A Bailout for Publishing? Seriously?

by Sandra Parshall

James Patterson is right when he complains that all the talk about publishing these days is negative, focused on the industry’s decline without offering any solutions. But is he really proposing a government bailout?

Last week Patterson placed an ad in Kirkus Reviews and The New York Times Book Review, and on both covers of Publishers Weekly, asking “Who will save our books? Our bookstores? Our libraries?” The ad read in part: "The Federal Government has stepped in to save banks, and the automobile industry, but where are they on the important subject of books? Why are there no impassioned editorials in influential newspapers or magazines?"

The four-page PW ad lists 46 novels and nonfiction books under these questions:
“What will happen to American literature?”
“Who will publish important books like these?”
“Who will help save America’s books?”
“Who will mentor and encourage our authors in the future?”
“Who will recommend books like these to the American public?”

Most of the fiction titles he lists as representative of America’s best are literary novels or modern classics by Hemingway, Faulkner, Harper Lee, etc., but he also includes books by Thomas Harris and James M. Cain.

The world’s bestselling thriller writer may not produce books that could be called “literature” but he is a passionate advocate of reading who has donated thousands of books to U.S. troops stationed abroad, founded a program that encourages children to read, and given time and money to literacy programs. He told PW in an interview that he hoped his ads would turn the discussion of publishing’s survival in a more practical direction. Currently, he said, publishers are in a “Woe is me” rut and the media produce the same “publishing is in trouble” story over and over. He urged publishers to “Get in attack mode.”

Exactly where that attack would be aimed is unclear. PW senior writer Andrew Albanese said in response to Patterson’s ads that “The book is changing, for sure. And reading is under pressure,” but whether “the book” is endangered is debatable.

Patterson’s ad doesn’t mention the phenomenal rise of the e-book, although it’s impossible to discuss traditional publishing’s decline without naming the main cause of it. The figures tell the obvious story: as digital sales continue to rise, print sales continue to drop. But there’s a lot more to it than simple sales numbers.

Some writers are so disgusted with traditional publishing that they would love to drive a stake through its heart, and they think all writers should jump at the chance to take control and self-publish. However, we’re seeing more and more successful self-published writers accepting offers from traditional imprints and happily turning over all the grunt work of publishing to professional editors and marketing departments. Many traditionally published writers might dabble in self-publishing but would never give up the very real advantages of bringing out their books the old-fashioned way. As long as traditional publishing attracts talented writers, including those who start by self-publishing, it will stay alive.

Everybody seems to agree on one thing, though: traditional publishing has to change, perhaps drastically, and adapt to the new realities of the book world. Unfortunately, nobody appears to know how it should change. Merely adding digital departments to process e-books doesn’t look like the answer, when so many other aspects of the business are outdated and writers and readers alike are unhappy with everything from pricing to marketing to the often poor quality of the product.

Will the federal government step in and bail out publishing? Not likely. Publishing is a comparatively small industry. If it failed completely, it wouldn’t bring down the economy, and the economic impact is all Congress cares about. However, local communities and states have a duty to keep public libraries open and provide funding to pay staff and keep both print and digital collections up to date. That is a use of public money that benefits everyone, but library funds are among the first to be cut when communities are faced with deficits.

The good news is the “the book” is alive and well. It's not always in the form of pages between two covers, but it isn’t about to vanish. Many owners of e-readers report that they are reading more than ever because digital books are less expensive than print and can be purchased in seconds. Book discussion communities are thriving online, and face-to-face book clubs are more popular than ever. Readers will find the books they like, regardless of how they're published. Patterson asks: Who will recommend good books to the public? The answer: Other readers will. Favorable word of mouth has always been the best way to sell a book.

Avid readers and book-buyers have never been in the majority – writers realize that the market for our products is small compared to that for pop songs or action movies – but they are passionate about the written word. As long as readers love to read and writers feel compelled to write, “the book” – in whatever form it might take – will live on.

Books We Love, Books We Recommend

Elizabeth Zelvin

The Malice Domestic convention represents the biggest gathering of avid mystery readers (excluding Bouchercon as drawing lovers of crime fiction and thrillers as well). Malicegoers have a fanatical loyalty to their favorite authors and series characters and an encyclopedic knowledge of the books they’re read (and in many cases, reread over and over). It’s not guaranteed that attendees will have conversations about these books, apart from those of authors who are present and those nominated for the Agatha awards (or the Edgars, which MWA announces just as Malice begins). But it does happen. I had two such conversations during this year’s Malice: one with the old friend with whom I stayed (located conveniently two and a half miles down the road from the convention hotel in Bethesda, MD) and the other with the gentleman who sat on my left during the Agathas banquet, Steve Steinbock, recently appointed book reviewer for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

My friend and her husband are mystery readers, but they aren’t connected to the mystery community, so I had the fun of recommending writers they didn’t know, once they’d told me enough about their tastes to get a sense of whose books they might like. They read James Patterson but find his work “a little too formulaic” and his characters lacking in depth. (They knew nothing of Patterson’s team approach to writing.) They enjoy Robert B. Parker because the formula is redeemed by witty dialogue and characters they have become attached to. (They were surprised to hear that many readers don’t like Susan Silverman.) They don’t mind the gore in Jonathan Kellerman’s books, but think John Sandford goes too far. They had reservations about Linda Fairstein on the counts of characterization and excessive detail in the passages on police procedure.

