No, the problems in the business are actually not at the highest and lowest ends of the risk spectrum; the biggest books are regularly the most profitable, and the smallest ones have significant upside. The problem is with everything in between: the books which publishers spend between a hundred thousand and a million dollars to acquire, followed by hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing and distribution. This is the dangerous middle, the place where substantial bets are made on books with lots of potential but no guarantees.'Cause, to me, anything you spend more than $100,000 on had better be a lead title. Maybe that's just my limited, genre-warped perspective...
Friday, December 05, 2008
A Question for Publishing People
Does this description -- from Bob Miller, as quoted in the New Yorker's "Book Bench" blog -- sound like "middle" to you?
6 comments:
I think Bob Miller is exactly right. Very rarely does a publisher pay over $1M for some piece of something that they've purchased in auction fever. The rare exceptions to that, like Tina Fey's book in the aftermath of the Palin stuff that I do think is likely very ludicrous, are very well promoted, but there are very few of those. No, most of the $1M books are going to be purchased by authors who have very good track records with a decent chance of making the money back. Any small fortune you might pay for Stephen King or John Grisham is probably worth it.
But yes, below that level are all of the books where you've paid more than the usual first novel money for a first novel that totally doesn't work, or where you've gotten just a little ahead of the market for the author who sells 20K in hardcover, and you have a great idea on building to 30K or 50K, only you end up at 10K or 15K instead, and even worse that was the first book in a 3-book deal. You can lose six figures in a jiffy doing that, but the odds of a 7-figure bath are much smaller.
The idea that a publisher considers books bought for $100,000 - $1,000,000 as the "middle" is ludicrous. I've been in publishing and following the biz for over 35 years(having started in book publishing and moved into magazine publishing) as an editor and "author" ie, editing anthologies and this attitude is what has been killing book publishing for the last two decades.
Brillig: I can't speak for any other houses -- heck, I can't speak for Wiley [1], since we're very atomically organized -- but I'd say that any book that you spend an appreciable fraction of a million dollars needs to have a plan nailed down before the bid is made.
Miller's comments makes it sound like houses just throw out hundreds of thousands of dollars on books that they're not sure how to sell -- and that might indeed be true, but it's a bad idea. It implies that they've been spending far too much for far too long, and says something about why so many literary first novelists just disappear without a trace.
Gambles should be for much less money -- maybe $50,000, if that. (Though I do expect that agents will tend to disagree with me.)
[1] I should also note that I can't speak for Wiley, full stop, in any case.
I want to be in that middle. Can someone direct me?
LOL, the mid-list is usually made of books in the $20,000-250,000 advance range. I know the end point sounds high, and those are lead titles, but sometimes they are the B and C slot lead titles, the lower-rung and category bestsellers in fiction, and the niche sellers for their different categories in non-fiction. But I have heard publishing execs talk about the middle as the $100K-500K range before, and they can take a bath on those because the advance is high and there is marketing done on them, but they might not get to the next sales level. So from an accounting perspective, that may seem to be the middle to some, while five figure advances are the start-up authors building audiences. Essentially, the six figure babies are the bestsellers or almost bestsellers who aren't, to their mind, performing well enough.
you already know i stand on the far opposite side of this question...
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