THE PUBLISHING DEATH SPIRAL

part one--The Cold Equations

I know I’m going to make an enemy or two or more with this, many writers in the same
position have kept their mouths shut about it publicly for fear of being blackballed. But
I’m approaching 70, after 4 decades and over 20 books as a published novelist, I haven’t
been able to find an American publisher for MEXICA, a best-seller in Mexico, or
OSAMA THE GUN, just published in a major way in France by my major French
publisher Fayard, so I don’t have much fear left since I’ve already been screwed in the
United States by the Death Spiral. And I just at least temporarily slammed death’s door
into the Grim Reaper’s face, which does give you a kind of fatalistic existential courage,
and I’m the guy who put the words into Julius Caesar’s mouth in THE DRUID KING:
“We’ve made an enemy of someone who it would have been much better to have had as a
friend.”
And so you have. And if you don’t yet know who you are, you soon will. So fuck it,
and on to the barricades!
###
Among themselves, writers already have a term for what corporate conglomerate
publishing in conjunction with the major bookstore chains, all two of them, and
something called BookScan, which not at all incidentally is an arm of the Nielsen
corporation which runs the TV rating service, has done to writers, readers, and the
literary culture and biz as a whole in the United States.
We call it the Death Spiral.
Here is some recent correspondence between me an an editor who I have very good
reason to believe is being totally sincere and honest about POLICE STATE, a long
treatment for a novel of no projected great length.
“Norman-
Thanks for sending the attached, which is a tremendous piece of writing. In an
honest world, I could publish Police State in a second and the NY Times type critics
would line up to rave about the book’s virtues.
In this world, I’m afraid it’s just not a book I could get support for, so with much
regret, I’m going to have to pass. Like He Walked, via the French publication and
your online avenues, the Police State will gain its audience regardless and someone
in the US will eventually find a way to champion the novel as it deserves.
In the meantime, thanks very much for the read which again, is truly impressive.”
I’ve made this treatment freely available on the Net, but here is the URL again on my
blogsite NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE so that you can judge for yourself whether he
was whistling Dixie or not: http://www.scribd.com/doc/33883271/POLICE-STATE-
novel-and-or-film-treatment

#####

“I'd be curious to know how such a positive and apparently sincerely praising
opinion ends up as a rejection. In other words, what gives in this current publishing
world that results in such a paradox? The knowledge of what the hell is going on
might prove useful in the future. Or the present.
Regards,
Norman”
Not having been born yesterday, and having been three term President of the Science
Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, having written a book about the business end of
writing called perhaps excessively hopefully STAYIN’ ALIVE, I pretty much knew what
the answer would be, but also being a sometime journalist, I wanted confirmation from an
independent source.
######
“Norman-
The problem really lies with your sales track. The books, unfortunately including
He Walked, just aren’t selling. Thus, at this point, the only way a book like Police
State could be published effectively is if the absolute head of a publishing company
took a personal interest, and elected to spend the 10’s of thousands of dollars in co-
op money it would take to get a decent number of copies into the marketplace. I’m
afraid that’s not going to happen here.
I wish I could help. Power in this day and age in terms of “cutting edge” fiction has
(as I’m sure you’re aware) largely left the hands of conventional publishers. Rather,
the guys who are making it now are doing so off of their web presence, having
established themselves as counter-culture figures at large on the net.”

In other words, here is an acquisitions editor displaying passionate literary enthusiasm for
a novel proposal he is not only being forced to reject but is self-censoring himself by not
even bothering to try to get it through the publishing machinery, in part because he knows
he will fail, and too many failed efforts to champion books on literary grounds that don’t
make it through the cold equations will damage his credibility with the publishing
committee and/or the aforementioned honcho or honcha if there actually is one and in
the end might cost him his job.

What cold equations?

The cold equations of the Death Spiral.

