All Crisis,
All the Time
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (FEBRUARY 2001)
In
an address to the Publishers Lunch Club last month,
industry veteran Tom McCormack looked back on
forty years in publishing, finding that the more things
change, the more they stay the same. Here’s a condensed
version of his remarks.
When I first came down to New York, some folks asked
me why I was going into a doomed industry. Couldn’t
I see that television was going to kill book-reading
dead? In the years since, I’ve heard again and again
that the industry had struck an iceberg. I was told
we were holed below the waterline by videos, CD-ROMs,
computers, and even books themselves — which is to say
that in 1975, Walter Meade of Avon mass
market told me to get out of hardcover fiction because
in five years there wasn’t going to be any. Later I
was told — and also did not believe — that Barnes
& Noble would assassinate publishing as we know
it.
In fact, of the changes I’ve seen, many have been merely
an increase or decrease in size. Take chain stores.
They’re not new; my first employer had the Doubleday
bookshops chain, though it was a small one. The media
today notice and decry the rise of mega-publishers,
but those of you with keen memories can testify that,
throughout the forty years, small or fading publishers
were constantly being acquired by bigger brethren —
John Day, Sun, Orion, Crowell,
Lippincott, Rawson, Atheneum, Pantheon,
Schocken, Scribner’s. But new publishers
have always been born at a greater rate than older ones
were dying.
We’ve seen the decline of the importance of independent
bookstores. But do you want to know something? Nobody
in this nation knows for sure how many independents
there are today. When I last tried a count in 1996,
there were more independents than in 1986. And there
were more in ’86 than in ’76 — and so back through this
century. It always makes the news when an indie goes
out of business, never when a new one is opened up.
I remember two years ago, there was an elegiac article
when a certain indie closed its doors. That same week,
three new stores opened in New York — and you never
read a word about it.
Here are three more constants in our industry. One:
The alleged pundits, and the industry statistics they
rely on, are consistently wrong. Two: We as an industry
have always been very bad at wooing the right personnel.
I mean this in two senses. We’re weak at filling the
bottom jobs — that is, at recruiting the best and the
brightest coming out of college. And we’re even worse
at filling the top jobs. Take down an LMP of
eight or ten years ago and read who the CEOs and eds-in-chief
were. Recall how, when they had those jobs, they looked
like they knew something. Notice how many aren’t there
anymore. The third consistent fact of life in the book
industry involves the media. The good news is, The
New York Times is the best newspaper in the world.
The bad news is, The New York Times is the best
newspaper in the world. The basic fact is the media
know next to nothing about our business. The only difference
from 1959 is that back then at least they never pretended
to understand the business side.
One regrettable change we might agree on has been that
so few of the large-house CEOs of today came up through
editorial. In the earlier years at St. Martin’s,
even when I was a CEO, I was an editor. In 1977 I signed
111 books, and one of them was The Far Pavilions
by M.M. Kaye. I took Mollie’s fifteen-hundred
page manuscript off to the hills of Pennsylvania, and
worked on it for three weeks. By my final years in publishing,
however, my annual signings were down to 25, and I was
lucky to edit ten of them. Why? Because St. Martin’s
— which billed $2 million in sales in 1959 — was approaching
$300 million by the late ’90s. I was drafted onto the
boards of seven companies around the world. I had little
time left for sitting down with authors.
In looking forward, for a quirky new perspective, think
of the rise of online bookselling as analogous to the
rise of book clubs between the wars. The clubs serviced
people where there weren’t any bookstores. As more retail
outlets were created, club growth flattened. One of
their responses was to develop niche clubs. I remember
once selling a St. Martin’s title to The Waterfowling
Book Club. That one club took four times more copies
than we placed in all the bookstores in America. Online
selling is a new and severe threat to clubs, but it
won’t kill them. What clubs continue to do for their
members is winnow and select.
In the end, the history of our industry reveals that
change was always with us, and that suggests it always
will be. We’ll get bigger, and more efficient, and new
stuff will arise. But remember: We always notice change.
We’re slower to notice what stays fundamentally the
same.
©2001
Publishing Trends
