“The times they are a-changin'” in the book world…
With apologies to Dylan (that phrase is justifiably part of American heritage now and probably international), I thought this would be a good title for an article about how publishing is changing in America and around the world. From readership to media and writers to retail, things are changing so fast that it’s even hard for people heavily involved in the business to keep up with things.
Readers have it good in general. With so many good books and so many good authors, in all fiction genres and non-fiction from how-to to memoirs, books for all ages and other demographics are being published. Given that even an avid reader maxes out at only 50 or so books per year, a single reader can’t hope to try them all. The only negative seems to be price—the traditional publishing establishment continues to expect readers to pay $10 or more, even for ebooks, but the indies, with most ebooks less than $5, solve most of that pricing problem.
Yet the number of readers is decreasing. If you’re on Goodreads, it looks like that number is huge, so my statement is a bit deductive and statistically flawed perhaps. I factor in the time people can spend on entertainment. People are generally working more and longer hours, so leisure time is decreasing. Yet the number of things they can do with that leisure time is increasing. Streaming video; computer games; YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and other internet websites; sports, whether active or passive; and so forth—these all use up free time. People have to prioritize and curling up with a good book is becoming less of a priority with the multitude of other leisure-time activities available.
What number of books is too many, given this situation? The number of new books published each year varies from half a million to a million, yet most of them sell less than 250 copies per book, partly due to decreasing readership and partly due to simple saturation even if the number of readers were increasing. Google estimates that about 130 million books exist in the world, but that has to be ramping up considerably each year. The Bowker number for new indie books was 450k+ in 2013 alone (that counts both pbooks and ebooks), but Bowker only counts books with ISBNs—many get by just fine with Amazon’s ASIN number that’s assigned to an Amazon-exclusive ebook.
Ebooks are to pbooks what DVDs were to VHS tapes, CDs to LPs, and cassette tapes to eight-tracks. Media preferences often send shock waves through an entertainment industry. There are always hangers-on, of course. Many still prefer that LP sound (I still have a collection of 200+ classical music LPs, mostly because the performances don’t exist on CD). Some books—those doorstop biographies or graphics-intensive textbooks—don’t work well as ebooks, but trade fiction is better on my Kindle than weighing down my bookshelves with pbooks. There is no denying that the ebook revolution went hand-in-hand with the indie writing revolution, though. Ebooks don’t cost much to produce, a savings traditional publishers are loathe to pass on to customers as they continue to push their costly pbooks (environmentally unfriendly hardbounds and trade paperbacks).
Writers have many choices nowadays too, but more and more they have less patience with the stultifying traditional publishing paradigm—not to mention the poor royalty structure and egregious contracts the traditional publishers offer. My personal experience is that after producing twenty-two books with considerable personal investment, that paradigm clearly still has positives as well as many negatives—I wouldn’t have incurred most of that investment. Of course, I probably wouldn’t have twenty-two books either. Still, right now the positives for going indie seem to win out over those for going traditional, especially if you’re focused on producing only a few books.
That number 250 is 500 for Amazon (Amazon books do better?)—I don’t understand the difference, but both numbers are sobering. Whether traditionally or indie published, most authors better keep their day jobs, because it’s hard to feed a family of four as a full-time writer these days. Your day-job might involve writing—agenting, free-lancing, ad copy, greeting cards, whatever—but something additional is generally needed so you can keep on writing. But that eats into your leisure time too, so it’s hard to keep on a schedule. Authors do it, but it’s not easy. One can argue it never was, but the rewards are diminishing because of all the above—too much competition for too few readers, basically. It’s true that anyone can publish a book nowadays. It’s not true that everyone will find readers.
The eight-hundred pound gorilla in book retail (now all kinds of retail) is Amazon. Most writers offer their works to the reading public on that internet retail site. As much as traditional publishers try to finagle an advantage (sometimes illegally), Amazon has been good for them as well. Of course, Jeff Bezos is standing that old bookbarn paradigm on its head. Because the B&Ns (and their competitors now out of business) are so intertwined with traditional publishing, their fates are intertwined too. B&Ns still do well in the New York City area because NYC is the mecca of traditional publishing, so they can program many events involving those traditional giants. In the burbs, I see the B&Ns empty for the most part, except for the coffee drinkers who frequent the ones who have coffee bars—nothing like reading some magazines for free while slurping your triple-mocha-caramel-whipped cream-high-caloried whatever from CoffeeSucks.