Here’s how it works. Barnes and Noble and Borders, the major bookstore chains, control
the lion’s share of retail book sales. They order centrally for all their outlets together, for
instance there is a single buyer for all science fiction, all mysteries, etc. How, you may
well ask, can these buyers read and pass judgement on, for example, the over 1000 SF
titles published in a year?

Of course the answer is they can’t. Instead, an equation makes the buys of most of the
books on the racks or blackballs the ones that don’t make it that far. It’s called “order to
net.”

Let’s say that some chain has ordered 10,000 copies of a novel, sold 8000 copies, and
returned 2000, a really excellent sell-through of 80%. So they order to net on the
author’s next novel, meaning 8000 copies. And let’s even say they still have an 80% sell-
through of 6400 books, so they order 6400 copies of the next book, and sell 5120....

You see where this mathematical regression is going, don’t you? Sooner or later right
down the willy-hole to an unpublishablity that has nothing at all to do with the literary
quality of a writer’s work, or the loyalty of a reasonable body of would-be readers, or
even the passionate support of an editor below the very top of the corporate pyramid.

And there’s a further wrinkle to it because what significant independent bookstores that
still survive and the non-speciality outlets like WalMart subscribe to BookScan and have
access to the Death Spiral numbers too and act accordingly. If there’s a book to order at
all, because in many cases if the chains’ order to net equation zeros out and they don’t
order at all, the book in question doesn’t get published. Back in the day, I knew of novels
that were commissioned, accepted, and paid for but never published because the chains
didn’t order. Today BookScan prevents such expensive mistakes from happening by
aborting them at the acquisition stage.

Voila, the Death Spiral. And I too am in it.

The aforementioned HE WALKED AMONG US only finally snake-danced its way

through the Death Spiral machineries in the US after years of trying thanks to the mojo of
my formidable French publisher, Fayard. But despite the great enthusiasm of the
acquisition editor, thanks to the Death Spiral numbers which guaranteed it minimal
support by its American publisher, the cold equations condemned it to a self-fulfilling
prophecy, which in large part has made it currently impossible for me to find an
American for the next novel I wrote, OSAMA THE GUN, published in French with
panache and corporate enthusiasm.

Read the first third of the novel and judge for yourself whether the French knew what
they were doing:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/326098/OSAMA-THE-GUNnovel-portion-

Voila, the Death Spiral.

How, after four decades, twenty-five or so novels published to often glowing reviews,
awards nominations, translations throughout the world, could I get sucked into this
whirlpool leading down into American publishing’s version of Davy Jones’ locker?

Well, admittedly I have been something of a controversial writer, BUG JACK BARRON
denounced in the British Parliament, THE IRON DREAM banned in Germany for eight
years, called a Communist by Fascist sand a Fascist by Communists, OSAMA THE GUN
admittedly being a red hot politically incorrect potato, and a lot of people have told me
that I’ve been blackballed by the America publishing industry for being such a political
punk and literary bad-ass.

I’m not that paranoid. I don’t believe it. When did controversy really ever have a
negative effect on commercial viability?

Besides which, in the era of BookScan, book chain quasi-monopoly, and the Death
Spiral, it doesn’t take a Village, it doesn’t take a Conspiracy. Just as “the only way a
book like Police State could be published effectively is if the absolute head of a
publishing company took a personal interest, and elected to spend the 10’s of thousands
of dollars in co-op money it would take to get a decent number of copies into the
marketplace,” a single such power at the head of a single major publishing house can
easily do the opposite and do your commercial viability in all by himself by torpedoing a
single novel.
The novel in my case being THE DRUID KING.
The publisher in question being lordly Knopf.
The head of Knopf being one Sonny Mehta.
Stay tuned, literary blood sport fans, for part two of THE PUBLISHING DEATH
SPIRAL.

THE PUBLISHING DEATH SPIRAL

part two-- My own publishing Death Spiral

Naive? Moi?

Hey, I learned the business of publishing from the gutter up as a 24 year old
anonymous wage slave in the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. I’ve been president of
two writers’ organizations. I’ve written a whole book on the publishing industry. I’ve
been called a Communist, a Fascist, an anarchist, a punk, a bastard, an asshole, and a
prick. But one thing I’ve never been called is naive.

