The Business of Books

...Economically speaking, this sector ot the industry is not, despite appearances and all of the attention it receives, very important...

...If commerce holds the upper hand, quality retains a comfortable niche that seems to be secure and enduring Reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated As one editor-in-chief of a publishing house explained " I don't think we ever turn something of real quality down because it is going to lose money We know that half of our books are not going to make money My theory is let people look at the final results " The three authors themselves state that "precious little American poetry would be published today if the' bottom line' reigned supreme in all houses Few first novels would appear on bookstore shelves, and scholarly books would be produced in very small print runs and only by academic presses ' It would be pleasing to be able to say these instructs e comments are contained in a lively, stimulating, provocative work that should be read bv anyone with an interest in American culture and letters Alas, that is not the case...

...The duller, graver, workaday text and scholarly sectors are the real backbone of publishing Coser, kadushin and Powell deserve a good deal of credit for focusingon the publishing industry as a whole, instead ot on the division that is the most intrinsically, interesting and tun to write about...

...Writers & Writing THE BUSINESS OF BOOKS BY BARRY GEWEN THERE IS PROBABLY no more popular pastime among literary Americans than bemoaning the state of our national culture "A tawdry cheapness shall outlast our days," Ezra Pound lamented long ago, and looking over the New York Times' best-seller list, with its weekly accumulation of diet books, spy thrillers, cheap romances, and get-rich-quick schemes, few would choose to take issue with him In a land where Miss Piggy's Guide to Lije is celebrating its seventh month as one of the year's most successful publishing efforts, Caliban, to borrow from Pound, has surely cast out Ariel So common is this criticism of our intellectual life that it cuts completely across political lines Conservatives of the blackest stripe decry the loss of standards, which they perceive as having accompanied the democratization of learning, superior work, in their eyes, cannot survive the leveling, homogenizing effects of popular culture, the revolt of the masses At the other end of the spectrum, Leftists of the pinkest hue point accusing fingers at manipulative media barons who, they insist, have turned art into a business, skewering quality with a dollar sign There is considerable overlap in these objections, and very often the complaints get so intertwined that the elitists come out sounding like revolutionaries, the Marxists like aristocrats, until the players themselves must need scorecards to remember the side thev are supposed to be on Whatever the confusion of political roles, though, everyone seems to agree that the mix of culture and the marketplace is a miserable brew indeed, and a marked decline from past periods of creative excellence when merit alone was valued Everyone, perhaps, except Lewis A Coser, Charles kadu-shin and Walter W Powell In Books The Culture and Commerce of Publishing (Basic,411 pp , $19.00), they offer convincing arguments that the situation is not only much brighter than it appears, it is perhaps very near to being the best of all possible worlds—with a heavy emphasis on the word "possible " We live in a capitalist society where even the most high-minded enterprise must make a profit to survive In publishing, as in such other "culture industries" as music and film, a constant tension exists between the demands of business and the pursuit of excellence, yet, all things considered, excellence doesnot fare badly in the struggle...

...With its celebrated authors, high-powered agents, chic book parties, dominance of the book reviews and best-seller lists, film and TV connections, it is certainly the most glamorous sector i et trade books account for less than one-fourth of the industry's annual 56 3 billion in sales...

...Once publishing ceased being a patronage-based cottage industry devoted to a small literary elite and looked toward the mass market of industrial society, that is to say once it turned modern, diatribes against "commercialism" became a constant of literary discussions The authors quote grumblings from 1843,1890, 1905, and 1946 that, with minor alterations of language, could appear in today's prestigious magazines Seen in this light, the criticism that is so much a feature of our common parlance sounds like nostalgia for a bygone and thoroughly extinct era of rigid social hierarchies and mass illiteracy OF COURSE, simply because the complaints have not changed m a century and a half does not mean that the realities haven't In the 1960s, conglomerates began to move seriously into publishing, and in the 1970s tie-ins with Hollywood and television for the production of heavily promoted "blockbusters" became a major source of revenue for a number of houses The authors express concern about these new developments, maybe too much concern, since from their own evidence the industry remains open, diversified and healthy "There has been simultaneous concentration among large firms," say Coser, Kadushin and Powell, "and a prohferation of small, geographically dispersed independent companies The small firms are frequently pursuing projects overlooked or cast aside by larger houses " Most editors in corporate-acquired houses, moreover, are surprisingly unaffected by management decisions at the upper levels, and many are happy about the new pools of capital available to them from the parent companv Coser, Kadushin and Powell point out a tendency for financial considerations to become dominant once conglomerates have seized control of a publishing firm But natural constraints would appeal to limit the impact of the giants If a conglomerate takes ov er a small or medium-sized house that has been modestly profitable, and attempts to build it up at breakneck speed by backing a number of "blockbusters," it stands a good chance of raining the firm's original success while producing a series of Heaven's Gate disasters Unquestionably, megalomaniacal corporate executives are out there who think they have a better grasp of the publishing business than knowledgable editors who have been toiling away for 20 years Unquestionably, too, these would-be empire-builders have the ability (read ' cash") to do real damage to individual houses and to the careers of the people connected to those houses Still, the industry as a whole looks flexible enough to weather any conglomerate storms Start-up costs are sufficiently low to assure a steady flow of small new firms, the market is sufficiently segmented and unpredictable to guarantee diversity among the book producers The prospect of a few monster companies dictating and debasing our reading habits by appealing to the public's lowest common denominator is, for the foreseeable future, only a paranoid's nightmare 5oofousefully details precisely how diversified publishing actually is The authors divide the industry into three broad sectors—text, scholarly and trade—among which the differences are at least as sinking as the similarities Any generalization is bound to miss some essential feature Does the trade sector depend on mass sales of between 7,500 and 40,000 to turn a profit9 Scholarly houses can make money printing only a few thousand copies of each volume Do textbook publishers have a recognizable and definable group of customers to whom they must appeal...

...Not surpris-ingly, there is little switching from one type of publishing to another Trade is the part of the industry everyone thinks of when he or she refers to "publishing...

...Textbook and scholarly publishers continue to rely on small established circles and personal contacts Even the private lives of editors differ according to the particular sector they work in "Scholarly and text editors tend to go home after work to their predominantly suburban dwellings and engage in a social life that is separate from publishing or writing In contrast, trade editors, many of whom live and work in Manhattan, are active in the city's cultural life?another source of book ideas and manuscripts...

...It is too bad thev did not succeed at another part of their job—finding a wav to make a dull subject exciting...

...Although Books will undoubtedly take a deserved place in the collections of business school liberaries as a profile ot an industry unlike anv other, most common readers will be put oil by its fiat prose, its aimless meandering and its amassing o! details only a graduate st udent could love (Is there anyone who really needs to know that editors in textbook divisions spend more hours each week attending meetings than do trade...

...Trade houses in effect throw their products into the ocean and see if they float Are media-made "blockbusters" increasingly influential in the trade divisions...

...e popular—editors'') The writers' insistence on quantifying everything that comes under their gaze approaches parody When they report that many of those they interviewed " found our penchant for figures trying," a reader is hkely to applaud At least they have the sense, after attempting to schematize the way editors go about judging manuscripts, to conclude "We were overrationahzing a strongly intuitive process " Nonetheless, much that Coser, Kadushin and Powell have to say is worthy of attention from people outside of the industry, particularly then analysis of the commerce vs culture question In opposition to the view that we have witnessed a linear decline from some Golden Age of Belies Lettres to a mercantile present when books are ground out like so many McDonald's hamburgers, the three authors paint a cyclical picture in which changes—for worse or better—are less important than continuities and repetitions...