Re: extropian business--publishing?

From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Jun 02 2003 - 21:22:06 MDT

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    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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