A large publishing house is often at war within itself. Usually only one side knows the war is happening (it's kind of a guerrilla war).
Most of the large publishers are, as you say, owned by larger corporations. The folks at the very top, who count the beans, are almost certainly not people who started out as an assistant-something at a publishing house, and often never worked in publishing before. (And even when they do have a publishing background, it's often from journals and magazines, which, despite falling sales, can still regularly and accurately predict how many copies they will sell each month. They always seem to have the hardest time understanding that books don't work like that.)
So I have watched more than one editor try to come up with plans to sell their books, where the plans had to take into account not the marketplace of readers, but the demand for instant results from the bosses upstairs. This usually translates to a major marketing push and splashy attention for a promising first novel. Unfortunately, they cannot do this for every novel.
One of the better strategies I've seen is the mass-market-original, three-books-in-rapid-succession series. It grabs that chunk of shelf space the five-book backlist used to, and it prevents severe drop-off between books in a series.
The three-books-at-once strategy has the benefit of being relatively inexpensive. The books are mass market paperbacks (low profit margin, but low overhead, too), the marketing of one is the marketing of all three, and if they don't perform, they still have the excuse of being first novels.
This doesn't work, however, with guys who do non-series, which perhaps explains why they are more and more likely to be mainstreamed, even when the books are clearly SF. (And yes, it happens more with SF, it seems to me. Perhaps because F is more series-driven.)
The problem is that editors want to publish more than one or two books per month. This means that a lot of books are the figurative spaghetti at the wall.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2009-04-21 02:48 pm (UTC)Most of the large publishers are, as you say, owned by larger corporations. The folks at the very top, who count the beans, are almost certainly not people who started out as an assistant-something at a publishing house, and often never worked in publishing before. (And even when they do have a publishing background, it's often from journals and magazines, which, despite falling sales, can still regularly and accurately predict how many copies they will sell each month. They always seem to have the hardest time understanding that books don't work like that.)
So I have watched more than one editor try to come up with plans to sell their books, where the plans had to take into account not the marketplace of readers, but the demand for instant results from the bosses upstairs. This usually translates to a major marketing push and splashy attention for a promising first novel. Unfortunately, they cannot do this for every novel.
One of the better strategies I've seen is the mass-market-original, three-books-in-rapid-succession series. It grabs that chunk of shelf space the five-book backlist used to, and it prevents severe drop-off between books in a series.
The three-books-at-once strategy has the benefit of being relatively inexpensive. The books are mass market paperbacks (low profit margin, but low overhead, too), the marketing of one is the marketing of all three, and if they don't perform, they still have the excuse of being first novels.
This doesn't work, however, with guys who do non-series, which perhaps explains why they are more and more likely to be mainstreamed, even when the books are clearly SF. (And yes, it happens more with SF, it seems to me. Perhaps because F is more series-driven.)
The problem is that editors want to publish more than one or two books per month. This means that a lot of books are the figurative spaghetti at the wall.