insides to be pulped, and return only
the covers to the publishers for credit when settling accounts.

Since paperbacks were returnable, distributors delayed paying publishers
until unsold stock was returned. To account to authors for the gap between
copies sold and royalties released, the paperback publishers took a
page from the creative accounting systems devised by the hardcover industry,
holding large amounts of royalties for long periods until returns were
finalized. Royalty reports to authors were deliberately fashioned to
omit information about the number of copies printed, shipped, and returned,
or about the amounts of royalty reserved pending finalization of returns.
This suppressing of vital sales data gave publishers carte blanche to
retain royalties that might have been remitted to authors. Some publishers
got too creative and held royalties forever. Until the 1990s, when pressure
from agents and from writers' organizations forced publishers
to reveal significant details, mass-market houses reported only net
sales with no information as to how they arrived at those net figures.
As I wrote at the time, it was like reporting batting averages to baseball
fans without revealing how many at-bats or hits the players had had.

The Paperback Industry Blossoms

Unlike retailers of hardcover books, paperback booksellers seldom had
much say over which titles were stocked on their racks. They passively
received the current month's selection and passively watched the
unsold stock loaded into the distributor's vehicle a month later.
The authors of those books watched the process too, but some of them
figured out ways to influence the wholesalers to promote their books.
A number of leading authors, on their own initiative or sponsored by
their publishers, began visiting the wholesale agencies and pitching
their books at executives and ingratiating themselves with the jobbers.
Some of the more energetic writers went so far as to drop in on drivers
as they loaded their vehicles, bringing coffee and donuts and promotional
material to inspire them. This technique was particularly successful
with romance fiction, which sold most abundantly in the supermarkets
that women visited two or three times every week. It did not hurt if
the authors were attractive. Many a lovestruck driver stocked extra
copies of a title after a pretty novelist shared a pre-dawn breakfast
with him on the tailgate of his station wagon.

Although a growing number of traditional bookstores stocked mass-market
paperbacks, it was the wholesale distribution network that fueled the
huge growth of the book business in the last quarter of the twentieth
century, spawning a thriving industry and a generation of bestselling
authors. Even when those authors graduated to hardbacks, paperback reprints
of their books drove sales overall. In the late 1980s and early '90s,
mass-market paperback revenue made the difference between feast and
famine for hardcover publishers. Income from romance fiction alone contributed
25% of the cash flowing into the trade book industry.

Smart publishing executives recognized how heavily they depended on
mass-market income for their profits. But that message did not always
filter down to their editors. Many of them, possessing only a hazy idea
of where the money for their acquisitions came from, spent profligately
and ended up taking a bath on books and authors that flopped miserably.
Or they simply acquired whatever they pleased without giving much thought
to the bottom line, failing to realize that they were indulging in a
luxury largely subsidized by paperback book revenue. Many lived in denial
that their beloved first novels, short story collections, poetry anthologies
and other elevated forms of literary endeavor were financed by romances,
westerns, thrillers, horror novels and space operas.

Efficiency Strikes the Distribution Business

Meanwhile, the infrastructure of paperback book distribution was undergoing
significant changes. The dramatic rise and expansion of bookstore chains
like Barnes & Noble siphoned business away from wholesalers'
franchises, both in cities and suburban malls. Computerized sales information
enabled publishers, wholesalers and retailers to better track the performance
of categories and identify winners and losers among specific books and
authors. And the stunning advent of amazon.com leveraged the awesome
power of the Internet to link supply and demand.

Assessing these patterns, paperback distributors began asking themselves
why they needed to employ human labor when they could more efficiently
and economically service bookstores and other outlets by shipping books
directly to the retailers. Yes, it would mean that the human element
-- the guy in the station wagon who knew which towns loved historical
romances and which preferred contemporary ones, which adored westerns
and which were big on science fiction ­ would be removed from
the equation. But -- well, that was progress!

The big agencies pulled the plug in that summer of 1996 when whole fleets
of drivers were discharged, and in the following years the wholesale
distribution workforce was reduced to a fraction of what it had been
in its heyday.

The Bottom Drops Out

Most publishing executives were slow to recognize the implications of
the nosedive in the wholesale paperback distribution business, dismissing
it as one of those occasional and inevitable shifts to which the industry
had always adapted. What was the big deal? Fewer romances and other
genre novels would be published, wasn't that all there was to
it?

In fact, the consequences were nothing short of calamitous. The impact
was felt in every sector of the publishing business, from what got written
to what got published to what got read. It wasn't long before
customers in west Texas or Nebraska or South Carolina discovered that
many books by their favorite authors were no longer being stocked in
their local stores. When customers or store owners complained, they
were told to take it up with the distributor ­ in Vancouver or
some other far-flung location reachable only by an 800 phone number.

The Rise of the Airport Model

A key result of the shift in distribution patterns was the streamlining
of the way retailers ordered books from publishers. Why pick and choose
among thousands of titles that might sell only a handful of copies?
Wasn't it better to follow the formula that worked so well at
airports, ordering only the top fifteen or twenty bestselling books
by branded authors like Nora Roberts, Robert Ludlum, John Grisham and
Stephen King?

