A sombre article in the today’s Observer/Guardian by Henry Porter throws more light and a certain amount of cold water on the current upheaval in the book publishing business. It’s definitely a good read….
‘As I start to write my latest book, I fear for the future of publishing
Retailing pressure and the emergence of the ebook are threatening the future of authors and their work.
Last Monday at 8.30am I began to type the first lines of a new novel. These sentences are unlikely to see the light of day but they’re a start – I am out on the pitch swinging my arm in a fashion that convinces me at least, which is certainly an advance on the week spent inside the pavilion whitening my pads and tidying the locker.
To begin to write a book these days seems more than the average folly. Publishing appears to have been hit by a storm similar to the one that tore through the music industry a few years ago and is now causing unprecedented pain in newspapers We are told that fewer people are reading, that book sales are down, that the supermarkets which sell one in five copies of all books care more about their cucumber sales, that the book is shortly to be replaced by the ebook and electronic readers sold by, among others, Amazon, which seems bent on reducing publishers to an archipelago of editorial sweatshops and the writer to the little guy stitching trainers in an airless room.
Publishing seems to be one of the great mysteries of commerce. Despite the large numbers involved – a total of £1.752bn was spent on 235.7m books in 2009 in the UK, that’s nearly four books for every man woman and child – the business today is a testament to self-deprecation, with only a few people willing to assert the unique value of books and their content.
When you transfer the model into any other business, the way books are sold seems like an evolutionary freak. Imagine you are the owner of a chain of ironmongers and a man suggests that you sell his new line of household equipment. You agree but with the following conditions. First, though he retains ownership of his pans and brushes, you will take something more than 50% from any sale. Second, he must pay for front-of-store display to make sure the goods catch the customer’s eye. Third, if they don’t sell within a specified period he pays to ship them back to his warehouse. Fourth, if your centralised ordering system breaks down and the items fail to materialise during the broom and mop-handle promotion, he has no comeback.
That is how publishers sells books: having paid an advance to a writer and stumped up for editing, design, marketing and distribution, they take all the retailer’s risk.
Selling through the supermarkets is even tougher. There is huge competition for space and the supermarket demands a much greater percentage of the sale price. Publishers guard the figures closely but 65% is not uncommon; one asked for 85% before Christmas. In order to sell more hand-crafted mint chocolates and olive oil, the supermarket may chose to make a loss leader out of a bestseller by Dan Brown or JK Rowling, thus devaluing the book and harming the trade of the local book shop in one swipe. “Supermarkets like to give any specialist shop a good kicking,” said one publisher.
The forces in the book market are increasingly monopolistic, particularly when it comes to selling on the web and on the new battlefront of ebooks. Amazon, the online retailer, has unprecedented power to squeeze publishers’ margins and to compete with high street retailers. The company now wants to make its Kindle reader the primary platform for ebooks and is pursuing a strategy that when the publisher supplies books at wholesale it will also license the books at a very low price to the Kindle. In effect publishers would be providing the means to cannibalise their own product, and at a discount. Unsurprisingly they prefer a model that allows them to appoint a company such as Apple as an agency for their books.
I don’t have serious objections in principle to the right kind of “disintermediation” – the jargon used for the process of reducing the supply chain – or even to ebooks, as long as they don’t completely replace the physical book. If all man had ever known was ebooks and someone came along and suggested actually printing one it would be heralded as a wonderful addition to civilisation. However, there should be doubts about the remote power of deletion that Amazon retains over the Kindle. During the Amazon-Macmillan dispute last week sample chapters from Macmillan books disappeared from electronic readers and last year the company removed a copy of Orwell’s 1984 because of a rights problem.
If you feel sorry for publishers spare a thought – and a dime – for writers, on whose shoulders this huge, discounting, rights-trading, jargon-babbling profiteering melée rests. As things are, the writer’s share of a book that sells for £10, after his or her agent’s fee, hovers between 35p and 40p: more than 95% is kept by the agent, publisher and retailer. The fierce discounting in supermarkets means that writers are now even less likely to earn out their advances. At the same time advances are being cut and authors’ contracts are being summarily cancelled.
We tell ourselves times are tough and jobs must be saved. Newspapers, TV, the music business are all suffering from the recession, a collapse of advertising and audience. But as their advances are cut, authors have failed to notice that during the worst recession for 80 years, book sales went down last year by just 1.2% in value and only 0.5% in volume. Non-fiction titles suffered but fiction is booming and all the publishers I spoke to are secretly optimistic.
So the storm is far from perfect. What does seem to be happening is that publishers have somehow become embarrassed about “being the impresarios of stories and ideas”, as Toby Mundy, head of Atlantic Books, romantically describes his job. They have allowed the relegation of the book to the status of a stone-baked pizza, a commercial and moral misstep, and writers have gone along with it because of the gloomy orthodoxies of necessity.
Talk of “disintermediation” is nonsense when half a minute’s thought will tell you that the intermediaries that count, the ones between writers and readers, are large, monopolistic and generally unsympathetic to writers. Ebooks don’t bother me any more than writing on a computer does. The world will accommodate them even though reading Christopher Reid’s Costa-winning collection of poems on a screen will scarcely add to the experience. What worries me is the loss of income for writers in what is a pretty healthy market, the loss of good editors from publishing houses and the disdain for writers by retailers – people who depend on them. If they are not careful the core talent of the book trade may well combine in new types of ventures – collectives and transparent relationships where writers and editors go into business together on a 50:50 basis and are enabled by web platforms, ebooks and print on demand… disintermediation of a more radical sort.
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve finished three books, Finest Years by Max Hastings, Generosity by the American novelist Richard Powers and an extraordinary book by William Blacker about his life among the farmers and gypsies of Transylvania, Along the Enchanted Way. They were thrilling to read. We should prize the system that produced such wonderful storytelling: it needs to be nurtured as an essential part of our society. To write a book half as good as any of them is what makes me proceed with trepidation from the first to the second paragraph.’
The Observer, Sunday 7 February 2010