Between the dealers’ room at Malice and the bag full of books given out to attendees, I was able to give my hosts books I knew they would enjoy along with the fun of making recommendations. Felony & Mayhem Press was selling some of my very favorite traditionals: I bought Janet Neel’s Death’s Bright Angel for them—a police procedural with sophisticated and intelligent characters the reader falls in love with—and Peter Dickinson’s Sleep and His Brother, which I had recently been thinking of and wishing I could reread, for myself. The husband is interested in the World War II era, so he got two excellent books from the goodie bag that I’ve already read: James R. Benn’s Billy Boyle and Charles Todd’s The Red Door. I can’t wait to send my friend a list of series authors she can put on her Kindle, including Margaret Maron, Laurie R. King, and Donna Leon, all of whom I’m sure she’ll love. I think the husband will enjoy Jan Burke, Reginald Hill, and Cynthia Harrod-Eagles.

Steve Steinbock, whom I first met in the bar at Bouchercon a couple of years ago, is a kindred spirit who loves many of the same books I do. He agreed with (or at least let me rant on about) my theory that the middle ground between the heirs of Agatha Christie and the heirs of Raymond Chandler is occupied by the heirs of Dorothy L. Sayers, who introduced the character-driven novel to mysteries of the Golden Age. This goes largely unacknowledged in the perennial cozy vs hardboiled debate, although imho the descendants of Sayers include some of the most extraordinary writers of traditional mysteries, including Maron, King, Hill, and Julia Spencer-Fleming, as well as (arguably) Laura Lippman and S.J. Rozan (usually considered crime fiction writers) and Nancy Pickard and Charlaine Harris (usually considered cozy writers). Steve and I had a grand time talking about Manning Coles’s Tommy Hambledon spy novels. I was able to recommend to him a writer he didn’t know, Michael Gruber, whose The Book of Air and Shadows I consider the perfect thriller (plot, characterization, listen-to-this language, and even humor) as well as a brilliant World War II era suspense novel he didn’t know, the late Ariana Franklin’s City of Shadows. I also recommended Peter Dickinson's superb King and Joker, a refreshing alternative-history view of British royalty (and a propos as the royal wedding competed with Malice itself).

What mysteries do you love? Which authors do you recommend?

James Patterson, Writer

Elizabeth Zelvin

James Patterson’s books are everywhere. It’s said that one out of every seventeen books sold in America for the past three years has been a Patterson book. As the person who introduced him as the speaker at the last meeting of Mystery Writers of America’s New York chapter said, his sales equal those of Stephen King, John Grisham, and Dan Brown combined.
The only apparent catch in Patterson’s candidacy for the title of most successful writer is the fact that other writers collaborate on many of his books. So is Patterson really a writer? After hearing him speak about his process, I say yes.

First, he writes every day, often all day. He still gets up at 5 AM to do it, as he did when he had a high-level day job at a major advertising agency. Second, he’s an Edgar winner, taking Best First Novel in 1977 at the age of 26. Third, after his coauthor on any book has made his or her contribution by writing to his outline, Patterson himself does draft after draft—as many as seven—reworking it so each scene does exactly what he wants it to, without further reference to the collaborator. I call that writing.

As Patterson pointed out, team writing is not a new concept. Screenwriters do it, and so do advertising copywriters. There’s storytelling, and then there’s craft. (He said it, and I agree: I’m pretty sure I’ve blogged about storytelling, craft, and characterization as the “three-legged stool” that supports a novel.) Patterson is a prolific and gifted storyteller. It’s not that he has no talent for craft (“Edgar!” he reminded us with a smile), but he admits he’s less interested in craft than in storytelling. He chooses collaborators whom he considers better stylists than he is. It doesn’t stop him from rewriting dialogue and all the rest over and over until he feels he’s got it right.

Patterson is a big advocate for getting kids to read. He has a website, Read Kiddo Read, that steers parents, teachers, and librarians to books that he believes are such good reads that kids will love them and want more, eventually becoming readers for life. When asked what he thinks about the future of e-readers, he said, “It’s a done deal.” He went on to say that it doesn’t matter in what form readers read their books, but that the shift to reading on screen leaves him deeply concerned about the future of bookstores.

