Re: Authors Who Should Retire

On Tue, 11 Mar 2008 09:39:18 -0700 (PDT), "Richard R. Hershberger"
<rrhersh@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>On Mar 11, 12:24 pm, Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> On Tue, 11 Mar 2008 07:53:39 -0700 (PDT), "Richard R. Hershberger"
>>
>> <rrhe...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> >On Mar 11, 2:12 am, Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>
>> >> Also, from a purely practical standpoint, there aren't enough
reliable
>> >> old authors still writing to fill every publisher's schedule.  There
>> >> are a LOT of books being published these days.  They have to come
from
>> >> somewhere, and Heinlein, Herbert, and Asimov are dead.
>>
>> >For years I've been seeing the complaint that the publi****ng industry
>> >is dying because so many titles are being published [insert Yogi Berra
>> >quote here].  I've never quite figured out the logic of this.  It
>> >makes sense for an author trying to get attention to complain about
>> >this, but that is not at all the same thing as the industry as a
>> >whole.
>>
>> I don't think it's killing the industry, but it does hurt profits
>> because you lose economies of scale.
>>
>> If you put out 10 titles and each one sells 150,000 copies at $5.00
>> apiece (I'm assuming a low-end paperback house, obviously), that's
>> $7.5 million gross.
>>
>> If you put out 100 titles and each one sells 15,000 copies at $5.00
>> apiece, you still gross $7.5 million, but you had to pay fixed
>> expenses -- editor's salary, copy-editing fees, printer's set-up
>> costs, cover art -- on 100 books instead of 10.  For those extra 90
>> books, that all comes out of your profits and could be the difference
>> between making money and losing it.
>>
>> This is, in fact, very roughly what's happening in the publi****ng
>> business -- in order to compete for shelf space in the stores,
>> publishers are putting out lots of titles, but the average sales per
>> title are way down because readers aren't buying that many more books.
>>
>> In 1968, I am given to understand (I wasn't publi****ng yet), an
>> average midlist SF/F paperback sold maybe 150,000 copies, but there
>> were only maybe twenty titles a month being published.
>>
>> In 1988 there were about 100 titles a month, and average sales were
>> maybe 35,000 copies.
>>
>> Now there are about 200 titles a month, not counting small press and
>> e-books, and average sales run 20,000 copies.  
>>
>> So publishers are making less money per book, driving up over prices,
>> which drives down sales, creating a vicious circle.  There are more
>> authors being published, but they make less money and get less
>> attention.
>>
>> I've over-simplified all this, of course; I've ignored things like the
>> rise of chain bookstores, the collapse of the ID paperback
>> distribution system that had dominated the market from 19957 to 1993,
>> the huge increase in hardcover sales, etc.
>
>This all adds up to it being harder to make a living as an author, and
>perhaps as a publisher, but it doesn't add up to an industry problem.

That's right.  I said more or less that several paragraphs back.

But if you're a publisher and you're making less money than you used
to, it's easy to see it as meaning the industry is doomed.

>I'm no free-market ideologue, but this is just the sort of thing the
>free market is good at.  If there is such a glut on the market that
>publishers can't make a profit, some will drop out and the market will
>have corrected itself.  This is exactly analogous to a new gas station
>opening up in town.  The owners of the old gas stations aren't likely
>to be too happy about it, but that's not the point.

Yup.  Publishers have consolidated a lot in the last few decades,
giving us these zillion-imprint houses that used to be a dozen
separate companies, and they thought this would mean higher profits by
cutting competition and overhead, but instead it's resulted in lots of
small presses coming along and filling niches...

The free market is messy, and no one's guaranteed survival, but it
does usually work.




-- 
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