About U.S. Book Publishing
and
PublishAmerica
(Page 1 of 3)
By Denny Hatch
I have received several queries about why I allowed PRICELINE.COM: A Layman's' Guide to Manipulating the Media to be published November 17, 2003 by the little known and (to my way of thinking, leading edge) firm of PublishAmerica in Frederick, Maryland. After all, my questioners reasoned, this is my eighth book (actually my eleventh if you count several little fluff jobs in the early 1960s), so I should be able to go with a traditional publisher and enjoy the concomitant prestige and benefits.
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Larry Clopper, PublishAmerica co-owner
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In the 1960s and 1970s I worked in the book trade and was well connected. From 1976 to 1992 I was writing junk mail and (with my wife, Peggy) started a newsletter for junk mailers called WHO'S MAILING WHAT! (now titled Inside Direct Mail). I had no time to write books. In the 1990s I wrote three books on direct marketing, was well known in the field, and was able to deal direct with business publishers who knew me.
The priceline.com book is a business how-to title, but more a case study than anything else. My regular publishers were not interested; it did not fit their list.
I sent it to Bloomberg and Wiley who turned me down. Suggested it to a Norton senior editor who said, "This is not my kind of book."
So I surfed the Web, found PublishAmerica to whom I sent an e-mail query. I got a response within two days inviting me to send the manuscript. I sent it in and within a couple of weeks they sent me a contract. (More about the PublishAmerica contract later.)
Am I happy with PublishAmerica as opposed to a traditional publisher? So far, the answer is an emphatic YES.
Traditional book publishing is very efficient at one thing and one thing only: creating landfill.
Otherwise, it is the most screwed-up, wasteful, and depressing business model ever cobbled together by people who should have known better and done something to change it.
The one-word profit killer-Returns
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, business was so bad that bookstores could not afford to buy books from publishers and stock them in any quantity. So the book trade sweetened the deal by coming up with the policy that all unsold books were fully returnable-a situation that exists 70 years later. As a result, publishers have become bankers to the book trade. Consider the following scenario:
* A bookstore orders 20 copies of ABC by Sample A. Sample on a 60-day net payment arrangement.
* Of those 20 copies, 4 sell within 40 days, leaving 16 in inventory.
* Bookseller pays for the 4 copies it sold (at a discount of somewhere between 40% and 55%), and returns the unsold 16 copies.
* Bookseller then orders 4 copies to keep in inventory.
* Over the next 40 days bookseller sells 1 copy, leaving 3 in inventory.
* Bookseller pays publisher for the one sold copy and returns the 3 unsold copies.
* Bookseller orders 1 copy for inventory.
Under this cockamamie business model, the publisher has shipped to the bookseller 25 copies in three shipments; the bookseller has returned 20 copies two shipments; the publisher has been paid for five copies that were sold and has 15 copies sitting in the warehouse gathering dust. Yes, the bookseller pays for return shipping. But the publisher has printed books and paid for all the handling and warehousing. Profitability is impossible.
The example cited above is for a mid-list title-a known author or subject matter that should be of interest to a certain number of customers. If the publisher has bet the ranch on a celebrity author and the numbers above have an extra zero (e.g., instead of 20 books shipped, the number is 200), the losses become catastrophic.
So how do publishers make money?
* One way is to sign up guaranteed best sellers by Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Bob Woodward, Andrew Weil, J.K. Rowling, or Princess Di's butler.
* Or they shoot craps and get very, very lucky, as they did with Hillary Clinton and Laura (Seabiscuit) Hillenbrand.
* Or they come out with a hot subject, such as Soctt Berg's biography of Katherine Hepburn that made it onto bookstore shelves less than two weeks after she died.
* Or they have a series, such as Norton's Aubrey-Maturin nautical adventures by Patrick O'Brien that keep attracting new readers and continue sell year after year (with serious help from Peter Weir's film version of Master and Commander starring Russell Crowe).
* Or they build up a critical mass of special-interest titles that appeal to specific markets (e.g., titles on cooking, automobiles, boats, gardening, health and fitness, crafts, music, etc.).
My first job was in book publishing-writing press releases and getting authors on radio and television-for the trade book division of Prentice-Hall. The year was 1960, during which 15,000 new titles were published. Today, 150,000 new titles are published every year, so you will quickly realize that all across the country, book warehouses have walls bulging and floors sagging with unsold books (a.k.a. future landfill).
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Willem Meiners, PublishAmerica, co-owner
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For a bookstore to stock just one copy of every new book published would require an additional 3-1/2 miles of shelving every year-and that is spine out.
For the full cover to be displayed would require 14 miles of shelving. Stacked on top of each other, these 150,000 books would be the equivalent of 14 Sears Towers. Bookstores have access to this avalanche of titles and they can be special ordered and delivered in as little as a day or two.
And, of course, Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com carry information about them and make the ordering process easy. But far less than 5 percent of all book publishing's output of new titles ever make it into a book store where it can be physically handled and studied before purchase. In the immortal words of publishing guru Dan Poynter, "Bookstores are a lousy place to sell books."
My first boss in the business, children's book publisher Franklin Watts, was a hard living, hard drinking ex-traveling book salesman who used to storm into the office every year on his birthday and announce loudly, "Do not wish me many happy returns! There is no such thing as a happy return!"
Book Publishers and Authors
Writing a book is a terribly lonely pastime. It requires a special breed of person capable of laser concentration and pure doggedness to sit in front of a computer or a yellow pad or a typewriter day-after-day for weeks, months and even years to create a book-length manuscript.
Authors are a publisher's major asset. Without authors, the publishing industry would not exist.
So how do publishers treat aspiring authors?
Quite simply, we are treated like dirt.
The odds are that an unknown author sending in a query to a book publisher by mail or e-mail will get no response. Or a brush-off answer such as, "We do not accept unsolicited material" or "We only accept manuscripts from recognized agents."
More about agents later.
Those publishers that do encourage authors to send in manuscripts throw them into a "slush pile" where they sit for weeks or months until some supercilious twenty-something who could not write his or her way out of a paper bag gives it the once-over and sends a rejection slip. For example, my manuscript languished in the Wiley slush pile for over a month.
In fact, the idea that a writer's work is confined to a "slush pile"-as if all unpublished manuscripts were "slush"-is, to me, truly offensive. Another offensive term book publishers use to describe an marked-up manuscript proofs: "foul matter."
In short, traditional publishers are snotty and patronizing to authors unless your name is Ken Follet, or Tom Clancy.
In the 1970s I had a truly splendid agent named Marvin Moss who generated a slew of movie options on my three novels and a paperback sale on one of them. No film was ever made, but the money was good. Marvin was unbelievably well connected. Other clients of his included Edie Adams and director John Avildsen. When you had Marvin working for you, he stopped at nothing to sell your wares.
When John Avildsen won the Academy Award for Rocky, one of the people he thanked was Marvin Moss. Alas, Marvin died young, leaving me agentless. The late, great comedian Fred Allen once said, "You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood and put it in a flea's navel with two caraway seeds and still have room left over for an agent's heart."
Not Marvin Moss! How I miss him!
However, publishers and authors must beware of agents. They make money only when they sell something and get a commission. If an agent represents an author to a publisher, his aim is to get as fat an advance as possible-money paid up front against future royalties.
For example, the top brass at Simon & Schuster bit their nails up to their elbows worrying if they would ever sell enough books to make up the $8.5 million advance they paid to Hillary Clinton. (They did.)
But many a deal has been queered by an avaricious agent trying to hold a publisher up for a big advance. And my guess is that 90 percent of all books never earn out their advance.
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