A View From Corona #12

Jeremy Lassen | July 26th 2003 at 12:52 pm

“The solitary, steep hill called Corona Heights was black as pitch and very silent, like the heart of the unknown. It looked steadily downward and northeast away at the nervous, bright lights of Downtown San Francisco as if it were a great predatory beast of night surveying its territory in patient search of prey.”

- Fritz Leiber, Our Lady Of Darkness

Time for some semi-random free association observations about the industry that I love to hate to love – Books and Publishing. The industry as a whole dodged a MAJOR bullet recently when debt-ridden mega-media-corp AOL-Time Warner decided to NOT sell off their publishing division. There are currently 6 major publishing houses that publish the majority of books sold in this country, and it was looking like this Big 6 might become the Big 5. The Other corporate media giants in the publishing world were leery of paying the $400 million asking price, because of fears that top tier authors and editors (and top tier distribution clients like DC comics) would leave the Time-Warner Publishing ship like rats leaving a sinking ship.

Which is sort of ironic, because one of the rumored bidders on the Division was Random House – which is another way of saying German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Bertelsmann, who previously owned Bantam/Doubleday/Dell and all their associated imprints, bought up Random House (and all of THEIR associated imprints) in a 1998 deal that made Bertelsmann the largest English Language publishing house in the world, and is still sending shockwaves through the industry. Bertelsmann has spent the last 5 years reorganizing and streamlining its many competing imprints, shaking up senior editors, and in the last couple of years, instituting massive cost saving measures.

It is Ironic that Bertelsmann had been courting the sinking ship AOL Time Warner, because Bertelsmann has been looking like a ship that, while not sinking, has at least been floundering. Random House fired its Editor-In-Chief, Ann Godoff for “not generating enough profit.” Within a week, Bertelsmann’s competitor Penguin Group snatched Ms.Godoff up, and made her head of her own brand new imprint. At the same time, Bertelsmann is selling its 44-story Time Square office building. Apparently Bertelsmann is suffering under large dept loads just as AOL Time Warner is. While the image of the formerly ravenous media conglomerates who ate everything before them and are now wandering around in a kind of “food stoned” state of over-indulgence might be kind of funny, there is no fun in seeing the damage that their short sighted policies have caused the industry.

The publishing industry has instituted the same kind of blockbuster ideology that has destroyed Hollywood, and the music industry. Small books don’t matter, even if they make you a small profit. It’s all about the summer blockbuster.

In the new paradigm, every book needs to sell, and needs to sell large quantities, regardless of literary or artistic merit. Traditionally, publishers have helped build the career of promising authors. An author’s first book may not make any money, but it has literary merit, and the author shows promise. The second book by that author might only break even, but the author is getting better over time, and is starting to get rave critical reviews. The third book by said author generates a cult following which generates a buzz and word of mouth that catapults the authors next few books to the best seller lists, and insure that the earlier titles sell in steady numbers as backlist titles. This is how it is supposed to be. This is how best selling authors of quality fiction have been created in the past. This is how (and why) publishing (and the music industry for that matter) has worked in the past. And for the most part, it is not doing it this way any more. The industry is broken on the wheel of best sellers, and corporate profit expectations.

Now every book has to be commercially viable, and make a lot of money by itself. If a book doesn’t sell, there is no second or third book by the author. To make matters worse, every editor must constantly be on guard. An editor is only as good as his last few books, and if they don’t sell, (for whatever reason), said editor could find him or her self out of a job quickly. So, not only is there pressure for every book to succeed, there is no long term stability, so there is no incentive for editors to groom a young author over the long term, because the editor probably won’t be with the company in 3 years anyway.

This blockbuster mentality has completely infected New York publishing. I have heard second hand accounts from this years Book Expo about New York SF editors gibbering with excitement about getting big name author X to do media-tie in Y, and gushing about how many “units” they can move, with nary a word about any new, up-and-coming or exciting young authors.

A well-respected genre editor from a large New York house proclaimed at a convention “We don’t NEED to do collections… The small press publishers like Golden Gryphon do a fine job of it, so we can concentrate on novels.” So they can concentrate on the big name blockbusters, in other words. Because they AREN’T concentrating on novels. This editor’s company recently dropped a first time author after his novel didn’t become a blockbuster. Not long after his publisher had dropped him, this novel went on to win a prestigious industry award for best first novel. 30 years ago, this author would have had astute editors giving him multi-book deals. Now, his second book is coming out from a small, independent genre publisher. New York is producing an astonishing number of first novels, but second novels are getting rarer, and third novels are practically an extinct animal.

In today’s climate, an acknowledged master like Gene Wolfe would never have gotten a second or third novel published. In fact… I would hazard to say that without David Hartwell, most of Gene Wolfe’s work would not be in print today. As a senior editor at Tor Mr. Hartwell has done a great job of advocating for quality material. And Patrick Nielsen Hayden – who oversees the Orb line of classic reprints – has helped ensure the genre’s history won’t be lost. But, at the end of the day, even senior editors at one of the largest SF/Fantasy/horror publishing houses find themselves at the mercies of big media accountants and marketing types that insist a book is only as good as its initial six months of sales.