One might think that Patterson’s publishers pour a fortune into promoting his books. Not so. He does all the promotion himself. He works with an agency, but he’s the client and has the control as well as footing the bill. That way, he can make sure he gets it right. He said he probably loses money on a book by book basis, but overall, it’s worth it.

Patterson made it clear that he’s not taking any shortcuts or cynically writing to the market. Like the rest of us, on every book, he’s doing the best he can.

Readers in a Rut

Sandra Parshall

“I stopped enjoying her books years ago, but I still buy them and read them.”

“His last half-dozen books have been poorly written and boring – but I can’t seem to stop myself from buying them, even though I know I’m going to hate them.”

How many times have you heard people say this sort of thing? How many times have you seen similar statements posted on DorothyL? How many times have you admitted to buying books by authors you should have given up on years ago?

I’m trying to understand why readers buy, and read, then complain about books they know in advance they won’t like. Do they have such ecstatic memories of an author’s first few good books that they keep hoping she or he will suddenly start writing well again when all the evidence points to a permanent decline? Any author can be forgiven one weak book – no one is consistently brilliant, after all – but I have so little time to read that a writer who disappoints me repeatedly has to do something spectacular to win me back. I feel very much alone in taking this hard line, though.

If you doubt that American readers are creatures of habit, just take a look at last year’s overall bestsellers list, as reported in a recent issue of Publishers Weekly. Among the top six books of the year – those that sold more than a million copies each – is only one by a new author: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski, which came in second with 1.3 million copies sold even though it wasn’t published until September of 2008. The other books at the top are (1) The Appeal by John Grisham, (3) The Host by Stephanie Meyer, which is still near the top of the bestseller lists after 48 weeks, (4) Cross Country by James Patterson, (5) The Lucky One by Nicholas Sparks, and (6) Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich.

Moving down the list, to books that sold more than 600,000 but fewer than a million copies last year, we find (7) Christmas Sweater, a first novel by conservative media personality Glenn Beck, who was already a known quantity because of his books of opinion on social issues; (8) Scarpetta by Patricia Cornwell; (9) Your Heart Belongs to Me by Dean Koontz; (10) Plum Lucky by (again) Janet Evanovich; (11) 7th Heaven by (again) James Patterson; (12) Sail by (again!) James Patterson; (13) A Good Woman by Danielle Steele; (14) Divine Justice by David Baldacci; and (15) The Gate House by Nelson DeMille.

One new writer in the entire lot -- and Wroblewski was blessed with Oprah’s imprimatur, which drove sales of Edgar Sawtelle.

A total of 155 novels sold more than 100,000 hardcover copies each last year. Of those, four were by James Patterson, three by Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb, four by Iris Johansen, three by Danielle Steele. The following authors all had two bestselling hardcovers each in 2008: Janet Evanovich, Patricia Cornwell, Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark (they co-authored one book), Dean Koontz, David Baldacci, Laurell K. Hamilton, Jonathan Kellerman, Stephen King, John Sandford, Clive Cussler, Debbie Macomber, Stuart Woods, Robert Parker, Jeffery Deaver, and Jack Higgins. Twenty-one authors wrote 47 of the 155 novels that sold more than 100,000 copies.

In paperback, these same authors sold even more copies of more novels, some of them reprints of books originally published years ago. Roberts/Robb had the most paperback bestsellers in 2008 – nine in mass market pb and six in trade pb. James Patterson had a total of nine.

Almost all of the other books on both hardcover and paperback lists were written by long-established authors.

I’m not saying these people produce bad books, or that their fans are automatons who buy blindly even when they don’t anticipate enjoying the novels they purchase. All of the top-selling writers have legions of devoted fans who love every word they write. I realize that the millions of books they sell are helping their publishers stay in business. But the sameness of the names at the top of the bestsellers list, year after year after year, does suggest that many readers lack a sense of adventure and would rather buy a book with a familiar name on it, whether it’s a good book or not, than try something new. Publishers know that, and count on it when they put out multiple books by the same writers each year.

In addition to Wroblewksi, one other newcomer stood out last year: Brunonia Barry, whose The Lace Reader sold more than 160,000 copies. I refuse to believe that only two new writers published novels last year that were good enough to engage the minds and hearts of a broad range of readers. I think a lot of wonderful books fail to sell in large numbers because the publishers don’t promote them and habit-bound readers are reluctant to spend money on books by writers with unfamiliar names. Yet those same readers will automatically buy a familiar writer’s book – even when they expect it to disappoint them.

Will somebody please explain this quirk of human nature to me? I am sincerely baffled.

Do you buy books by writers you no longer enjoy? Why do you do it? What would it take to persuade you to spend your money instead on a new author’s book? Have you discovered any new authors in the last couple of years whose books are now on your automatic-buy list?