From: Katherine Kerr
to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/KatharineKerr/
message #131, titled "Various"

Donah asked about the publishing situation. Yes indeed, this is happening to a lot of authors, particularly in the USA, but it may start happening in the UK, too.
When I wrote to Ed originally, I was feeling quite depressed about it, but as I mentioned, there is probably hope for Deverry because of the decent foreign sales. Others may not be so lucky.

The situation in genre publishing has been deteriorating for many many years, but what sparked this last round is the mega-merger phenomenon.
My first publisher in the US was Doubleday, who got eaten by Bertelsmann and combined with Bantam and Dell.
Recently Bertelsmann bought Random House, which had already glommed onto Ace and Del Rey. This means that Bertelsmann, a German firm, owns something like 65% of all SF and Fantasy published in the US.

In the UK, Rupert Murdoch is in the same position thanks to HarperCollins UK.
When these mega-deals go down, they aren't paid in cash -- all the money is borrowed, and at the prime commercial rate. This means just servicing the interest is a horrendous sum. What's more, publishing is a high-risk business.
Now, the corporate types putting these deals together expect a high risk to return a high profit, eventually. The reasonable return (pure after-tax and everything profit) to expect from a publishing firm is about 8% in a good year. The corporate masters want at least 15% and more likely 18%. (These figures are from my agent.)

So how do they get it? They squeeze every penny they can out of the people who actually do the work, first off, and I don't just mean authors. Editors, production people, art directors, cover artists, and so on -- none of them were making a princely sum anyway.
To save money, corporations downsize, that is, they don't cut people's pay, they just increase their work load savagely. Doubleday SF had 4 editors each with an assistant; to put out the same amount of books, Bantam Spectra has 2 editors and one assistant, not for each, just one.

Next they turn to "product." This is what books are to them, product, like dog food or toothpaste.
It costs the same amount of money to print and bind a bestseller as it does midlist. Ergo, they only want bestsellers -- except of course, no one really knows what makes some books huge and others, better written even, moderate.
So they are forced to allow editors to buy new names.
A first novel has about 6 weeks to make it, that is, to get enough chain store orders and customer sales to meet whatever quota has been assigned. No one tells the authors what these quotas are, of course, but for a first book, they're fairly low.

For the second book, however, they jump up. If you don't meet that quota, there won't be a third book, which is why so many trilogies are never finished. At this point too you run into something called "ordering to the net." That is, a chain store will onl reorder the number of copies of a new book by an author as their first book sold. It's very easy to drop off the quota board.

Publishers also have quotas on how many copies a month a book must sell to stay in print. If your book drops below, it's pulled out of print immediately, on that one month's performance.

Now, in this situation, it's extremely easy for volumes of a series to go out of print, and once one goes, the later ones follow. Oddly enough, this hasn't happened with any of the Deverry books -- they are all selling well enough to stay in print. For a series this long, it's a marvel. However, there's been a new rule added: series books must "earn out" their advance in a year, or the editor may not buy the next book.

I had a two-book contract for RED WYVERN and BLACK RAVEN. WYVERN did not earn out in a year -- why? They only printed a small number of trade paperbacks. All of those sold, and they refused to reprint, but they hadn't printed enough for the book to earn out in the first place.
They were stuck with RAVEN, because it was under contract. When my editor went to buy THE FIRE DRAGON, however, her boss said no. She fought for the book, and so did my agent, and it was a hard fight.

The upshot was a compromise. THE FIRE DRAGON will come out from Bantam, but only as a mass-market paperback, and I got half the advance I'd received on the others. In other words, it was demoted to the bottom rung. Both my agent and I doubt, therefore, that Bantam will buy Book 12 -- even though it will be the last in the series. In other words, they will cut off a series rather than end it if the raw numbers dictate.

Probably my agent will be able to sell #12 to a small genre publisher here in the States because of the high performance in Europe and the UK. Other authors are not so lucky. So if all your favorite series suddenly disappear in mid-stream, you now know why.

Kit

Permission reference follows:
Yahoo! Groups : KatharineKerr Messages :
Message 17208
KatharineKerr@...., "Katharine Kerr" wrote:
: Ed, yes you may.
: Kit

Thanks, miLady. I'd even invite you to update those comments with fresh info if you have new news about such matters.
We have some pertinent discussions going at the HiEbook Yahoogroup, where it seems that the HiEbook hasn't been the topic of any conversation for about a month. :)
I plan to repost your comments there as an example of some of the realities of paper-pubbing that epubbers shouldn't allow to happen.
Thanks again,
Ed Howdershelt - Abintra Press
Science Fiction & Semi-Fiction
http://abintrapress.netfirms.com

: ----- Original Message -----
: From: "auwg"
: To: KatharineKerr@....
: Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2002 11:04 PM
: Subject: [KatharineKerr] Re: Various
: : Question: May I quote some or all of this message
: : (#131) on my website? I've been trying to make a
: : similar point concerning how books are viewed and
: : marketed by the large conglomerates.
: : Maybe seeing essentially the same words from a
: : noted author will have more impact.
: : Thanks,
: : Ed Howdershelt - Abintra Press