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.