I think mom&pop bookstores do better. They can’t stock all the books a B&N has—all traditionally published and not long on the shelves—but they can and will offer a more personalized service. I prefer the ones featuring used books. My wife completed my collection of Greg Benford’s “Galactic Center” sci-fi series by visiting one in Sudbury, MA, and the Traveler Restaurant is a great resource for used books (good homecooking too)—it’s in Union, CT, with an easy exit off the Mass Pike (I-90). Browsing these old collections sends you down memory lane, you can talk with some interesting people, including the owners, and you can find old books to fill hours and hours of entertaining reading.
Alas, some mom&pops just don’t get it. You walk in and they try to push their choices on you; they won’t carry indies, not even pbooks, because they associate indies with the old vanity press concept (do they even know about Wool or The Martian?); and they’re loaded with classics and “literary novels,” those non-categorizable books that usually bore me to tears (all those old clunkers like Moby Dick your teachers made you read so you can be convinced you don’t like reading). I still like the idea of owning a bookstore that features mostly genre fiction and has a lot of used books—I gave myself a cameo in Silicon Slummin’…and Just Gettin’ By for that reason. It would be a place for gabbing about books more than selling them.
I see bookstores going the way of the dinosaurs—they’re certainly an endangered species. Yet, two of my favorite novels (some might even call them “literary”—what an insult!) feature bookstores: La Sombra del Viento (Shadow of the Wind, reviewed in these pages in 2008 in both Spanish and English) by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry (figured it doesn’t need any more reviews—it’s a bestseller, which is weird) by Gabrielle Zevin (Ms. Zevin actually has one character say pretty much what I said about Moby Dick above, by the way). One can almost say that a bookstore is the main character in each of these novels. The first takes place in Barcelona at the time Franco was coming to power. The second takes place on a fictional island off Cape Cod. Completely different stories except for showing how a bookstore can and should influence many lives. Of course, books are still written about the dinosaurs, so maybe there’s some hope.
Libraries are in trouble too. Many still can’t handle ebooks, and forget about gabbing about books there—some old harridan with a mustache who still thinks a library’s principal purpose is to archive will shush you and ban you for multiple offenses. You can talk more in the Sistine Chapel than these temples dedicated to storing knowledge and not sharing it. University libraries are often an exception, but their stock of genre fiction books is overwhelmed by all the academic tomes, many of them obsolete. Corporate libraries are usually much worse, an exception being the helpful librarians at the place where I used to work—they actually saw their role as getting what the reader needed, not so much archiving.
You can talk about books in book clubs, of course. The general paradigm is that the reading choice rotates among the members so that every person gets to select a book that all must read and discuss. I see that more as an AA therapy session. Books should be talked about, but I don’t want to talk about some choice foisted on me by a group. That paradigm is wrong. In A. J. Fikry, the clubs were seen more as a socializing vehicle where eating and drinking had priority. Again, I don’t want celery sticks loaded with peanut butter foisted on me. I want to curl up and read a book I choose and later delight in talking about it with someone who independently made the same choice. At least book clubs keep people reading, I suppose, but as leisure time decreases, their future is uncertain.
How will these changes shake out in the future? Will book readers and writers all disappear along with the industry that depends on them? Will ebooks completely take over as they incorporate multimedia elements (sound, sight, and odors)? Will the new technological paradigm be receiving a virtual reality interactive whatever via a wi-fi attachment directly into your brain that allows you to play a role in a fantasy created by your friendly neighborhood AI machine (that’s featured in the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” by the way)?
I’m expecting the chaos to continue—chaos in media, chaos in business plans, new genres created, old genres revisited and dying, online retailers duking it out with older retail outlets, and indies v. traditionally publishing authors fighting over a diminishing readership. Change is often painful for the people most involved in the change. One thing is for sure: it will happen faster than I expect. Whether that’s good or bad is debatable, of course.
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In libris libertas….