As paperback publishers awoke to the new buying patterns, they were
forced to choose between star authors and those whose sales performance
fell below a minimum level. At first the triaging was restricted to
marginal genres like westerns, but as the last decade of the twentieth
century progressed the definition of "marginal" broadened
to embrace every category of book that fell below an ever-stricter definition
of commerciality, a process akin to the lowering of the bar in a limbo
dance. Limbo indeed: authors who had made a living for years from sales
of ten or fifteen thousand copies of their paperbacks were now being
dropped by their publishers as the minimum sales quota increased to
twenty or thirty thousand copies or more.

Like the men and women who distributed their books, a lot of authors
were thrown out of work, and the grim truth finally dawned on publishing
executives. It wasn't just genre titles that were affected by
the seismic shift in book distribution; paperbacks of every kind were
being hit by the pullback.

"What's the Author's Platform?"

As the publishing industry entered the twenty-first century, book industry
executives began requiring editors to produce elaborate profit and loss
projections and other corporate-style analyses of the potential viability
of books and authors. What was the sales performance of previous books?
Did they "sell through" satisfactorily or did returns cross
the threshold of unprofitability according to the latest formulas devised
by bookstore chain number-crunchers? The mantra of "The Bottom
Line" was invoked ad nauseam at every editorial committee, and
editors were constantly reminded, "We can only afford to publish
hits. If you can't project a big profit on a book, turn it down."

Editorial financial projections were aided by an Orwellian innovation
called BookScan, instituted early in 2001 by Nielsen Broadcast Data
Systems, the world's leading provider of airplay tracking information
for the entertainment industry. BookScan offered subscribing publishers
weekly analyses of sales by most major book retailers. Within moments,
editors could access vital sales statistics on previously published
books and authors, elevating performance parameters over traditional
but less quantifiable values like compelling storytelling or stirring
prose.

And what about the author? Was he or she attractive and mediagenic?
Did he or she have a "platform" ­ an organizational
base such as a hit television series or chain of fitness centers capable
of promoting the sale of books? Was the author willing to buy large
quantities of books for giveaway or resale by his or her franchise?

More and more, the importance of traditional literary criteria has taken
a back seat to "The Numbers" and "The Platform."
Promising but modestly successful novelists have discovered they cannot
get their second or third books published, and aspiring newcomers find
that they cannot sell their books at all. As for nonfiction, no matter
how compelling a memoir or business guide or social commentary might
be, publishers are disposed to reject it because the author was not
"branded."

Faced with these grim options, authors have resorted to increasingly
frenzied measures to get published. Established novelists are writing
under pennames to disguise the poor performance of their earlier books,
or strive to produce blockbuster "breakout" novels long
on sex, violence, and plot but short on craft and characterization.
Without supportive publishers to carry them while they developed their
talents over four or five books, new novelists resort to gimmicky concepts
with "log lines" that can be pitched like movie scripts.
Nonfiction authors plump up their credentials or hire public relations
specialists to burnish their images and enhance their media exposure.
Others subsidize the purchase of large quantities of their own books
to drive up their "numbers." Literary agents are besieged
by writers frantically seeking the advantage of representation by successful
dealmakers. Self-publication has soared now that electronic and print
technology and Internet promotion have brought the costs of vanity books
down to proletarian levels.

As much as authors would dearly love to bring back the robust mass-market
paperback era, it's no likelier than a return to steam locomotives.
More and more, the mass-market paperback is becoming a manifestation
of blockbuster publishing, where economies of scale enable publishers
to make a profit on immense shipments despite high returns. Because
retail sales have shifted from racks to bookstores and the Internet,
new and midlist works are increasingly being released in trade paperback.


The shift to trade paperbacks may help save midlist books. A major advantage
of the trade paperback format is that it is the preferred size for print
on demand reprints. "POD" takes all the guesswork out of
bookselling, and the publishing industry can no longer afford to guess
who will buy its products. Dismaying though it may be for old publishing
hands to contemplate, the future of book distribution belongs to print
on demand.

The end of the old mass-market paperback distribution system coincided
with the birth of a new method of delivering books to readers. Though
e-book technology has encountered innumerable obstacles, its potential
to reach a vast readership is no longer seriously disputed. What sort
of literature this new medium produces, and how it will make money for
authors and publishers, are fascinating sources for speculation.

Copyright © 2004 by Richard Curtis.

First published in Backspace,
www.bksp.org

Richard Curtis,
president of Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., is a leading New York
literary agent and a well-known author advocate. He is also the author
of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including several books
about the publishing industry. His interest in emerging media and technology
has enabled him to help authors anticipate trends in publishing and
multimedia. He has lectured extensively and conducted panels and seminars
devoted to raising consciousness in the author and agent community about
the future of communications. He was the first president of the Independent
Literary Agents Association and subsequently president of ILAA's
successor organization, the Association of Authors' Representatives.
His firm served for over a decade as agency for the Science Fiction
Writers of America. He is married to author Leslie Tonner and has two
children. He currently resides in Manhattan. His hobbies are sports,
music and painting.