Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
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
A PDF copy of the NYRSF issue in which this editorial first appeared is available for purchase at Weightless Books.