The book publishers combined publish at least ninety percent of the stories that have first appeared in the magazines in one form or another. It is a very rare novel that manages to appear in a magazine and yet avoids coming out as a book, and the shorter pieces are also almost always given book publication either in anthologies or as one-author collections. In addition, the book publishers bring out a much larger volume of new work, principally in the form of novels. The four principal companies specializing in science fiction books—Ballantine, Doubleday, Ace, and DAW Books—aggregate more than six million words of first-book publication a year, probably two-thirds of which has been written especially for them. Smaller publishers, in the aggregate, add another million words or more.
In all, there are at least ten to twelve million words of new adult science fiction appearing each year in the United States. If one counts juveniles and such peripheral books as Fail-Safe or The Andromeda Strain, the total may exceed fifteen million words.
As was true during the magazine boom of the mid-1950s, there may be a quality-control problem here: there do not appear to be enough good stories being written to fill all those blank pages. Certainly there are a lot of bad books being published. But there are also a good many excellent ones, and every year a few which are superb; and at least as of this writing the industry appears healthy.
Although hard-cover and paperback publishers compete for the same writers and the same stories, and there is not much to choose between them in the quality of what they publish, there are significant differences between the two fields.
To a large degree, the hard-cover publishers are parasitic on the paperbacks. Few hard-cover science fiction publishers would find their lines profitable if they could not count on selling most of the books they publish to paperback houses for reprint; and they share in the income received from this source with the author. (Usually fifty-fifty, although more and more a few writers have been able to get a better percentage split.)
A typical hard-cover science fiction book brings its author a $2,000 advance against royalties, sells for $4.95 or so retail, earns him therefore not quite 50c on each copy sold, and therefore must sell four thousand copies to pay back his advance. Typically, four thousand is roughly what most sf books do sell. This same four-thousand-copy sale is, again roughly, just about enough to cover the publisher's payment to the author, cost of printing and paper, payrolls, office rent, overhead, advertising expense (if any), free lunches for the agents, and general hidden costs of all kinds. If either writer or publisher want more than this bare-bones existence, they have to look toward additional sales of some kind.
The basic sources of additional sales are: book club; foreign and translation editions; and paperbound book reprint.
Book clubs have not been greatly interested in science fiction (although Doubleday has maintained a specialized outlet, called the Science Fiction Book Club, which distributes a dozen or more titles a year successfully enough). The major clubs, however, have used almost no science fiction.
Foreign and translation sales are much more common. At least half the sf books published in the United States do in fact ultimately come out again in at least one other country. Many of them do so over and over again. (The most successful science fiction book whose history I know well, The Space Merchants, has been translated into about forty languages, and in some countries has had six or eight separate editions over a period of twenty years.) Although the revenue from a single foreign sale is seldom as much as American publication, and may indeed be as little as fifty or one hundred dollars for the right to publish in one of the smaller countries, in the aggregate it can run to as much as the earnings from the American edition or more. This income the original American book publishers would generally like to share, to the extent of twenty-five percent or so.
The biggest source of dependable subsidiary rights income, for both writers and hard-cover publishers, is the American paperback reprint. A representative advance for a title is in the fifteen-hundred- to two-thousand-dollar range. But prices of five thousand, ten thousand dollars, and more are not uncommon, and some isolated titles have gone much higher. As far as they are able, the hardcover publishers try to keep fifty percent of that sum. For most of the books they publish, the thousand dollars or so that is their share from the paperback sale, plus the additional several hundred or thousand dollars from other subsidiary sales (less the cost of maintaining a subsidiary rights department to make the sales for them in the first place, and agents' fees and so on where they exist), constitutes just about their entire profit on publishing the book.
Of course, the hard-cover publishers would like to make money on actually selling copies of the book itself, too. Their chance of doing so on the first printing of thirty-five hundred or five thousand copies is not very good, but if that sells out in a reasonable time they may well go back for additional printings.
This seems a simple thing to do, but in practice it doesn't happen as often as one would think. It is partly a matter of the velocity of sale—a book that the publisher can expect to sell at the rate of one thousand copies a year for two years may seem to him worth keeping in stock, while one that might sell three hundred fifty copies a year for ten years isn't. Hard-cover books are sold to bookstores by salesmen, before the bookstores sell them to the customers. The salesman for any one publishing company can be expected to keep just so many titles in mind. His time with any buyer is limited, and so the book that will sell over a period of years, but not very much in any one year, tends to get forgotten. (This is even more true in paperback publishing, and is why some of the famous sf titles that schools and individuals would happily go on buying year after year are often allowed to go out of print.)
Twice a year the hard-cover publishers count up the number of copies they have sold, multiply it by the royalty due the author on each copy (generally ten percent of the retail price on the first five thousand copies, up to fifteen percent thereafter), and send him a check for his earnings. If the book is selling reasonably rapidly, they will try to keep it in print.
