State of Publishing in USA

Annamaria on Monday

As it did to almost every aspect of life on our sacred planet, Covid dealt a severe blow to the already reeling USA publishing industry. Many already-struggling small publishers went completely dark.  Even the big five - Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hatchette, and HarperCollins – began to lay off their staff.  In the meanwhile, it seems, everyone who had six chapters of a novel in the bottom drawer of a bedside table sat down and used the lockdown to complete the book and quickly submit it.  In the face of lower staff levels, a tsunami of queries have overwhelmed the inboxes of editors.  "I have never seen anything like it," a book agent told me.

Even before the pandemic, the industry had made some ill-advised decisions.  With the introduction of eBooks and their greater contribution to the bottom line, publishing executives convinced themselves that print books were pretty much a thing of the past.  On this assumption, dominos began to fall.  The number of printers shrank.  Paper supplies quickly dwindled.  But people still wanted REAL books.  Then, with the virus still in the future, came the publication of Michele Obama's Becoming.  This event exposed the folly of those executive decisions.  Obama's book started with a print-run of 2 million copies. Given the reduced printing capacity, this demand took up just about all the available presses and paper.  When the first printing quickly sold out, there was a scramble to re-print to keep up with the demand. We can only imagine what this did to first-time authors' scheduled launches.

Just a few days ago, I chatted with a fellow historical mystery writer who declined an invitation I had extended.  His excuse?  His publisher had moved up the due date for the manuscript of his next book, because the cue of books waiting to be printed is now so long that they have to get his book in line two months earlier than was formerly required.

Meanwhile, the public's preference for print has persisted.  Actually, since the early 2000s, the time the average American spent reading books had been slowly climbing for the first time in decades.  Then with lock down, it skyrocketed.  Many many people started buying books. And perhaps it was all those talking heads on TV or colleagues on their zoom calls, all showing book cases in their background.   Print book sales are stetting records. And, mirabile dictu, small independent bookstores have begun opening all over the country, with many of them becoming integral parts of their communities. This part is the good news, very good news.

But publishing is still facing major challenges.  Publishers of all sorts are loath to raise their prices, but given the smaller supply, the price of printing and paper have gone way up. Shipping costs even more so.  Shipping a container, which holds about 35,000 books used to cost $2500.  It now costs $25,000.  This will further screw up the economics of the industry, already terribly challenged in the post-Amazon world.

Speaking of containers, here's a crazy story I heard from someone whose client's book was involved. A shipping company carrying the container with the print-run of that first book was caught in the debacle at the Suez Canal, which I am sure you've all heard about. Anyway, the shipping company decided that they couldn't wait the month it would take for their ship to get through the canal, so they redirected it to Cartagena. In Cartagena there were goods to be picked up. But there wasn't enough room on the ship for all the new cargo; they had to jettison some containers on board. That first-time author's novel, all the copies of it, went to the bottom of the sea.

Perhaps misery really does love company, because this makes the challenges I am facing right now relatively bearable.

Let me end with a trend I think we will all like. According to the "On the Media" podcast (which was the source of much of the info above), there is a new trend in book covers, away from the gloomy colors that have dominated recently and all those meaningless, weird shapes and blobs. The publishers seem to be going now for bright colors and attractive artwork. That'll be a relief, for sure!