The Columbia History of the American Novel

The Book Marketplace II

The literary marketplace has always had three essential elements: authorship, publishing, and audience. Each of these has been shaped by market forces from the very beginning, and each in its own way has mirrored the successive phases of Western capitalism — preindustrial/premodern, industrial/modern, and, in the last fifty years, postindustrial and postmodern. Our immediate concern is with the literary marketplace in the last of these phases, but as we consider how that market has changed since World War II, it will be important to keep in mind that at least some of its features are perennial.

The postmodern period of capitalism has been characterized by rapid technological development, mass production, inflation, and consumerism — factors that, according to Marxist cultural critics from Theodor Adorno onward, have altered the way in which all goods, including cultural goods, are produced, distributed, and consumed. Magalia Larson has suggested that, because postmodern capitalism is a technocracy, it values and rewards expertise, which results in the rise of professionalism in intellectual life. Fredric Jameson argues that in the age of multinational oligopolies, free-market rhetoric is used to discourage the social planning of production, while the 'free choice' of consumers is effectively limited to selecting standardized goods on the basis of superficial differences. Per Gedin, a Swedish socialist critic, has concluded that because postmodern capitalism is fundamentally inflationary, it requires growth and therefore inculcates the consumption of quantity rather than quality. -679-

Seen from this point of view, the consequence of postmodern capitalism for the author is that s/he now competes for survival in an environment that is economically demotic but intellectually hieratic. The increasing distance between the popular and the respectable means that although literacy is widespread and many people do still read during their leisure time, the writer who aims for intellectual prestige, formal originality, or artistic merit is likely to have a day job. As for publishing, the foregoing account of the general economy of the postmodern era can easily be adapted to explain those features most frequently cited in discussions of the current state of that industry in America — the emphasis on essentially interchangeable bestsellers, the precarious position of independent bookstores, the declining fortunes of 'serious' literature, and the amalgamation of the novel with television and film.

Some in publishing have argued that many of these 'changes' are really nothing new: highbrow literature has rarely paid well in its own day because readers have always preferred a more easily digestible fare, and publishers have distributed their resources accordingly. Moreover, the 'blockbuster complex,' which Thomas Whiteside describes as characteristic of the direction publishing has taken in the last decades of the twentieth century, may in fact have been with us well before the advent of the cause (conglomerate ownership of publishing houses) to which he attributes it. As Gedin himself notes, in 1901 'Publisher's Weekly maintained that of the 1,900 titles published during the preceding year, a maximum of 100 had sold more than 10,000 copies. Profits, and in some cases they could be huge, were thus earned on vast printings of a very few books.'

A classically trained economist, looking at what Whiteside and others see as new and negative developments in the publishing industry, might see only a demonstration of the well-established capital asset pricing model, which holds that people like to be compensated for risk. The fixed costs for printing a book are relatively high, and the profitability of any one book is extremely uncertain: this generates publishers (since authors cannot afford to print their own books), and it encourages those publishers to diversify their risk across many books. Since any one author needs a publisher more than that publisher needs any one author — unless the author in question is one of the few whose novels always sell well — the author is in -680- a weak bargaining position and will be likely to sign a contract that gives the publisher most of the rights to future profits in exchange for a relatively meager payment up front. If the novel is a success, the conglomerate — which may well own not only the hardcover house that published the book but also the paperback company, the film company, and the television network to which subsidiary rights will have been sold — will reap the reward; if the novel is a failure, the conglomerate will be able to absorb the loss, which is likely to be small in relation to its total assets.

These economic 'truths' of publishing may be altered significantly in the near future by desktop publishing and other forms of computer-mediated text dissemination. The fixed costs for these forms of publishing can be very low, which means that authors can afford to become their own publishers: that many have already done so is demonstrated by a look at FactSheet Five, a monthly catalog that lists thousands of limited-circulation alternative and underground magazines, many of them devoted to poetry and fiction. The barriers to alternative publishing have always had as much to do with status as with costs, though, and it remains to be seen whether such desktop literary productions will be regarded as anything but another form of 'vanity' publishing. On the other hand, the electronic dissemination of text by academic and scientific publishers (proprietary and nonprofit alike) has already begun, and a number of commercial publishing houses have begun to experiment with using computers to tailor textbooks to the requirements of individual instructors and even to deliver books on-line through commercial database services where one can read part of the book, punch in a credit card number, and download the full text. Assessments of the impact that computers and electronic text will have on authorship, reading, and publishing vary from extreme optimism to extreme pessimism, according to whether the person making the assessment feels that this new technology will necessarily overturn or inevitably reinforce the monopolization of information.

One of the things that has not changed very much over the last two hundred years is the fact that most writers have not been able to subsist on what they earn from writing. In 1986, Paul W. Kingston and Jonathan R. Cole published a book-length study entitled The Wages of Writing, based on the results of a 1980 survey of 2241 -681- American authors ('authors' being defined only as those who had published at least one book). According to this survey, in 1979 the median annual income for an author — including book royalties, movie and television work, and payments for newspaper and magazine publication — was $4,775. 'Median income' means that 50 percent of all the authors surveyed earned less than that amount; fully 25 percent earned less than $1,000 from writing during this year, and only 10 percent had incomes of $45,000 or more. Not surprisingly, almost half of the writers surveyed had other jobs: of these, 36 percent taught at colleges or universities, 20 percent were employed in other professions (as lawyers, doctors, computer programmers, etc.), and 11 percent were editors or publishers. Among those who wrote full time, the median income was only $7,500 (or slightly less than fifty cents per hour). Genre fiction was the most profitable type of writing, with 20 percent of its authors earning more than $50,000 a year — about three times the income enjoyed by authors of adult nonfiction, the next most profitable type of writing.

Kingston and Cole's survey also brings to light some interesting information about race, class, and gender as it correlates with income from writing. According to the data they gathered, race and class were not significant factors in predicting a writer's income, nor was it important where an author lived or even whether the author had a college education. On the other hand, there was a noticeable difference between the income of men and that of women: the median income for male writers was 20 percent higher than that of female writers, and men were almost twice as likely as women to be among the highest-paid authors (that 10 percent who made more than $45,000 a year from writing).

Authors of both genders continue to pursue their craft in spite of the odds against success because they are willing to sacrifice income for the privilege of doing what they enjoy (something economists call 'self-exploitation'), and also because unknown authors do sometimes stumble into stardom. Stories of overnight success are common in publishing, even though their significance is more psychological than statistical. One such story is that of Judith Guest, whose novel Ordinary People (1976) was submitted to Viking Press, where it was published after a young assistant pulled it out of the 'slush pile' of unsolicited manuscripts. Guest's novel became a best-seller and was -682- made into a profitable motion picture by a major studio. At the time that this happened, Viking Press was receiving about fifty unsolicited manuscripts every week, or 2600 a year; Ordinary People was the first unsolicited manuscript they had published in ten years — odds of approximately 26,000 to 1. Arthur Kadushin, Lewis A. Coser, and William W. Powell, who tell this story in Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing (1982), cite a New York Times Book Review article that calculated the odds against the publication of unsolicited novels at almost 30,000 to 1. Sixty percent of the trade publishers interviewed by Kadushin, Coser, and Powell said they received over one thousand unsolicited manuscripts every year; the president of one of the larger general trade houses, Doubleday, estimated that his firm receives 'an average of ten thousand unsolicited manuscripts a year, out of which three or four may be chosen for publication.'

Most literary fiction is not plucked from the slush pile: editors rely on agents, friends, and even other editors to help them find publishable work. But even though an inside connection of some sort may be a necessary