Charles, thanks for the knowledgeable insight into the publishing
business...it may have been short, but it certainly wasn't boring.
Ron Clinton
> Nobody needs a long, boring lecture from me on the economics of
> publishing. But a short, boring one never hurts.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com [mailto:rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com] On
> Behalf Of hardcasecrime
> Sent: Friday, June 26, 2009 3:30 AM
> To: rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: RARA-AVIS: Re: Noir then, Noir now
>
>
> > 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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