Hiatus

As you may have noticed, lords and ladies, I haven't quite been bringing my "A" game the past couple of months. Between increased responsibilities at work and a host of other demands on my time, I'm afraid I'm going to have to put Pimp My Novel on indefinite hiatus.

Not to worry—nothing terrible has happened/is happening. It's just that there are only so many hours in the day, and I know I'm not going to be able to do a consistent or good job with this blog once the Publishing Giant reawakens in September.

It pains me to write this, folks, since so many of you have been here since day one. You've encouraged me to write about the industry, shared with me (and your fellow writers) your tips, advice, stories, works in progress, successes, and setbacks, and I want to thank all of you for your time and generosity over the past two years. Seriously, y'all are the best.

So: thank you. Hopefully I'll be seeing (read: posting for) you again soon.

The Last Chapter

I've returned from parts unknown, mes auteurs, and I trust y'all enjoyed last week's guest posts while I was gone. Many thanks to our five guest posters!

All is not sunshine and lollipops in Ye Olde Publishinge Lande, however. If you haven't yet heard the sad news, Borders is converting from Chapter 11 bankruptcy to Chapter 7, meaning they are liquidating their assets and going entirely out of business.

First, my sincere condolences and heartfelt thanks to all the Borders employees who have helped me so much over the years and to whom I wish the best in their pursuits and endeavors after Borders. BGP's liquidation will entail roughly 11,000 layoffs—not including potential job losses at ancillary corporations, such as publishing, shipping, and food services companies that may have departments dealing exclusively with Borders—and my best wishes are with those who will be seeking work in this economy in the next several months.

Second, this will impact the industry in many significant ways, not all of which will become immediately apparent.

• There is now only one major bricks-and-mortar physical book retailer in the country: Barnes & Noble. B&N no longer needs to contend with any other major player in terms of physical co-op, in-store couponing, &c &c. I expect they'll continue to compete heavily with Amazon, however—especially in the increasingly popular e-book arena—so I don't foresee any immediate or comprehensive shifts in the price of physical books.

• There is now a significant surplus of physical books in the market. I'm not completely clear on the returns policy for distressed retailers, but I believe they're entitled to return most—if not all—of their unsold stock to the appropriate publishers. While I imagine many publishers moved to minimize their exposure back when Borders filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, I think a lot of them are going to get hit with big returns as Borders dissolves.

• Print runs are going to become smaller. When making final decisions in terms of binding books, publishers have taken two major chains into account; now they'll only account for one. While it's true that Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and (to a lesser extent) big-box retailers like Wal*Mart and small, independent book shops will absorb some of that business, a portion of it will be permanently lost.

• I think this will hasten physical/electronic equilibrium in the market. With fewer physical books being printed and more consumers going to Amazon and Barnes & Noble—many purchasing books electronically via the Kindle or Nook, respectively—I think the American market will be fully half e-books by the last quarter of 2013 or the first quarter of 2014. Over time, areas traditionally resistant to electronic media (such as art books, children's books, and international editions) will increasingly move in that direction, as well.

Again: is the physical book dead? Absolutely not. But the loss of Borders will, I think, hasten its transition to a secondary format.

The times, they are a-changin', ladies and gents, and I don't pretend to know what's going to happen over the next several months. I can tell you, however, that I'm not surprised by this turn of events—in fact, Borders managed to hang on much longer than I expected—and I was by no means alone in the industry in that expectation. Though the methods by which customers purchase books will undoubtedly continue to change, people will still need great stories. Books, whatever their form, are here to stay, and it's my sincere hope that Borders' demise will engender more opportunities than it dissolves.

The Vanishing Advance

You may have been hearing about this from other publishing professionals or from fellow writers, mes auteurs, but in case you haven't heard, the average advance has declined a bit over the past couple of years. Much of my evidence for this is either proprietary or anecdotal, so hopefully there are a few literary agents or editors in the house to confirm the trend.

In case you're curious, though, there are a few reasons I think lower advances have been—and continue to be—the norm.

Belt-tightening. With forbidding economic indicators such as unemployment still high and talk of a double-dip recession floating around, editors and publishers have become much more frugal in terms of the advances they offer. Many have modified their P&Ls to reflect current sell-through and consumer habits, and decreased demand for physical books has resulted in decreased up-front cash for authors.

