Houghton Mifflin, Tolkien’s own publisher, froze acquisitions and laid off a bunch of people. This means they’re not buying any new manuscripts. It’s chilling, all right.
Borders Booksellers, the second-largest chain in the country, is undergoing a ‘restructuring’. Meaning, most likely, closed stores, lost jobs, and less selection at remaining stores.
Just last week, yet another phony ‘memoir’ was exposed-after a ringing endorsement from Oprah Winfrey and a movie deal. Herman Rosenblat’s touching story of two children helping each other survive to Holocaust, only to meet on a blind date years later, turned out to be a total fabrication. I think that’s three (or is it four?) fake memoirs in the past year. No industry needs that kind of black eye.
So, what’s to blame for all of this? The industry itself, of course.
Some time ago, I’m guessing the late seventies or early eighties, publishing decided to adopt the Hollywood model; acquire product that will move fast, build franchises/series/brand names (I’m always suspicious of a book whose author gets a bigger font size than the title). Work for the quick turnaround. Occasionally publish a smaller, ‘prestige’ book to let people know you still care about good writing.
I suppose this worked for a while, but in the end it was doomed to crash and burn. The reason is simple: Books are not movies.
True, both (or good ones, at least) can take you to other worlds, engage your heart and mind, make you think, make you cry. But the experience is different. Put five hundred people in front of a screen and run the flick, they’ll get everything at the same time, the dialog, that fiery explosion, that thrilling sunset. Give the same people a book, and very likely none of them will be on the same paragraph at the same instant. Some people read more slowly, some like to go back and reread little passages just because the writing stirred them, or maybe they missed some little bit and need to refresh.
But publishers got greedy. They wanted the quick turnaround and they began super-hyping star authors at the expense of lesser-knowns. When Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince was published in 2005, Scholastic spent eight million dollars on promotion. Never mind that the book promoted itself, never mind that Scholastic must have had dozens of new authors whose work needed the boost. But these days most of the big houses leave new authors on their own when it comes to marketing, which makes one wonder why they picked up the book in the first place.
Now they’re in trouble, and we’ll all lose because of it. We lose because new books that don’t ‘fit the profile’ won’t get published, (Twelve years ago, twenty publishers rejected Cold Mountain. Would anyone pick it up under today’s conditions?) . We lose because more books will go out of print, and because the houses that survive will publish more hum-drum retreads in the hope that they'll sell.
This probably isn't as dire is it looks. This is a shaking-out rather than the apocalypse. The world is still full of people who love to read, and they will demand good books. But shakings-out can be uncomfortable, even traumatic. A lot of people will lose their jobs and a lot of imprints will disappear. It will be interesting to see who survives.
I think the best outcome would be the death of the huge publishing conglomerates and the return of smaller houses that are truly independent. Even now, the few smaller publishers that remain are putting out better work than the biggies (on the whole at least). On-line publishing and self-publishing will also fill the gap. I think that in five years, the industry will look very different.
Let's see if we can all hang on.
Check out this article from The Nation, where Mr. Engelhardt draws comparisons to what's happening in publishing to the mess in other industries.
www.thenation.com/doc/20090105/engelhardt
