June 2011 Editorial

Winds of Change

    Well, Lake Champlain is flooding in upstate New York, and

we are happy that the Dragon Press headquarters in Westport is

on a bluff. The publishing industry is suddenly suffering from a

cutback in mass market orders in the last month, not entirely the

result of the fall of Borders, and not exactly the result of increased

ebook sales. It appears that the major distribution channels decided

in near-unison to decrease their initial orders on paperbacks to

cover a four-week supply rather than a six-week supply, or to buy to

net—which means if the last book by an author sold 40,000 copies

out of 80,000 distributed, this time the stores only buy 40,000;

and sometime both happen at once, so that if, of those 40,000

sold, only 30,000 sold in the first four weeks, they’re buying only

30,000 this time. You can see that this would seriously diminish

the initial print run on every title. All the numbers I have used are

theoretical, but they show the forces at play. This kind of group

decision steamroller happens from time to time in publishing, and

it is never pleasant.

    And what happens if the last sale was only 15,000 copies?

Well, then the title falls below the baseline profitability necessary

to publish it at all on first release, and the publisher has to cancel

the mass market edition, choose to publish it at a loss, or gamble

that there will be good sales and a nearly immediate reprint that

will carry the book up to profitability soon. But the economies of

scale that used to apply to mass print runs, lowering the unit cost

per book, dwindle even further than they already have in the last

decade. It is hard to imagine, then, that the same number of mass

market paperbacks will be published this month in 2012 as are

released this month in 2011. Everyone gets hurt in the pocketbook:

writers, publishers, distributors, booksellers. The only question is

who gets hurt least, and that’s not an easy answer now, though it

will be perfectly clear later.

    What is clear now is that ebook sales are not making up half

the difference in lost mass market sales, or gains and losses in

hardcover sales (hardcovers have different issues). Taking into

account the money already lost by the industry to bankruptcies

this year, it looks bad for profit at any company this year.

Personally, I am hoping that book sales will increase just a bit in

hardcover and trade paperback, and a lot in ebooks. Otherwise,

it will be a really cold winter for publishing come the end of

December 2011.

    Now that some of the bad news is out of the way: Kathryn

and I had a great time at Ad Astra in Toronto in April (pictures

on page 3). It appears that the season of head and chest colds is

about over, and there has been no snow in more than three weeks,

although we have had some heavy April showers. We feel sorry for

our friends in the American South and Midwest whose storms and

floods are much worse than ours, after the heaviest snowfall on

record in North America this winter (I am told). But it looks as if

we will have many spring flowers, already starting to appear, and

then summer. We look forward to the conventions of summer and

to the continued flowering of NYRSF *

—David G. Hartwell

& the editors

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A PDF copy of the NYRSF issue in which this editorial first appeared is available for purchase at Weightless Books.