Reviving the Book Business
In response to my post about the collapse of mainstream publishing, fellow writer Kimberly Carlson e-mailed me, “Just read your blog ‘the death of an industry.’ This subject has been on my mind and I am heartbroken by it. I wonder, is there more I can do? Sure I have some selfish reasons why it upsets me so, but also, novels have more than enriched my life. I believe they have helped me to crawl out of some pretty stiff spots. I don't think TV and most movies can do this.
“I thought about what you had said... Yet I still love to hold a book. My husband said he heard on NPR yesterday that colleges are starting to do away with text books. When one particular university made the decision to do this at a faculty meeting, one philosophy teacher walked out in tears, saying that he cherished his text books so much that he had them bound in leather.”
You can imagine what a chord her words struck. The Last Good Fairy is a heartfelt valentine, actually, to the book form. I personally believe that books are one of mankind’s most profound creations and some of the most elegant, versatile technology ever invented. Think about it: You can take a conventional book to the beach and not have to worry about sand or grit, or that the sun is too bright to read the screen. You can take it into the bathtub and not worry about electrocuting yourself if you happen to drop it in the water. You can read a book without using electricity. You can read it without any hardware or software. You don’t need “updates” to read them, either. The book form has existed for millennia and for good reason. It’s brilliant.
For that reason, I share Kimberly’s sadness over the thought of books going the way of print newspapers. But I honestly don’t think that they will. There is an aesthetic component to a book that is not quite shared by newspapers, the pleasurable tactile sensation of holding a print newspaper aside (and the superior layout). Also, a book is meant to be a more persistent entity. Yesterday’s newspaper is today’s fish wrap, but books, ideally, are something that we treasure and keep on our shelves as a reminder of the good read that they gave us, to share with friends, or to read again, perhaps. A beautifully designed book is a work of art, even if mass-produced (which most books, except for handmade ones, are).
And yet, slowly but inexorably, books became as disposable as newspapers. In order to get economies of scale from printers, to offer their product as cheaply as possible, and to get as much ink as they could in the trade publications (books with larger print runs get more attention), publishers printed as many books as they thought they might possibly sell. However, as I noted in a previous post, publishers have only been able to figure out what will sell profitably ten percent of the time. That has meant that tons—literally—of books have been remaindered and scrapped. A lot of the highly discounted books for sale on the Internet are remaindered books. But others get shredded. The current system depends on large volumes of sales and movement of product in order for anyone to make money.
But it would appear that, like other aspects of our consumer economy that are now displaying the weakness of unsustainability, this is unworkable over the long term and in certain economic and technological environments—like the one we are experiencing now.
I think, personally, that there is a terrific opportunity here to remake the way we bring literature into our lives. The corporate model is only one way. Books have been gracing our lives for hundreds of years before corporations took over. Some of the solutions to preserve the book form of storytelling (and information transmittal) aren’t necessarily going to sound appealing to those of us who have gotten used to having a limitless supply of cheap books at our disposal, or to industry mainstays for whom the present system might still be working well enough. But for the long term evolution and health of literature, here are some ideas that I think are worth considering:
Make print-on-demand the main way that books are produced. Print-on-demand (POD) technology is the process by which a book in an electronic form is printed and bound, single copy by single copy. Modern traditional printing methods create a book block of printed pages from the electronic files, then employ a binder to create the cover and bind the pages together inside the cover. Because of the machinery used, it’s not economically viable to print a single or even a handful of copies. So, larger print runs are encouraged. This is where so much of the waste comes in. However, the unit cost of a POD book is such that it’s almost impossible for an author to make any money from sales. (It’s become something of a form of vanity publishing for this reason. So here’s another thing we can do—lose the attitude toward this way of publishing). Readers, used to the cheap book prices that derive from large, wasteful, traditional print runs, are unwilling to pay more for a book than they’ve become conditioned to believe a book is “worth.”
Perhaps if POD became the industry standard, economies of scale would start to figure in enough that authors could make money from their books. But I do think that, in addition, it is up to us readers to recognize the actual costs that go into producing a book and be willing to pay more. We could buy fewer new books (and share them and use the library and continue to buy used books), but at least we would get the price in line with the costs. Psychologically, we could start to accept the price of a more individualized process. What we would be gaining from this is access to a much larger number of titles, ones that have been rejected by corporate publishers on commercial grounds. In the same way that I can now find songs I’ve been wanting to have in my library forever because I can now buy individual songs on the Internet, we could buy titles whose audience might be only a few hundred readers. But if we’re one of those few hundred, we’re delighted to find a book that’s perfect for us.