I had tense conversation with a New York publishing professional at the con-suite of the World Horror Convention a few years back. A fan asked why Joe Lansdale continued to publish with small press publishers like Subterranean. I pointed out that for most of the 80’s, and early nineties, New York publishers had no idea HOW to publish and market Joe Lansdale… and that publishers like Subterranean had repeatedly found ways to successfully publish and promote Joe’s work to a wider and wider range of people, and that Joe was an honorable guy who continued to work with people who did right by him. I suggested that New York’s problems with “orphaning” books had a lot to do with their inability to sell Joe Lansdale on a regular basis.

A small digression… (if you know what orphaning is, skip to the next paragraph.) When an editor gets sacked from conglomerate A, the editor still has many projects in the pipeline… but editor A’s replacement, editor B, has no vested interest in ensuring that those books get the kind of promotion and support that they need to succeed in the marketplace. If editor A’s leftover books do good, it is a reflection of A’s good taste, and not B’s, so sometimes, editor B might actively try and sabotage a book, so that B’s books do better than A’s book, thereby justifying the decision to sack A and hire B. Further, editor B is probably not going to want to continue working with A’s authors… Editor B has his or her own favorite authors, and has no interests in continuing to work with A’s authors, unless they are blockbuster best sellers, and if the authors were blockbuster best sellers, Editor A probably wouldn’t have been fired to begin with. (As a side note, this is exactly what happened to Norman Partridge at Berkley, to his Jack Battleaxe series of mysteries. The Editor who acquired the series left, and the new editor had no interest in continuing this otherwise successful and popular series…).

The New York pro that heard me talking about the shortcomings of the New York Industry apparently took my observations personally, and proceeded to tell me in no uncertain terms that my reasons had nothing to do with why New York couldn’t sell Joe Lansdale. This person insisted that Joe Lansdale’s work was “slipstream”, and that there wasn’t a market for “slipstream” in the 80’s. This person went on to say that New York’s failure to sell books by one of the most creative and inspired voices of the late 80’s and early 90’s was because one of his PBO mystery novels had a gruesome cover that turned people off. These explanations (errr-I mean-excuses) further demonstrated my point… if you can’t put a neat, easy label on the book, the New York Marketing departments have difficulty knowing what to do with it, and if one book fails (because the marketing department put a bad cover on it, for example), a publisher looses faith/interest in an author, regardless how good he/she is. And no disrespect intended to said New York Industry Professional, but SLIPSTREAM!??!?!!?!?!? I’ve heard Joe Lansdale’s work called a lot of things, but never that.

Lets take a look at the major players in the publishing industry right now. I’m only mentioning the major adult/trade imprints of the conglomerates, but assume that educational and children’s imprints are owned by these behemoths, as well. Also, by the time you are reading this, many more mergers, shakeups and dissolution of lines may have occurred. But this is a good place to start.
As mentioned earlier, AOL-Time Warner’s publishing assets represent a huge chunk of the industry. (http://www.twbookmark.com/index.html). Their major imprints are Little Brown and Warner Books. Little brown is the literary side of the house, and Warner Books has all the genre lines, like Mysterious Press, and Warner Aspect. Warner is simple enough, but this is as simple as it gets because Warner Publishing is the smallest of the six.

Next Up on the hit parade is Penguin Group, AKA Penguin-Putnam. In their own words “Penguin Group (USA) Inc. is the U.S. affiliate of the internationally renowned Penguin Group, the second-largest English-language trade book publisher in the world. Formed in 1996 as a result of the merger between Penguin Books USA and The Putnam Berkley Group.” Penguin Group’s adult imprints are:

· Ace Books
· Avery
· Berkley Books
· Dutton
· Gotham Books
· G.P. Putnam’s Sons
· HPBooks
· Jeremy P. Tarcher
· Jove
· New American Library
· Penguin
· Perigee
· Plume
· Portfolio
· Riverhead Books
· Viking

Penguin Group, and its UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa affiliates is owned by the Pearson Group, who’s other major media assets include Pearson education group, and the Financial Times group.

Bertelsmann, as mentioned above, is the 800lb gorilla, that owns everything and everyone. Everything is centralized, under the umbrella of Random House. Here is a list of some of their major organizational units (basically, the smaller companies Bertelsmann has swallowed.). Note that each of these groups has several imprints associated with it that were often originally independent publishing companies in their own right.

