Budget cuts, low advances, canceled releases, layoffs, early retirements, pressured resignations, consolidations, pay reductions, discontinued imprints. You name it, and trade publishers are cutting it.
Barnes & Noble, the country’s largest chain of bookstores, with 800 outlets, predicts a dismal holiday sales season. (I was in a B&N store on Saturday, a couple of weeks before Christmas, and while it was fairly busy, there was nowhere near the crowd I saw at the same time last year.) Borders, with 500 stores, has so far managed to survive serious threats to its business, but it, too, expects a slow gift-giving season. Even Bible sales are down.
Obviously, the downturn in the economy is affecting the book trade and large publishers, which, in many cases, are part of much larger corporations and conglomerates that are, themselves, on the skids. For small presses—those that publish just three or four new titles a year—and for authors who choose to self-publish, however, this may well prove to be a pretty good time. Why? Because the little guys have a far better idea of precisely who is going to buy their book(s). Big publishing houses gamble every time they bring a book to market. They send their sales representatives out to place their new releases in stores, but in a way they’re flying blind; they don’t really know whether the fresh list will entice retail shoppers to pick up the books and carry them to the cashier.
Many self-publishers and small presses, on the other hand, have the opportunity to define their lists more clearly and relate them directly to their market. They know who is likely to purchase them. If they don’t—if they haven’t figured that out before publication—then surely they won’t invest their limited resources in publishing their books. Small presses have the ability to be nimble and the luxury of waiting until the time is right for their books. Big publishers have to release two or three lists, each of a hundred or so new titles, every year in order to maintain their niche in the market. Their investment is huge, and they have to rely upon the general public to go to an online or brick-and-mortar bookstore and buy their books. Many small press books, on the other hand, are not even sold through bookstores; their publishers approach their customers directly.
When a big New York publisher pays an author an advance of hundreds of thousands of dollars, it must sell minimally about 75,000 copies of the author’s book in order to be successful—and it’s not really dead certain who its customers are for any particular title. Small presses have a more intimate relationship with their customers and can better control costs (print runs, price, targeted promotions, shipping, returns). Their return on investment may be lower in dollars but higher in percentage of profit. Example: Doubleday, part of Random House, took a chance on first-time author Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle and paid him a $1.25 million advance. Even though the book was very well received critically, Doubleday, unfortunately, hasn’t yet recouped its advance—fewer than 40,000 copies sold, as reported by Nielson BookScan. Do the math: At a list price of $25.95, sales fell several thousand dollars short of expectations.