Fantastic Metropolis

Author’s note: I originally wrote this piece in the summer of 1998. Publishing is a constantly evolving business. Therefore, some details no longer reflect the current situation, but the overall climate still follows my pessimistic scenario much too closely. I’ve added a new coda (Coda Redux: 2002) that briefly discusses some new developments; otherwise, here is the piece—with minor edits—as I conceived it in 1998.

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I have recently emerged from twelve years spent in the trenches of the publishing industry: retail bookselling. For most of that time, my principal function was that of owner, manager, and buyer of Nebula, a specialty SF bookshop in downtown Montreal, which I founded in 1989 and then sold in June of 1998. The world of book retailing and I had been evolving in ways that, increasingly, did not make for easy cohabitation. Throughout this period, my love for challenging fiction, especially genre-bending works and literary SF, stood—and still stands—unmollified. This love affair, like so many others, made me vulnerable to the inevitable reality of loss—in this case a slow process which has long saddened me: the disappearance of the literary SF mass-market paperback. If love and loss are the subtext here, then the context is my experience as a bookseller.

1989: An Overview

UK publishers were putting out an astonishing quantity of books, including much of the fiction that was piquing my interest, and keeping many more classic titles in print than their North American colleagues. Lou Aronica was publishing many good genre books for Bantam, although they unfortunately went out of print rather quickly. St. Martin’s may not have published a great number of genre titles, but the few that it did publish proved to be admirably quirky and erudite (and, important in light of later developments, most of these were seeing both hardcover and mass-market publication). Carroll & Graf, a newer publisher, was carefully selecting and releasing, in mass-market, choice titles from the heritage of genre fiction, hence bringing back into print many neglected classics. Small press publishers seemed plentiful and healthy, with a wealth of new titles coming out every season. There were good books aplenty, many of them in affordable mass-market editions, making it all the easier for me to get pleasure in the dissemination of the literature I cared for and loved. Miraculously, Montreal was home to no other SF bookshop. So there I was, poised to spread the good words of Geoff Ryman, J.G. Ballard, Michael Blumlein, Garry Kilworth, Lucius Shepard, and their ilk to the reading public. And for many years, that’s just what I did.

The Disappearance of the Literary SF Mass-Market Paperback

In 1989, the literary SF mass-market paperback was already showing signs that it was on its way to becoming an endangered species. R.A. Lafferty, a critically acclaimed, award-winning author whose writings had influenced many of the fantasists who came into prominence in the 1980s, now had to rely on extremely obscure small presses to get his books published—many of which were created to ensure the continued availability of his work. These and other small presses were indispensable and many good books might never have seen print if not for their existence, made necessary by a publishing climate that was gradually less receptive to midlist literary SF: publishers were infatuated with the lucrative ascension of the fantasy/quest series that were catering to the big markets created by role-playing and the Star Wars films and with the temptation of equating SF with easily marketable tie-in novels. Simon & Schuster had closed its adventurous SF line, Timescape, a few years previously and had opted, when it came to SF, to concentrate solely on Star Trek novels.

Bantam had started to experiment with marketing and packaging the paperbacks of some of its more literary SF authors (John Crowley, Lucius Shepard) in what was becoming a lucrative format and genre for publishers, the literary trade paperback. Vintage and Harcourt Brace were well on their way to successfully repackaging their entire paperback lines in this way, with other literary publishers, like Penguin for example, not far behind. These Bantam books were not marketed as SF, though the covers of this unsuccessful, short-lived line were cleverly designed in a way to potentially appeal to both mainstream and genre readers.

(Here I need to specify that when I talk of trade paperbacks in this text, I mean only books reprinted, from hardcover or mass-market, into a trade paperback format—and not trade paperback originals, which are something different in the life of a book.)

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.

 

Coda: 1998

Around the world publishers have all swallowed each other, including in the UK, where it resulted in the disappearance of many imprints and in a radical reduction of the number of in-print genre classics. Lou Aronica is still fighting the good fight, publishing good genre and genre-bending books for Avon, emphasizing mass-market publishing and even offering a $3.99 selection every month to help foster an audience for emerging writers of note. St. Martin’s publishes good, quirky genre-bending fiction that much too rarely makes it to any paperback format, virtually ensuring its long-term obscurity. Carroll & Graf’s program of reprinting genre classics has dwindled away into oblivion. After years of slim pickings, genre small presses are making a careful comeback. There are good books being published, though increasingly few of them in affordable mass-market editions, radically reducing the potential number of readers who feel they can purchase these, or any, books. So here I am lamenting the corporate accounting strategies that rule today’s publishing world, hoping that there will always be a place on publishers’ lists for works by William Browning Spencer, Kim Newman, Rachel Pollack, Robert Reed, Paul Di Filippo, and other writers of vision and integrity—and an audience to welcome them.

 

Coda Redux: 2002

Since I originally wrote this piece, more classics have returned to print. A few examples: Vintage has expanded its successful marketing of Philip K. Dick to “literary” mainstream audiences to other classic sciencefictioneers such as Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, and Samuel Delany; Del Rey has launched a line devoted to reprinting genre classics (although for the most part it is simply repackaging books that were previously available in mass-market into trade paperback); Gollancz has recently been reissuing SF classics in a variety of formats; and print-on-demand (POD)—a new player responsible for the lion’s share of classic reprints—has entered the arena.

Vintage’s strategy is a good one. I’ve seen its attractively designed line of literary SF trade paperbacks racked with mainstream fiction as much as with SF. What Vintage is doing is expanding the market for these writers. An incentive for new readers: the price point for these books is at the lower end of trade-paperback pricing. Meanwhile, Tor still prices its trade paperbacks too high to attract new readers in any appreciable number. I wish someone would follow Vintage’s lead with a line of books by active SF writers.

For the most part, diversity in the genre lists—in any format—of the big publishers is dwindling. More and more, all we’re seeing is novels by the top-selling writers, copycat series, and generic potboilers. One shining exception is John Jarrold’s Earthlight imprint over at Simon & Schuster UK. For example, Earthlight has been publishing a string of high-quality literary SF mass-market originals by writers such as Richard Calder and Eugene Byrne. In the US, David Hartwell edits two annual mass-market best-of series that ensure that mass-market readers will still have access to current trends in SF and fantasy short fiction. But the general state of SF publishing is better exemplified by Al Sarrantonio’s recent Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, a bloated and pretentious anthology that self-importantly compares itself to Dangerous Visions while its contents—with perhaps a handful of exceptions—are dreadfully banal and in no way visionary.

Small presses—both traditional and POD —are responsible for an important portion of the exciting work being published. To name a few: Golden Gryphon is releasing an impressive string of hardcover-only story collections by a diverse range of contemporary genre writers; PS publishes important new novellas in limited editions (to be later reprinted in omnibus hardcovers by Gollancz); POD publishers like Big Engine and Cosmos are putting into print both classic and new works that might otherwise not find a home; and one of 2001’s best SF novels—Ernest Hogan’s Smoking Mirror Blues—was published by Wordcraft of Oregon. I admire the work of these publishers, but I can’t help but wonder: Who reads these books besides the select few aficionados actively hunting them out?

As for literary SF mass-market paperbacks… the future still looks grim. Nevertheless, editors such as John Jarrold and David Hartwell soldier on, proving that, while desperate, the situation is not hopeless.