Hard Times in Hard-Cover Country

By J.D. Reed

Can the Three Bears save the book business?

Book sales were up an average 14% in 1980. So why do writers have long faces? And why are publishers worried? The answer can be found in the bestseller they all ignored: The Coming Currency Collapse and What to Do About It. Cheery statistics of last year can no longer hide the sober economic facts of 1982: higher costs, escalating book prices and dwindling profits. "I haven't seen times like this before," confesses William McCarthy, buyer for the 20-shop chain of Kroch's & Brentano's bookstores in the Chicago area. "The book business is being hit by everything at once: a soft economy, cost increases and an uncertain audience."

If the audience is uncertain, publishers are downright frantic. Only yesterday they could count on six-and seven-figure sales to paperback houses and thereby raise needed operating capital, fund new ventures and enrich writers' wallets. But Fat City is rapidly becoming as legendary as the Land of Oz. According to New York Publishing Consultant Leonard Shatzkin, author of the forthcoming analysis of U.S. publishing, In Cold Type, the times get leaner by the month: 1977 paperback-reprint rights, for example, "contributed approximately 60% of total subsidiary-rights income to publishers. That went down to 37% in 1980. I see it going down close to 0% in the next few years."

What went wrong? Inflation, principally--and poor planning for it. Printing and paper costs rose; prices were passed on to the consumer. But in a high-volume business, where the shelf life of a book is measured in days, the average $2.25 per paperback could no longer be considered an impulse-buying item. The result: of the 900 million paperbacks shipped last year, nearly one-third were unsold. The paperback recession was echoed in the diminishing rewards to writers. Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift brought $313,000 back in 1975, but The Dean's December earned about two-thirds of that sum this year, even though the author had become a Nobel laureate in the interim. E.L. Doctorow's Loon Lake (1980) got one-third of the $1.85 million paid for his Ragtime in 1975. Colleen McCullough's 1977 blockbuster, The Thorn Birds, sold for $1.9 million. But An Indecent Obsession (1981) managed much less. Watergate Conspirator John Ehrlichman and bestselling Feminist Author Betty Friedan recently shared the same fate: their books were withdrawn from paperback auction because the five-figure bids were insultingly low. There was only one bidder for Gael Greene's Doctor Love; and although Diana Trilling's Mrs. Harris went for $125,000, her publisher, William Jovanovich, says, "Two years ago, it would have brought over $200,000."

The cutbacks are just beginning. Says Louis Wolfe, president of Bantam, the largest U.S. paperback house: "We're paying more attention to what we pay up front and with good reason. We can't afford a lot of money for what might be a big book and then find out it isn't. We have to have a bottom-line profit, and we can no longer afford to keep some of the hard-cover publishing houses going." Shatzkin is less sanguine: "There will definitely be failures among the original trade publishers."

Some of those houses are already preparing for a siege by selling directly to customers: cookbooks in gourmet shops, tax guides in banks. Most have pared their lists dramatically to lower costs. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich has cut back from 110 titles in 1970 to 70 books this year. Says Jovanovich: "Nobody used to make money on first-time authors, but we considered that part of our business. Now, we can't do that." Even established writers are affected. Simon & Schuster, for instance, now retains the foreign-reprint rights--traditionally a low-register gift to the author--on 75% of its contracts. Not every writer is applying for food stamps, of course. John Irving's Hotel New Hampshire brought $2.25 million; Albert Goldman's Elvis nailed down $1 million, and Mario Puzo sold a "prequel"--an antecedent--to The Godfather story for about $2 million.

But more than a handful of winners are necessary to avert a full-scale depression in the book business. Some major corporations that backed publishing in the '60s and '70s, hoping for a big score, are pulling out. RCA sold Random House; CBS jettisoned Fawcett Books; textbook giant Scott, Foresman abandoned William Morrow. And the film studios, whose pictures often earned outsize profits for paperback tie-in editions, are equally cautious. A seven-figure property like Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife has yet to make it to the screen. Currently, the odds are against its ever getting to a sound stage. Says Willie Hunt, vice president of production at United Artists, "Everybody's trying to figure out what the 15-to 25-year-olds are going to see. You're not going to find that in manuscript form."

Still, the publishing business has endured crises before. The paperback revolution of the '50s was perceived as a threat to hardback publishing; so were television, outlandish contracts, school and library closings, and federal cutbacks. The business survived them all. And today it is moving, however slowly, toward a new reality--although the latest paper chase sounds like a fairy tale: the Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear deal. The term was coined to describe Tom Robbins' 1980 intermountain fantasy, Still Life with Woodpecker. The book was published simultaneously in a $12.95 hardcover (Papa) and a $6.95 quality paperback (Mama), with a $3.25 mass-market paper edition (Baby) that soon followed. The decent (and once profitable) interval between hard-and soft-cover editions may be a thing of the past. Traditionalists like Random House have begun issuing simultaneous clothbound and paperback editions. Nobody's Angel, by picaresque Novelist Thomas McGuane, is being issued with 5,000 Papas and 30,000 Mamas. Bantam, Ballantine and Pocket Books, three major mass-market houses, shortcut the hard-cover publishers with their own original titles. Jerzy Kosinski's just published Pinball is appearing as a Bantam Papa (5,000), Mama (150,000), with babies yet to be determined. Says Stuart Applebaum, director of publicity for Bantam: "For many people in their 20s and 30s, the quality trade paperback has become their hardback." Literary Agent Scott Meredith sees the flagging economy as the reason. Says he: "Few people today can walk into a store and casually buy ten books." Industry experts predict that by 1990 more than half of all books will originate in soft-cover--a situation that prevails in Europe today. And many of the hard-cover editions will be mere tokens, published in small amounts for libraries, for reviewers who shun paperbacks--and as a boost for authors' egos.

Those egos will have to shrink, along with authors' incomes, as paperback houses become a greater force in publishing. More and more often now, they depend on generic categories--romances (25% to 30% of all fiction sold), mysteries, historical sagas and scifi. According to Sociologist Walter Powell, co-author of Books, the Culture and Commerce of Publishing: "Fiction may no longer be part of the mass market. It looks very dismal for people who want to make a living writing novels."

But other futurists think the soft-cover business, in fact, may pick up the risks of publishing first novels, new nonfiction and, perhaps, poetry from the ailing old houses. Says Richard Snyder, president of Simon & Schuster: "The fact is, the mass-market publishers are making things more accessible, not less. There are books in homes that never had books before." And Bantam President Wolfe believes the worst of times is actually the best of times: "I can't stand this gloom and doom. This is an exciting and growing business. There is room for all types of publishers in all types of categories." Maybe, but that room seems to be rapidly filling up with paperbacks.

--ByJ.D. Reed. Reported by Janice C. Simpson/New York

With reporting by JANICE C. SIMPSON

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