I just read a fascinating article about the sorry state of the book publishing industry. The article talks about the multiple factors all contributing to the “publishing malaise,” from “conglomeratization” to declining sales and profits, from “mega-advances” caused by “frenzied bidding wars” to the insane level of returns, from the rising power of the chains to overproduction of titles that in turn get too little time and attention from their publishers.

You might think I’m referring to Boris Kachka’s article, “The End,” in the September 22 issue of New York magazine. But no, I meant Franklin Foer’s article, “Book Publishing,” published in the online magazine “Slate”—on December 7, 1997.

Clearly, Kachka’s five-plus months of research (allegedly involving interviews with seventy-five publishing executives) have not turned up anything new about the challenges that have faced trade publishing continuously for the past decade.  Yes, these problems are still there. But it seems a shame that Kachka didn’t look at what has changed from 1997 to 2008 instead of repeating the same old themes.

For instance, in 1997, the top bestsellers often sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but in 2008, the biggest books have sold in the millions. The short end of the tail has moved higher up the graph.  Meanwhile, online bookselling has bolstered the long end of the tail, creating easy access to thousands of backlist titles that might not earn their spot on a physical shelf. These two differences offer significant good news for authors and publishers with top-selling titles such as The Shack, or The Last Lecture, or Eat, Pray, Love, and also for publishers with extensive backlists.

What’s new about the current situation is that the same escalation in sales for the biggest titles that has enriched Dan Brown has also created exponential inflation of advances for the books in the middle of the tail—the place where most trade publishing tries to make a living. After all, if a first thriller might be the next Da Vinci Code, why stop bidding at only a million?  If that book goes on to sell twelve million, you would have been a fool not to keep bidding past four…or maybe one last best bid at five…

The logic then follows that you should distribute several hundred thousand copies of this thriller, and spend several hundred thousand dollars marketing it. But since only one in twenty of these big “make fiction” titles will succeed, the other nineteen will experience 80% returns, and the publisher who has missed the jackpot will be out an ante of several million poker chips. In fact, the only way to recover will be to find another book whose profits might outweigh the losses of the first before the fiscal year ends.

To quote Kurt Vonnegut, “so it goes.” And goes, and goes, until the once-profitable middle is the worst possible place to be. And we’re left with an industry that can only do two things: gamble bigger and bigger on the next big thing and milk the backlist for all the new formats it might be worth. If this trend continues, we’ll all be the poorer for it, because the middle should be a place where we can take interesting chances without risking the farm, not a place we go to put our careers—and our corporate parents—on the line.

Bob