You’d think that paper or printing costs might not represent the same fractions of a book’s cover price as they did in 1939, say. And what about composition costs, now that authors submit their work in computer files, eliminating the need for typesetting? (When this issue first arose, publishers refused to acknowledge that the writers were defraying a good part of the manufacturing costs, declined to raise their royalty percentages and claimed instead that a due increase in income would arrive thanks to more sales resulting from lower cover prices.
The arithmetic remained unchanged–even though the clueless MBAs who swarmed into the business in the 1990s might have spiffed things up. Of the roughly $10 a publisher took in on a $20 book, say, 10 to 15 percent of the cover price was allocated to the author, leaving only the remaining $7.50 or so to cover the fixed, make-ready costs (coding, proofing and correcting the author’s original disk, press preparation and such); the varying paper, printing and binding costs; the cost of sales and marketing; the overhead; and maybe some profit, 4 to 5 percent if all went well. No wonder they longed for bestsellers, the income from which would allow expansion of staff, or staff salaries, or the size of the list–or profits.
Along with old-time skills, the trade publishers risked losing their nerve and cultural daring. This is a well-known sad story. The money men trusted editors less and marketing people more; literary experiment was frowned on, though gambling on popular authors was acceptable–and they all bid to publish the same ones. They became more and more alike, competing to overpay for the same celebrities. Mercifully this was not uniformly true throughout the business. Small presses and still-independent houses with unimpeachable professional standards continued their exploratory, lively work, and university presses continued, even increased, their commitment to innovative books in the sciences and humanities; they became home to scholars who decades earlier would have been “discovered” by a Harper, Knopf or Macmillan–as William James, Keynes, Veblen, Gould, Arendt, Schlesinger, Hofstadter, Foucault and countless others had been. Today the trade houses may grab already world-famous professors or ambitious younger professors whom agents press on them, but they rarely find eggheads on their own. (…)
Another unacknowledged danger was the new twist given to familiar vulgarity. We knew about opportunistic books by or about politicians and celebrities–these had been hardy perennials for centuries. We knew about movie and television tie-in sales (they started in the 1930s and ’60s, respectively, with Steinbeck and Galsworthy, for example); tens of thousands of new readers devoured the novels on which big- and small-screen hits were based. This wasn’t high or low business, just good-sense middle. But by the 1990s, with the people in charge taking their cues from Hollywood and worshiping at the altar of television and the Internet, a tipping point was reached and passed: many bestsellers were now going in the opposite direction. More and more derivative pseudobooks were spun off from the Internet or TV, booklike objects created by the teams working for, say, famous generals in televised wars, cooks, telly dons, ballplayers, reality-show contestants, famous pets. These flashy items dominate shelf space, ad budgets and public attention; they leave nowhere near enough air, space or money for true literature.
{ Elizabeth Sifton/The Nation | Continue reading }