With POD as the industry standard, the wasteful practice of selling books on consignment could be done away with. I once heard a vision of a bookstore described at BookExpo America (the main trade show for the U.S. publishing industry) as a place where single copies of titles would reside so that readers could browse through the physical books, then order their copy from the bookseller. The bookseller would have a POD system at their store and could print you up your copy right then and there. This would eliminate unbelievable amounts of needless use of resources. Heavy boxes of books wouldn’t have to be shipped all over hell and gone, including ones that don’t sell. Books that don’t sell would never even be printed.
All well and good, of course, but this is more of a long range strategy and will require a great deal of retooling and cooperation. What can we do in the short term?
For one thing, we can go out of our way to support independent publishers and independent bookstores. Yes, it’s convenient to buy everything on Amazon, but I know from personal experience that it’s very difficult for a small publisher to make money selling books on their site. Publishers have, for awhile now, not wanted to sell individual books to individual buyers because it’s time-intensive, but the discounts expected by distributors and sites like Amazon have cut so deeply into their profits that this is beginning to change. Check out this website, The New York Center for Independent Publishing, which represents independent publishers. Take a look at their publisher directory to follow links to the sites of individual publishers whose categories of books might interest you. Buy the books directly from them. Some of them don’t accept credit cards or even have PayPal accounts (I’ve checked this out as a small publisher, BTW, and it is based, again, on economies of scale; so that is why some small publishers might not opt for this convenience), so you’ll have to call or e-mail your order in, or you might have to mail them a check or money order. But in my opinion, we need to keep asking ourselves: What are we losing or giving up when we prize low prices and convenience above everything else?
And here are two places where you can read reviews of books from small and independent publishers: Rain Taxi and The Midwest Book Review.
If you are lucky enough to have an independent bookstore in your town, buy books from them. If you can afford a new book instead of a used one, buy the new one. The money from buying new books will help the publisher publish new books by their existing authors and new books from new voices. We can’t expect to buy nothing but used books and continually get a fresh supply of new books injected into the market. Some nonprofit publishers get their funds from grants, but that kind of money is hard to come by. Especially these days.
Be willing to pay the somewhat higher prices that a small publisher might need to charge in order to cover their expenses. The printing bill alone for The Last Good Fairy came to $25/book. And that doesn’t include anything for the six years I spent writing the novel and the six months I spent designing the book. It doesn’t include any overhead. I lose money when I sell the book without decoration, but I’m happy to have the book out there, hopefully giving pleasure to readers; and as far as I can tell, most small publishers are doing what they do not to make money, but as a labor of love. (Most small publishers, of course, don’t publish such a lavish edition, so their margins are probably more favorable, which they need to stay in business.)
Organize a book club around books from small and independent publishers. Recommend books to your book-lover friends, give them as gifts, review them in your blogs. I’ll be happy to host some reviews of books by indie publishers on this site if anyone wants to send them to me, and I’ll write the occasional one myself. Word-of-mouth is the cheapest and most effective form of marketing that there is.
These ideas are what I’ve been able to come up with so far. If anyone else has any ideas, please send them my way and I’ll add them. I’ll continue to think about this, too, and if anything else comes to mind, I’ll post it.
Personally, I think the single most important thing we as readers can do is to remember that literature is an art form, not a commodity. Simply publishing for profit is not necessarily the healthiest motive for creating something as culturally important as books. I believe we have the opportunity to create a new kind of market for stories in book form if we want it bad enough. I love a good story in any form, but I do love books. Like Kimberly, I feel that novels have more than enriched my life and I love to hold a book. And I know we’re not the only ones.
Above: An image from a book of thirty removable Easter Rabbit postcards, Easter Rabbit Postcard Book, published by the independent press, Laughing Elephant (which includes the legendary Green Tiger Press).
To the left, the cover of a book by The Art Brothers, Invisible Art, also published by Laughing Elephant. Here’s an excerpt from the blurb about the book on the publisher’s website: “This book attempts to show us beautiful things which are not ordinarily thought of as beautiful—to make invisible art visible. The authors believe that too many people think that art is confined to museums and galleries, whereas, in truth, it is all around us … The ART in this book is INVISIBLE in the sense that much of it has been overlooked, dismissed, or forgotten. Further, a prevailing notion that art is to be found only in museums and galleries keeps most of us from the full enjoyment of the visual pleasure which life offers.”
Monday, March 2, 2009