Fantastic Metropolis

Meanwhile, the literary SF mass-market paperback was being threatened by magazine jobbers—responsible for distributing and racking books in airports, drugstores, etc. This system produces more strip returns (mass-market “returns” are destroyed, not returned) than sales, a cost that was—and still is—hurting publishing. No publisher, though, wants to lose that rack space to another. One of the economic consequences of allowing this to go on is the transformation of mass-market into the home of the lowest common denominators of fiction: the bestseller (expensive to acquire, but with a potential for tremendous sales) and the potboiler (cheap to acquire, but a good way to fill racks with your titles). Anything else is considered too expensive to publish and/or too meager in profit.

Except for a few isolated cases, the displacement of literary SF from mass-market to trade paperback has been a disaster. Contrary to their mainstream counterparts, genre readers do not favor that format. (The mystery trade paperback has also not been a great success.) I’ve witnessed it time and time again: when most genre shoppers are confronted with a title in trade paperback, they feel robbed and cheated—and express it vocally. More often than not, they’ll choose not to buy a particular book because of its price and format.

In genre fiction, trade paperback publication greatly reduces the potential market of a book. Reduced readership for an author’s current book or backlist means reduced potential readership for any future work by that author. Although the higher price tag may mean a higher immediate return for the publisher, it’s also a case of squeezing more and more money out of an ever-shrinking customer base—and depending on a gradually smaller pool of patrons is unhealthy for any kind of business.

Of course, publishers are under no obligation to publish the kind of fiction I love. Sometimes, I marvel that anyone ever does. Nevertheless, if they’re going to the trouble, I wish they’d do it in a way that would ensure its survival in the marketplace, instead of propelling it towards extinction—albeit unwillingly.

Is anything really accomplished when a publisher, say St. Martin’s or Tor, releases books by new, unknown authors in hardcover? Who will buy these books? The publisher claims poor hardcover sales when it declines to publish a paperback, or—in the case of Tor—refuses mass-market publication and opts for a trade paperback that is not only too expensive for many consumers of genre fiction but also more expensive than the trade paperbacks of any other major publisher. Authors are left with poor sales and no publishing contract because no publisher wants to take a risk on authors who have “proved” themselves poor sellers, even if the fault lies with the publisher’s marketing strategies. For all my problems with the content and cover design of the titles published by Bean Books, I admire and respect Bean’s understanding of the potential of the mass-market original to build a growing and faithful audience for a writer. Look at David Weber or Lois McMaster Bujold: their steady flow of mass-market originals was a decisive factor in their success. Tor is so wary of mass-market publishing that, for example, during the long wait between Kim Stanley Robinson’s second and third Mars books—despite the large, eager audience for Robinson’s work—it kept his backlist, to which it had the rights, in trade paperback only, out of reach of a large chunk of the author’s market.

There are ways to reduce publishing costs, to name a few: publish mass-market books available only directly to bookstores (already Bantam offers its Bantam Classics imprint under such a system); implement maximum returnability plateaus (not just to independents, but to chains and wholesalers also); fire a few overpaid corporate executives (instead of laying off low-paid employees who actually get a lot of work done).

These solutions favor long-term health, growth, and profit, to which corporate publishing—like all other corporate entities—is blind, caring mostly for the bottom line at the end of any given year, the immediate wealth of its executives and shareholders, and the saleability of the company to another corporation.

In North America, Cordwainer Smith’s books can only be found in hardcover (praise NESFA that they’re available at all); Roger Zelazny’s This Immortal, The Dream Master, and Lord of Light, all long considered essential SF reading, are out-of-print; James Tiptree, Jr. has disappeared from the mass-market shelves; and none of Robert Silverberg’s multitude of classic SF novels and collections are in print.

Currently, at best, the state of literary SF publishing, mass-market or otherwise, can be described as precarious, its future grim and uncertain.