If the book is a juvenile, they are often successful, partly because juveniles are blessed with a new audience of potential customers growing into the book-buying range every year, and partly because juveniles are not as frequently reprinted in paperback form.
Adult science fiction is not as likely to stay in print. (You may find it difficult to distinguish "adult" from "juvenile" sf, but the trade has no trouble—the books are marked one way or the other.) The publishers are eager to sell the paperback rights for a quick cash income. And once the book is available in paperback at 95c they consider the chance of selling further hardcover copies at $4.95 to be too low to justify keeping the book alive.
The paperback publishers operate in much the same way, but with a few important differences.
To begin with, they do not have the prospect of a paperbound reprint sale to sweeten their profits. They are the paperback reprinters. So the bulk of their income they must earn by selling actual physical books to actual real customers—not even to libraries or institutions (which find paperbacks too fragile to circulate very efficiently), but to individual readers.
There is also a fundamental difference in the way sales are counted and royalties are paid. Your hardcover book is printed, and the publisher's salesmen go out to sell it. Every time they sell a copy they report it, and that sale gets added into your royalty statement so that, half-year by half-year, each statement should show at least a trickle of additional sales to the author. The additional sales may be small, and may even be wiped out by returns of unsold books for credit; but typically there will be a pattern of continuing sales and earnings for some time.
Paperback books, on the other hand, are "sold" outright as soon as they come off the press. An edition of one hundred thousand copies of a new science fiction paperback title is not placed on sale, it is simply shipped out directly from the printing plant, in batches of a few hundred or a thousand copies each
(along with similar batches of every other book the publisher is bringing out that month), allocated to the various wholesalers all over the country who have agreed to accept such shipments from the publisher's national distributor.
So if you were to see the publishers' sales figures on your paperbound book the week after publication, you would be delighted to find that all one hundred thousand copies were "sold." Unfortunately, they do not stay sold. Within weeks, certainly within a month or two, the wholesalers begin to return the copies they do not expect to sell. Sometimes they will send back the whole book. More often they simply strip the covers off and return them for credit, destroying the rest of the book. (Much inventive technology has gone into designing machines which have no function but so to mutilate coverless paper-bound books and magazines that they cannot be read!)
So a month after publication your publisher's records show you have sold only ninety thousand copies. Two months after publication, eighty thousand. And so on. By the time the cycle is complete (it takes about six months to reach the point where you can really feel secure in estimating how many copies will be returned, and you can still be surprised unpleasantly for another year), you find you have sold only forty thousand to sixty thousand copies.
A lot of writers do not understand this, and so they think something is funny when they get a July royalty statement that shows they have sold fewer copies than the January statement showed—but those are the facts of life.
An ugly aspect of the practice of returning paperback books' covers for full refund has turned up in recent years. Some underground genius (the word is that the Mafia has something to do with it) decided that as long as you could sell a single sheet of paper—the stripped-off cover—back to publishers for half a dollar or so, it would be profitable to print up covers yourself and, with the connivance of "legitimate" wholesalers, mail them in for a neat piece of change.
No one knows exactly how many of these counterfeit covers have been returned, but the number is undoubtedly in the millions. This is very unpleasant to paperback publishers, representing an out-ofpocket loss of perhaps ten thousand dollars or more on a single title. It is even worse for the writer, partly because these "returns" are deducted from his royalty earnings, but even more because they give a very false picture of the sale of his book and therefore have an effect on future editions as well. The publishers are trying all sorts of stratagems to to make their covers uncounterfeitable, and these work reasonably well, but of course add to the costs and annoyances of publishing.
If a paperback book does sell well, it is not impossible for the publisher to notice this fact and go back to press for more copies almost at once. It is, however, extremely unlikely, at least on the average sf book. Big blockbusting best sellers are watched carefully and great efforts are made to keep them in print, but this process is expensive. When the total expectancy of sale is only average, it is cheaper and simpler for the publisher to wait until the whole fifteen-month or eighteen-month cycle of release and returns is complete, and then to take the final sales figure as gospel. By then so much time has passed that the simplest way for the publisher to capitalize on the success of the book is to put a new cover on it and reissue it as though it were a brand-new title. (He might even want to change the title of it so as to confuse the customers into ordering again, as well as the wholesalers, but he can't because that has become against the law.)
Since by the time that happens the publisher is committed to a bunch of new titles, and since he may well feel that so much time has passed that the sales figures no longer represent the current market, there is an excellent chance that he will prefer to forget the whole thing.
So much for science fiction publishing as it is.
What of the future?
