Raise Your Hand if you’re sure

Teresa Nielsen Hayden, over at Making Light, goes to town on some journalist for passing along the perceived wisdom that “book publishing is becoming a winner-takes-all contest”. She, presumably, knows whereof she speaks. If she says that her company, like most publishers, make most of their profit from okaysellers, rather than bestsellers, well, who am I to argue. But I would like to point out that there are some problems with this argument:

A quick test: raise your hand if you only buy bestsellers. No? Okay, raise your hand if the majority of your book purchases are current bestsellers. Right. Now raise your hand if your bookbuying decisions are based on marketing buzz. If you still aren’t raising your hand, you’re a normal book-buying reader, and the Wall Street Journal is chin-deep in hogwash on this point.

First of all, as was pointed out in comments and then dismissed, the readers of Making Light are not normal book-buying readers, or at least there is good reason to believe they are not, and no good reason to believe they are. I’m not sure, moreover, that publishers need to make their money from normal book-buying readers, or that they do. In other words, raise your hand if you’re not reading this. If you’re not raising your hand, you haven’t proved anything, right?

Of course, the whole point of best-sellers is that more people buy them than buy other books. In fact, among all the sellers, these books are the best. And, leaving aside the snark for a moment or two, they are the best by a lot, and I mean a lot. My understanding is that most okaysellers don’t sell a hundredth of a bestsellers numbers. The reason for that is that “normal book-buying readers” buy okaysellers, but that people who buy only one book a year buy best-sellers. Heck, when we get to the real lottery-winners, people buy a copy even if it’s the only book they’ve bought for five years. People give copies to their friends who haven’t bought a book in twenty years. Look—let’s divide the country into people who for whom the phrase “a majority of your book purchases” makes some sense and the big group. OK, now the latter go and buy The Celestine Prophecies, and former stand here in this telephone booth. Even better—give me a dollar for everybody in the big group, and I’ll give you a hardback book for everybody in the small one, and have enough left over to re-sign a left-fielder. And that’s not counting libraries—how many libraries are there in this country?—that buy bestsellers when they have run out of money to buy anything else, and if they do have a decent acquisitions budget (which they don’t), they buy three copies of the bestseller so that the Friends of the Library don’t get all cranky about having to wait three months to get through the waiting list.

What I’m saying is that there are two parts to that argument: first, Ms. Nielsen Hayden has to say what “normal book-buying readers” are like, and then she has to say that “normal book-buying readers” matter and the other people don’t. There’s got to be more to it than raising your hand.

Er, before I finish, let me make it clear that I am not talking about academic publishers, or academic divisions that break even (or do better). Neither is the Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Trachtenberg. Nor am I talking about itty-bitty publishers of any kind. I’m talking about publishers that publish best-sellers, or reasonably attempt to. Furthermore, let me make it clear that by instinct, I think Ms. Nielsen Hayden is correct, that bestsellers are lovely revenue centers for publishers but do not drive the bulk of publishing even among publishers of potential best-sellers. I’m guessing that publishers do publish books specifically to sell them to “normal book-buying readers”, or even to people like the readers of Making Light (who are, of course, a publisher’s dream, in many ways). After all, the thing about “normal book-buying readers” is that they normally buy books, and that’s not a bad market, if your product happens to be, you know, books.

Then why am I making such a fuss? It’s just that I hate the whole rhetoric of raise your hand if you are like X. See? There aren’t very many people like X. So they don’t matter. That’s partition thinking. It doesn’t matter, so much, in this case, so fine. But it’s a bad habit to get into. There are an awful lot more of them than there are of us, for any definition of us that doesn’t include them.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.