> Al, what's interesting is this quest for
> these blockbuster qualities might be what's
> driving book sales down by putting out so
> many books that fit the same formulaic mold.
> I personally think The DaVinci Code had a
> devastating impact on the industry, even if
> it sold a hundred gazillion copies, by
> pushing these editors to want the same sort
> of "relentlessly commercial" prose that The
> DaVinci Code was filled with.
While it's always tempting to bitch about the degraded state of this
thing of ours (whichever thing it is one is talking about) and moan
about how much better things were in the Good Old Days, let's not forget
that it was the selling of a hundred gazillion copies by Mickey Spillane
of his first Hammer novel(s) in pb that led to the eruption of copycat
paperback publishing in the late '40s and the '50s that we all relish,
celebrate, and occasionally pay through the nose to collect. Spillane's
prose was certainly not lauded for its extraordinary beauty;
"relentlessly commercial" is a lot nicer than most of the things people
called it. And plenty of what came after was decanted from the same
formulaic mold. But good work came out of the impulse to imitate as
well. And if not for that impulse, we wouldn't have had Gold Medal.
Now, tying the whole post-war pb revolution back to just one author is a
fallacy -- clearly there was more to it than publishers wanting "the
next Spillane" or "the next Hammer." But pretending that publishing
today is all soulless copycatting while in the old days it was a
high-integrity activity driven by literary quality and moonbeams is just
revisionism.
> Some of the trouble with the industry is that
> they're looking to have blockbusters as opposed
> to selling a lot of different stuff in moderate
> quantities. You can make a profit that way, just
> like you can make a profit by spending five
> million (not two hundred) on a movie and making
> 15%. It's three quarters of a million. But the
> idea of the blockbuster is everywhere.
Nobody needs a long, boring lecture from me on the economics of
publishing. But a short, boring one never hurts. The up-front costs of
putting out a mystery novel, even if you pay a paltry advance, don't pay
generously for cover art, etc., are about $10,000. (You can get that
down if you don't pay any advance, of course, and use clip art or just
text for the cover -- but that's not the way professional publishing
works.) Even if you print cheaply, figure on $1 per copy; most books
cost more. And if you get distribution into stores (as opposed to
selling one copy at a time through your website, or something like
that), you have to be prepared to print two or three copies for every
one you sell. And figure on only pocketing maybe $4 for each copy you
sell (you can keep more if you have a higher cover price, but that'll
only be for formats such as trade pb or hardcover that also cost more to
print). So, let's imagine you print 10,000 copies and sell 4,000 (a
better result than Al's very realistic numbers in an earlier post): Your
costs are in the ballpark of $20,000 up front and your revenue is maybe
$16,000. Let's say you double your cover price and your printing costs
-- now your costs are $30,000 and your revenues are $32,000. Okay,
you've broken even at the "gross profit" level. But you haven't paid
your salespeople for getting the book into stores, you haven't paid the
rent or phone bill or electricity for your office, you haven't paid for
the advance copies you printed and mailed to 100 reviewers across the
country, we haven't talked about warehousing or freight...and I haven't
mentioned that it takes 60 or 90 or 120 days to get the revenue out of
the stores' hands and into your bank account, but you've got to pay your
author and artist and typesetter and proofreader and printer well before
that.
So: Can you make money selling a moderate number of copies of a lot of
books? Well, it depends on what "moderate" means, of course. But
having a lot of titles that sell 4,000 copies and none that sell 40,000
(forget about 400,000 or 4 million) is a good way to go out of business.
And very, very, VERY few of the books we love to discuss on this list
sell anywhere near 40,000 copies. Even 4,000 is a stretch for some of
them.
It's hard to imagine that in a world where even a crappy movie can sell
100,000 tickets, most crime novels struggle to sell 10,000 copies...but
it's the truth. And it's usually the innovative, mold-breaking,
intriguing, award-nominated books that struggle the hardest, while the
formulaic DA VINCI CODE clone racks up its 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000
(more) easily. That's why publishers do it. Because it works.
Charles
--- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com <mailto:rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com>
, "davezeltserman" <davezelt@...> wrote:
Al, what's interesting is this quest for these blockbuster qualities
might be what's driving book sales down by putting out so many books
that fit the same formulaic mold. I personally think The DaVinci Code
had a devastating impact on the industry, even if it sold a hundred
gazillion copies, by pushing these editors to want the same sort of
"relentlessly commercial" prose that The DaVinci Code was filled with.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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