When I was an Air Force weatherman we were taught to plot isobars and sample the atmosphere with radiosondes and to make use of Bjerknes's air mass theory and the adiabatic lapse rate in order to predict what the weather was going to be; but most of the forecasts that we issued were made on the basis of what is sometimes called "The Persistence Theory of Meteorology." That is, you look out the window. If it is raining, you allow as how it will go on raining for a while. If it isn't, you predict that it won't.
This is not a bad way of predicting the close-range future of anything, and it is very likely the best way to look into the next few years of publishing. Large masses have a certain inertia; they change, but they seldom change rapidly. And publishing practices have immense inertia.
So it is likely that for the immediate future things will not change drastically. The magazines will remain in trouble. The hard-cover publishers will continue to live in large part off reprints. The paperback publishers will continue to suffer from fifty percent wastage of everything they print, and from slow, unreliable sales figures.
Yet things could change. It might only take one brilliant new editor coming along to change the shape of sf magazine publishing. If someone could find a new approach he might well build a loyal readership that would repeal the market laws and revivify the whole field, in spite of climbing costs and declining advertising revenues.
In book publishing, there is a very good chance of a useful new kind of sf book publishing emerging, intermediate between the hard-cover lines and the mass-market paperbacks.
There is a particular need for some mechanism that will permit a basic backlist of one hundred or so "classic" science fiction titles to remain in print year after year, if only so that the five hundred or so science fiction courses which are currently being given in the nation's colleges and high schools can order them for their students. This kind of publication is what is called the "quality paperback." These are physically a little bigger than the Ballantine or Ace mass-market books. They are usually printed on better paper, and their covers are typically less buckeye. Their editions are substantially smaller—ten thousand or twenty-five thousand instead of one hundred thousand. And they cost about twice as much as the mass-market books.
Their advantage is that each title can be stocked and sold on its own merits, as the titles on a mass-market list cannot. Instead of suffering a wastage of fifty percent on copies stripped and pulped, over a period of time each printing should approach a one hundred percent sale. There are technical and commercial problems involved that will take some solving, but the need and the market are there; it is probable that this will happen in some form in the fairly near future.
Further in the future there is an excellent (but not very immediate) prospect of "custom" publication.
This is a proposal made principally by a man named Eugene Leonard, who is in the business of designing systems approaches to communications problems. His notion is that when you want a book you pick up your telephone and dial in an order, whereupon your parlor teleduplicating machine starts printing a copy up for you. A system involving a screen like a closed-circuit TV set, plus a duplicating machine like a Xerox, could run off a three-hundred-page novel for you in a few minutes, just before duplicating your morning newspaper and after bringing you your morning mail. Clearly this would be more expensive per copy produced than conventional printing and binding, but it could amount to not much more than a penny a page to duplicate. And there would be zero wastage, since the copy of the book would not exist until you ordered it.
Microfilm and microfiche are interesting possibilities on the horizon. They have been on the horizon for so many years now that most people in publishing have begun to turn off their brains to the potential here, but just in the past few months some new developments have come along. There exists a new process which involves shrinking the size of each individual letter on a page, and printing other letters in the spaces thus left free, so that a single piece of film contains sixty-four or more pages of copy. A cheap and portable reading machine (probably smaller than a dispatch case and costing something like five dollars) separates out the characters that belong to any single page and reenlarges them so you can read them; so that you can sit in the bus
with a few slides and a viewer and read a novel on the way to work. Once enough people have the viewers it will not be hard to manufacture and market microfilms. They would be substantially cheaper than regular books, and would have the further advantage of using up the forests at a markedly slower rate—not to mention saving the difficulty of getting rid of all those old books, magazines, and newspapers.
All of this, of course, assumes that an audience capable of assimilating the printed word will still exist.
That may be an untenable assumption, since TV already makes reading a minor skill for many people. It may well be that the future of communications will hardly involve the written word at all, and that TV, video and audio cassettes, and personal receivers for broadcast and closed-circuit programming will abolish publishing, as such, entirely.
But those developments are outside the scope of this chapter.
Frederik Pohl
Frederik Pohl, three-time Hugo winner, editor of some thirty science fiction anthologies and author and/or co-author of more than forty books, mostly fiction, is now acting as science fiction consultant at Bantam Books.
He has a broad and diversified background as a science fiction editor and writer. From 1960 through 1969 he was an editor at Galaxy Publishing Corp., publishers of Galaxy and If science fiction magazines. Since then he has devoted himself full time to writing.
He is the author, with C. M. Kornbluth, of The Space Merchants (1953) which has been translated into more than thirty languages. His most recent science fiction novel is The Age of the Pussyfoot (1970), and his latest nonfiction book is Practical Politics (1972), a handbook of the political process in America.
He also is the author of The Case Against Tomorrow (1957), and Drunkard's Walk (1960), and the editor of Star Science Fiction Stories, The Expert Dreamers, Galaxy Reader, and Nightmare Age.
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