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?

The New Bibliophiles

Many people describe themselves as bibliophiles—book lovers—and I think many of you would count yourselves among them. Why would you be here if you didn't love books? Books: the bomb diggity. I think we all agree.

However! I ask myself (and, by extension, you): will the meaning of the word change over the next couple of years? That is, I wonder whether bibliophiles will become analogous to and as niche as, say, audiophiles.

Everyone listens to music; not everyone is an audiophile. And not everyone who loves music is an audiophile! These are the people who invest a lot in speaker equipment, often prefer analog to digital music, and spend time in small communities of like-minded individuals. They own a lot of stuff on vinyl. They know a lot of jargon that no one outside their subculture understands.

Just as audiophiles comprise their own niche community/market, I wonder whether tomorrow's bibliophiles will read and buy books similarly, what with their "eccentric" attachment to print and the experience of reading a physical book, their willingness to spend a lot of disposable income on rare books, and their predisposition toward (irony of ironies!) spending time on-line talking to people who also prefer to read physical books rather than electronic ones.

Record companies recognize the existence of the audiophile/enthusiast market and continue to release a small number of vinyl albums, regardless of the fact that most people listen to music electronically. Which is exactly the point! Vinyl is not aimed at most people, while electronic music is. I think that over the next couple of years, we'll see the same change in the book market. Most people will read electronically, and bibliophiles will read and supply the niche market for paper books.

This isn't to say that bibliophiles won't read electronically—I expect many will. The distinction I'm trying to get at is that consumers will do what they do best—consume—in the least expensive and least inconvenient way possible, which is to say, electronically. Enthusiasts, aficionados, collectors, connoisseurs—bibliophiles—will buy and read physical books and will maintain physical libraries.

For this reason, mes auteurs, I think there will always be a market for physical books—particularly coffee table books or collector's editions, which don't translate as well to the electronic medium—but that market will surely become much smaller, while the overall market for books will increase. The e-book is the future of publishing; the book buff is the future of the physical book.

What do you think?

Panic! at the Library

As part of my ongoing coverage of the astounding (and often strange) turns the publishing industry is taking as it shifts from paper-based to electronic media, I bring you this, mes auteurs: The Consumerist's report that HarperCollins is capping e-book loans at 26 check-outs. If a library purchases a HarperCollins e-book, they can only lend it 26 times before it "expires" and the library must purchase a new license from the publisher.

This is, à mon avis, completely nuts for several reasons.

First, the idea of forced obsolescence is probably so repugnant to most librarians that, rather than buy and re-buy the same e-book over and over, they're probably just not going to purchase HarperCollins e-books.

The publisher seems to be betting on librarians' collective fear that if they don't stock their e-books, patrons will simply buy e-books on-line and the libraries won't be able to justify their continued existence. If there's a way to breed ill will among your customers (that is, the librarians actually purchasing books for their libraries), this is it.

Second, the number 26 seems completely arbitrary to me. I'm not privy to any of the logistical tinkering or number-crunching the folks at HarperCollins did in order to arrive at this figure, but it seems to me (and you can see from the video in the article) that physical books last much longer than 26 check-outs (and I can tell you from experience that they consistently survive many more).

It's possible that this is an average number that takes into account all the books that go on shelves and are never or rarely checked out, left to rot over a fifty-year period with only a couple of loans. If that's the case, though, libraries would chuck the book when it became unusable and would probably not buy a new one, since no one wanted the original to begin with.

If a publisher is going to enforce a loan cap, I think it 1.) needs to be much higher than 26 (based entirely on my uninformed opinion), and 2.) should vary depending on the work in question. Harry Potter and the Seven Figure Advance is going to be borrowed a lot more often than Actuarial Mathematics for Dummies, and the loan cap should reflect this.

Finally, the whole reason the loan cap exists is as an analogue to the wear and tear suffered by physical books that eventually need replacing. I think one of the most destructive tendencies inherent to the publishing industry is not its resistance to electronic media, but its slavish insistence on making them exactly like physical media.

Instead of panicking over a perceived loss in revenues caused by books that no longer need to be replaced, publishers should be touting the non-physical nature of e-books as a tremendous boon: "You'll never need to replace this e-book! That means that rather than buy a new copy of the same book, you can spend the money you'll save on more of our e-books."

E-books don't take up physical shelf space, so the limiting factor that once forced a librarian to choose between replacing a popular title that's worn out and purchasing a different title—that is, space—no longer exists. More titles sold is good for everyone.

My rant is over for today, meine Autoren, but what do you think? Should publishers be able to cap library loans, and if so, is 26 a reasonable number?

This Is A Business: Redux

I first made this point a little over a year ago, gentle readers, but it bears repeating.

The other day I overheard a conversation in which one book-loving acquaintance of mine expressed the opinion that selling e-books amounts to a betrayal of the physical book.

Let me be the first to say: this a bunch of maudlin nonsense.

The book business is precisely that, mes auteurs: a business. Yes, in many instances we're selling art, but I've always been of the opinion that the art of the book is almost always found in its content, not in its form; if a majority of consumers want their books electronically, any publisher or bookseller resisting that change will likely be driven out of business. If it sounds Darwinian, that's because it is. If you're not selling what people want, you're not going to be in business very long.

This isn't at all to say that the physical book is going extinct (though hardcover fiction may, à mon avis, be more or less gone within a few years)—I'm only saying that refusing to cultivate an electronic platform or sell e-books due to the misguided notion that you're somehow betraying an inanimate cultural medium is, well, childish. Books aren't people; they don't have feelings. Those who really love them will buy and sell them in whatever format is available.

The book is very old, cats & kittens, but before we had them we had scrolls and before that we had tablets and before that we had oral traditions. The codex—a book with a cover and pages—hasn't been around forever and it won't be around forever, and the sooner publishers, booksellers, and other industry insiders realize this and not only accommodate but embrace the changes that are revolutionizing the way people read, the better.