From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Jun 02 2003 - 21:22:06 MDT
At 07:21 PM 6/2/03 -0700, Mike wrote:
>> Trouble is, paper book
>> publishing & mass market distribution is deeply fucked up as an
>> industry right now
>I'd
>like to hear what Damien finds is so fucked up about the print and mass
>market distro markets right now.
I'm no expert in this, but it seems to have a lot to do with two factors:
traditional publishers being gobbled up by vast global corporations which
apply book/reader-unfriendly protocols to selling their wares, and the use
of instant computer assessment by distributors of sales at major points of
sale like airports, supermarkets and book chain outlets. Here's what I
wrote the other day in my forthcoming book about sf, *x, y, z, t*:
==============
Today, fifty years on, sophisticated print sf teeters, perhaps, on the
edge of extinction. In 2001, Asimov's editor and writer Gardner Dozois
recalled his 1995 trip to a World SF Convention in Glasgow:
"the British science fiction industry is in ruins... One well-known
middle-level British writer says that the only way he can get a science
fiction book into print in Britain any more is by disguising it as fantasy,
changing what otherwise would have been aliens into vampires and
werewolves." (2001, 74)
Yet the book traders, Dozois notes, told him that customers complain that
they are sick of Celtic trilogies and horror, and crave sf instead.
`Something is wrong here somewhere. But if the perception of the publishers
that no one wants to read science fiction is wrong, there seems no way to
convince the publishers of it' (74). Can publishers get it so wrong?
Apparently so, due to their reliance on marketing tools appropriate to
selling soap and peanuts and gasoline. Computer systems now routinely track
book sales, effectively in real time, across chain outlets. Any item that
sells less than the mean is pulled quickly and pulped. New authors and
others trying something fresh and disconcerting vanish like the dew; their
names are poisoned for their next submission. Mega-corporations seek
certified bestsellers; authors strive to become safe brand names. Brian
Stableford, premier sociologist of sf, observed some years ago:
"In the busiest outlets-like those in airports, which are browsed by
hundreds of people per hour-the rates of sale can be measured so quickly
that many titles need only be displayed for a matter of hours before it
becomes clear that the rational decision is to replace them with something
else... Given the tendency of paperback publishers to overproduce and the
existence of the sale-or-return convention, it was inevitable that
publishers would find their returns coming back much more quickly and much
more prolifically... [W]hile the print-runs of paperbacks remained fairly
steady the sales of all but a tiny fraction-almost certainly less than
10%-suffered a precipitous collapse. By 1990... almost all of these
low-advance titles were failing to earn out those advances or make any
profit at all for their publishers." (Stableford, 2000, 47-8).
This fall into nescience by the marketing conglomerates has only
accelerated, and afflicts all publishing, but marginal modes such as
science fiction are especially at risk. It is possible that sf published
beyond the borders of the United States, with its distinctive contribution
to the expansive and liberating dimensions of the mode, might soon perish
entirely.
==========================
Damien Broderick
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