Sunday, September 28, 2003

Shelf life and the book industry: Part 3   Part 1  2 It's a few years old, but there's an interesting interview about the book industry with Steve Wasserman, former editorial director of Times Books, a division of Random House. It appears in a Salon article online, ("So Many Books, So Little to Read," by Dwight Gardner).  Here's a short version of his analysis. First, the concentration of the industry has swallowed up or driven out some excellent imprints. And concentration is a problem in bookselling as well, as smaller stores are forced out of business. According to Wasserman, the industry is becoming far too concentrated.  "This is all, of course, a 25-year trend … but it has reached critical mass." But ironically, "there have never been more books, good and bad, published in America, roughly 50,000 titles this year [1999] alone." The result is crowded shelves and short shelf lives. "When I first came into publishing, the shelf life of the average nonfiction hardcover was between six and eight months … today, it's six weeks." That leaves a small envelope during which books have to find their audience. All that results in a "stampede" to find blockbuster books and give them even bigger print jobs. " Why allow a good editor to work for months on a book by, say, a talented historian that will only sell moderately well, when you can have the same editor out looking for the next 'Seinfeld'  - which may not get much editing at all, and sell 40 times the number of copies? "One gets the feeling," Wasserman said, "that there are a lot of people in publishing now who wish they were in the movie industry, but somehow missed the boat." 5:30:25 PM

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