· Ballantine Group (includes Ballantine, Del Rey, Fawcette, and Ivy)
· Bantam Dell Publishing Group (Includes Bantam, Crimeline, Delacorte Press, Dell, Delta, Domain, DTP Fanfare, Island, Spectra, and The Dial Press)
· Crown Publishing Group (Includes Bell Tower, Clarkson Potter, Crown, Harmony, Prima, Sharey Areheart books, and Three Rivers)
· Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group (Includes Broadway books, Currency, Doublday, Mainstreet Books, and Nan A. Talese)
· Knopf Publishing Group (Knopf, Anchor, Everyman’s Library, Pantheon Books, Schocken Books, and Vintage)
· RandomHouse Adult Trade (RH Trade Group, Villard Books, the Modern Library, and Strivers Row Books)
· Random House international includes Transworld (Bantam UK), and Random House UK..

One of the major US owned conglomerates is Viacom … the cable/broadcast-TV/movie-production-company that is all about synergy, and uses its many publishing imprints to bring you tie-in novels to their TV shows and movies. Viacom’s publishing assets are controlled by Simon & Schuster. In their own words “Simon & Schuster publishes more than 2,100 titles annually under 38 well-known trade, mass market, children’s and new media imprints.” Lets take a closer look at Simon and Schuster. They have a relatively modest number of adult trade imprints:

· The Free Press
· Scribner
· Simon & Schuster
· Pocket Books
· Kaplan
· Atria Books

Notice the lack of SF imprints?! Simon & Schuster used to do their own SF line in house… first as Pocket Books SF in the 70’s, and then as Timescape. But they shitcanned that imprint in the early 80’s, and decided that they would distribute someone else’s SF line, and simply take a percentage of that. That someone else would be Baen Books. Another relatively new genre player that Viacom distributes is Ibooks: A mostly-reprint publishing house put together by Byron Priess.

The OTHER German media conglomerate would be Von Holtzbrinck Publishing Services, or VHPS. Details of their many imprints can be found at the Macmillan web site. Major US houses include:

· Farrar, Straus and Giroux
· Henry Holt
· St Martin’s Press
· Tor
· Picador USA

UK holdings include:

· Pan-Macmillan
· Tor UK (which is essentially the SF imprint of Pan-Macmillan, and has nothing to do with Tom Doherty’s US line, Tor except they are both owned by VHPS)
· Picador
· Boxtree
· Channel 4 Books
· Sidgwick and Jackson
· Papermac

A concise little history of VHPS, and its various imprints, from Tor’s point of view, can be found at the Tor website.

Don’t forget Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. When they are not producing episodes of the Simpsons, or being the Propaganda Ministry for the neo-conservative thugs that have infiltrated the US government, they publish books as Harper Collins. In their own words “HarperCollins is one of the leading English-language publishers in the world and is a subsidiary of News Corporation. Headquartered in New York, the company has publishing groups in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia.” Imprints include:

· Access
· Amistad
· Caedmon
· Avon
· Ecco
· Eos
· Fourth Estate
· HarperCollins
· HarperSanFrancisco
· HarperTorch
· Perennial
· PerfectBound
· Quill
· Rayo
· ReganBooks
· William Morrow

In the SF and fantasy genre’s there are three big “independent” publishers. Tor, Bean and Daw. I mentioned Tor earlier – they were sold to a larger company in 1986, which in turn was sold to a VHPS. The original founder of Tor still runs the company, and VHPS seems to grant it’s affiliates more leeway then most conglomerates, but Tor is not really an “independent.”

Baen books was founded by Jim Baen in 1983. It arose phoenix like, out of the ashes that was Pocket Book’s SF imprint, Timescape. Pocket decided to get out of the SF game altogether (except for Star trek novels, which were, ironically enough, created by David Hartwell as part of the Timescape line.). Simon & Schuster filled the SF niche by distributing Bean’s line of Science Fiction. You may like or dislike the type of fiction Baen publishes, but his company publishes in classic “old school” style of publishing. He takes risks on new authors. He builds authors. He has established a brand, and has remained faithful to that brand.
The other remaining independent is DAW. DAW was founded in 1971 by veteran paperback editor Donald A. Wollheim, along with his wife, Elsie B. Wollheim. Much like Baen does with Simon and Schuster, DAW has a distribution relationship with Penguin Group. They are, however still a strong, independent publishing company. While the original founders have passed away, it still remains a family business. A wonderful history of DAW, and the Wollheim family can be found as the introduction to the recent DAW anniversary anthology.

That pretty much sums up the state of the “New York Publishing Industry,” as it relates in to the Adult trade book market in general, and specifically, to the SF/Fantasy and Horror genres. I’ve probably missed numerous smaller players, and probably several larger players. If you have any company history or dirt, or interesting office gossip that I may have missed, please feel free to send it to me. This column has been, in the tradition of really bad SF, a straight info-dump, with no plot, or theme to speak of. However, I hope that this little bit of industry history and personal anecdote will give you a better idea why I’m so relieved that this incestuous little industry did NOT suddenly get even more incestuous.

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Post script: Shortly after writing this column, it was announced that Simon & Schuster would be cutting it’s UK SF imprint, Earthlight. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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