The Twisting Tail

Everyone seems to be trying to figure out what Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory means to publishing.

I’m trying to figure out what it specifically means to authors.

Here are some of the numbers he sites in his book:

Nielsen Bookscan tracked 1.2 million titles in 2004.

• Of those 950,000 sold fewer than 99 copies each.
• 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies.
• Only 25,000 tiles sold more than 5,000 copies.
• Fewer than 500 sold more than 100,000 copies.
• Only 10 titles sold more than a million copies each.

If you average it out – the average titles in the US sells about 500 copies a year.

Anderson says, “The mass market is turning into a mass of niches,” which is the quote Rachel Donadio uses to start off her article in Sunday’s NYT about how The Long Tail applies to our industry.

Donadio looked at the issues publishers have in stocking, warehousing and keeping all the niche books in print and she does an excellent job of explaining how profitable the back list is and how publishing succeeds because of it.

She quoted a BN executive who said that titles more than a year old account for 62 to 68 percent of the stores annual sales – which is pretty consistent with the “about 70%" I’ve always been told.

She goes on to say that “given the realities of the publishing industry, many of those low sellers may soon fall out of print.”

That’s where I take issue with her thesis. With Print on Demand publishers don’t have to warehouse our books anymore. They can print to order as few as one book at a time.

Which means they can keep our books in print forever.

So what will our future look like if Anderson’s predictions are true and we are facing a Long Tail in publishing?

There very well could be smaller and smaller advances for greater numbers of books with fewer and fewer authors able to make any real money on the sales of those books.

Writers, especially fiction writers, could become more like painters and sculptors – artists who live to create but don’t create to live and rely on some activity outside of their art to earn their daily bread and pay the insurance bills.

When I tried to figure out just how many of us there are who are pulling in good numbers, I looked at the list above but then realized those sales numbers include backlist titles not just new titles.

So a certain number of those 500 titles a year that sell more than 100,000 copies or those 25,000 titles a year sell between 5000 and 99,000 copies – are thousands of backlist titles.

For instance, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead sells over 100,000 copies a year. So does The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird. And so on.

My crystal ball’s a little cloudy but clearly, it’s more important than ever for us to invest in our own books. Not quit the day job and live on the advance but use the advance to advance our careers and at least get the numbers that will keep us in contracts.

We have to – broken record time – work with our publishers – trust them but not blindly and not stupidly. Because ultimately they are running a very different business than we are. (And by the way, I don't blame them. I understand why its this way and I have nothing but respect for the people in this business who love books and care about them.)

Our publishers – as much as they want each of us to succeed – don’t expect each of us to succeed. They don’t even expect most of us will succeed.  (Don’t forget almost 70% of their sales are coming from that nice big fat cushion called the backlist.)

They can afford the failures. For them it’s the cost of doing business and it’s built into the year’s projections. They need to keep publishing more books in order to stay in business. They need cash flow to cover overhead and keep the staff employed.

As someone smarter than me who used to work in publishing explained to me, “the solution to increasing cash flow is to focus on pushing more books into retail and wholesale outlets.”

And when one book doesn’t succeed. That’s okay. Even with high returns they’ve “pushed another batch of books into retail and wholesale channels to replenish their receivables.”

It’s the lottery theory in practice, my ex-publishing friend told me  “The more times you play the game the bigger your reward will be.”

But we’re not publishers. We’re running a different business with a different model. We only have that one book a year or every two years. Most of us don’t have a backlist cushion to rely on.  We don’t have an endless supply of books to push through the system.

I don’t have any answers but I know this: We live to write and if we want to write to live we need to get smart about how we play the lottery game, too.

Comments

[Jeff Nordstedt]

M.J., you have one smart ex-publishing friend ; )

I used to have these debates with my boss. He would be complaining about the decline in literarcy and all of those usual publisher complaints about TV and the internet and such. I would say (not that I am advocating this) that the lieracy rate could drop in half over night, but if we could publish a book that sold to 1% of the remaining literate people, we'd all be delighted.

There are still plenty of people interested in reading all kinds of things. It is the job of the publisher and author to work together and find creative ways to turn books into dollars.

[Nicky]

It remains the old question of do you work to the market ecomony or starve artistically in a garret. You're right, writers unquestionably need to get smart about this.

[Richard]

Writers, especially fiction writers, could become more like painters and sculptors – artists who live to create but don’t create to live and rely on some activity outside of their art to earn their daily bread and pay the insurance bills.

MJ, this is what I've done since my first book was published 27 years ago, and I think I'm far from unique.

It hasn't been possible for many years for a poet to make a living from her work, and that is equally true for those of us who write short stories rather than novels.

I have to view writing as a hobby. If anyone's interested, I explain it here:

http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0275970299&id=Jm8rlz0wKvsC&pg=PA83&lpg=PA83&dq=%22hobby+at+the+core%22&sig=wLwtv3ZwJSHkpyinGU29smM7FPw

[Allison Brennan]

The only problem with those numbers--and I don't know exactly how they were compiled--but they include small press and college press and niche publishing. When we talk those books published by a traditional NY publishing house, the numbers published are much smaller. Also, bookscan is roughly half of total sales. For example, it doesn't include Walmart. So if someone sells 50,000 in traditional outlets they might also sell an additional 50K copies in Walmart--which wouldn't be included in those numbers.

I agree with almost everything you say about investing in your own career, but at the same time we need to realize what we as authors can and should do and what we can't control to increase sales. I get frustrated when authors spend their entire advance on collateral and things they really can't effect.

[Peter L. Winkler]

Dear M.J.:

Way back when, you talked about your lunch with a publishing insider who said it takes a Brink's truck full of dough to "break out" a book. I don't remember if the dollar amount was $25,000 or $250,000, but even the first figure is much more than what many writers receive as advances.

Writers cling to this belief that if they send enough suggestion notes to people in various offices of their publisher, they can bootstrap their way to success.

But what you've written here before and what I've read from authors elsewhere tells a different story. Publishers do little to promote most of their books, making failure a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It is the publisher's job to not only distribute a book but create a demand for a book. If they abdicate that resonsibility, there's little chance an author posesses the resources to do so.

[MJ]

Peter the number was $250,000 to breakout a title and make it a NYT bestseller. But that's not what I'm talking about here.

What I'm saying is that if we invest in our books we can influence sales and the goal is not to have a bestseller but to sell through and book after book do well enough that we keep getting contract so that we build a solid fan base.

I can tell you story after story about authors who worked hand in hand with their publishers to do this and over time wound up with very solid careers.

Our goal is not stay alive long enough to get the numbers to a place where the publisher looks at us and decides, yes, now it's time to really support the author.

And its not just wishful thinking.It works this way. Its just a question of managing expectations, being in it for the long haul, and working with the pulisher and being realistic about goals.

[MJ]

Alison - I know - having some - that paperback originals don't fit into the bookscan equasion. My bookscan number for The Halo Effect was about 5% of the total sales since the book was sold in so many non reporting stores.

And you're right about the small press titles etc.

But the numbers aren't all that off if you talk to the big houses about the number of books that earn out.

At best we're talking about another 1000 titles added to that 25,0000 number. Or do you think its even more than 1000?

[UYGU]

http://www.hugechoiceof.com/