Publishing is a business, and we've got to try to make money on as many books as possible in order to stay in business. Speaking of physical media, another reason (à mon avis) for lower advances is:

The shift to electronic media. Because e-books don't face the same kind of supply chain/distribution challenges as physical books and are not returnable, it's easier for publishers to run P&Ls for e-books and to simply offer higher royalties than to stick with the advance model.

True, the vast majority of titles currently acquired are eventually released as concurrent physical and electronic books, but I don't think the day is long off in which a substantial section of the market will comprise e-only titles. Once that occurs, I think the idea of the advance will become even more antiquated; it's much easier to pay an author a fixed percentage of dollars earned in the more or less real-time environment of e-book sales than to bother with advances.

In fact, much (though certainly not all) of the work done by advances is obviated by the fact that:

Advertising and marketing budgets for e-books are often lower than for physical books. While a publishing house—particularly a large one—will pay the advertising and marketing costs for their lead titles, there are many midlist titles and titles published by smaller publishers for which the burden of lining up media and marketing falls squarely on the author. The advance is a way of mitigating this hardship; authors can use the money given to them by publishers to pay to promote their books (e.g. conduct book tours, create book trailers, and so on).

As advertising and marketing have become easier and cheaper—predominantly by way of social networking services like Facebook and Twitter—the cost of promoting books through these channels has necessarily also fallen. If publishers feel they can pay less money for the same commercial success from any given title, they absolutely will. Wouldn't you?

So that, dear readers, is my take on why average advances seem to be declining in this industry. It may be a relatively short-term reaction to the continuing economic uncertainty inherent in the recession, or (as I believe) a long-term reaction to the drastic changes that are occuring in the publishing industry as it transitions from physical to electronic media. Regardless of which, I think it signals an industry-wide recognition of the challenges the business is facing.

What do you think, gentle readers?

5.1.2011

First, apologies for the lack of round-up on Friday! I promise this week's round-up will be ultra mega awesome to make up for it. Should I be raising expectations that Laura will have to fulfill? Probably not!

Today's post is not book-related (or it is, sort of, in a very tangential way). If you haven't seen the news yet—and I can't imagine you haven't—Osama bin Laden is dead.

I'm not comfortable celebrating anyone's death, though I won't pretend to be upset by the news. I'm glad he's no longer a threat, regardless of the fact that it took us nearly a decade to catch him and he was operationally hindered by his constant flight from U.S. forces over the past several years.

Would I rather have seen him tried for his crimes? Of course. I don't think he would have permitted himself to be captured, however, and if this is the way it had to end, that's fine with me. Again: I'm glad he's gone.

I became a New Yorker only recently; I wasn't in the city (and in fact had never visited it) when the World Trade Center towers were destroyed. I watched on the news and had no firm grasp of what was going on. Maybe if I had been there ten years ago, I would have joined the crowds celebrating bin Laden's death last night, regardless of the fact that I didn't support the war in Iraq and am deeply conflicted about the war in Afghanistan. I certainly don't think this spells the end of the "War on Terror," as Peter Bergen unctuously insisted on cnn last night.

There are going to be books about this: biographies of bin Laden, coffee table books detailing the 9/11 attacks, compendiums on Al Qaeda, maybe even first-person accounts by members of the military directly responsible for bin Laden's death. I can promise you that this minute, any publisher with bin Laden-related titles in his backlist is going back to print; anyone under contract to write a non-fiction book about the man is probably being rushed to finish it.

The story goes back years. People will want to buy and read it. Time is of the essence with news-related titles like these, though I imagine the tenth anniversary of the attacks next September will widen the window of opportunity.

Osama bin Laden was buried at sea to prevent his tomb from becoming a shrine for radicals and radicalism—there can be no locus around which his followers might congregate. At the same time, however, it is important to write and to read books about these events to preserve them in our cultural memory. As the philosopher George Santayana wrote over one hundred years ago, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." We've witnessed tremendous violence these past ten years. If we can't learn from these events, we've got no hope of transcending them.

I hope that bin Laden's death signals a turning point in the war in Afghanistan rather than an event to galvanize his supporters. I hope that someone even worse than him doesn't emerge as a replacement. I hope that the Al Qaeda terrorist network suffers a loss of morale and organization with his death (again, operationally speaking, I don't think there will make much of an impact). And I hope that among all the polarizing, attention-grabbing, and politically motivated books on his life and death that arise over the next year or so, that there's at least one that invites us to think rather than emote, to reflect rather than react.

Santayana had another quote, too: "Only the dead have seen the end of war." I also hope he was wrong about that.