Now I have to do it to myself.

Boy was I naive about the great literary publishing house Alfred A. Knopf!
 Boy was I naive about its maven, Sonny Mehta!

This is not only going to be a sad story, it’s quite embarrassing to have to tell it.

While living in Paris, I wrote at least seven drafts of a film about Julius Caesar’s
conquest of Gaul and the Gallic leader he defeated, Vercingetorix under the direction of
writer producer Jacques Dorfmann. This was a major French national epic, which was
released as VERCINGETORIX in France and DRUIDS everywhere else. In my opinion,
even while I was writing them, every one after version three was a deterioration.

The reviews of the film were merciless and it bombed big time, so I cashed the
checks, licked my creative wounds, and thought it was a closed chapter in the story of my
career as a writer. But my good friend Richard Shorr had read my third draft screenplay,
and when he saw the film his blood boiled. He told me that, whereas what had been shot
was drek, it was a masterpiece and should not been lost. "You've got to turn it into a
novel!" he insisted.

I had never novelized a screenplay, myself or anyone else's, and loathed the whole
concept. “No way!” I told him.

"Read it and tell me that!" Richie demanded.

When I did, my own blood boiled. Richie was right. The idea that this version of the
story would be lost forever infuriated me.

But novelize a screenplay, even if it was my own....?

Shrugging, I sent it to my book agent in New York, Russell Galen, who effused to
the point where he compared it to Shakespeare, but said, how am I supposed to market a
novel on the basis of a screenplay for an already released flop? And asked me if there
was non--genre editor high enough up in publishing who might know my work well
enough to make this impossibility possible.

I really didn’t know. I am not making this up.

Well, I said, I think there’s this guy who was an editor at a secondary science fiction
paperback line I met a couple of times back in London in the 1960s when my novel BUG
JACK BARRON was getting me denounced in Parliament, a fringie of the New Wave
scene, who I think now has some kind of editorial job in New York. He would probably
be familiar with my work at least by reputation, every editor in London certainly was at
the time.

“What’s his name?” asked Russ.

“Sonny Mehta.”
 Russ did a take.

Sonny Mehta?!

You really don't know that Sonny Mehta is the honcho of Knopf and probably the
most powerful publishing executive in New York?

Uh, no. But a good and reliable friend who will not be named here for fear of
possible retaliation had told me that Sonny was an okay guy when we were introduced
back in Swinging London. What I only remembered much later, was that he had added:
“but of course not to be trusted."

And there was a certain synergy, because as agent for the estate of Philip K. Dick,
Russ had a relationship with Vintage, a subsidiary of Knopf, and its publisher Marty
Asher. Sonny apparently handed off to Asher with whom Russ negotiated a $75,000
advance from the most prestigious publisher in the United States, the most I had ever
gotten.

Ah yes, the literary high life! Or so I thought

I had a lot to learn and a lot of naivete to lose and it was going to cost me very
dearly.

Asher insisted on a contract clause paying out a large portion of the advance upon
my showing him 200 pages, like a schlockmeister Hollywood producer of old cracking
the whip over a screenwriter ensconced at studio expense in the Garden of Allah motel
who had to prove he could churn out the pages.

If this had been presented to me by the usual suspects, I probably would have vented
my ire and blown the deal. But Asher, a naïf himself when it came to originating a novel
because Vintage was a reprint house, genuinely seemed to have no idea that this was a
grave insult to an author of over twenty published novels who had never even failed to
deliver one on time.

Besides this was my shot at the Big Time, he was speaking for Knopf and I had no
choice.

Or did I? There was a deal with Time Warner UK, a British publisher which was
paying out a decent signature advance. And I had always felt that going back to rewrite
before completing a draft was a creative mistake, and showing raw partial first draft was
both dangerous and unprofessional.

So thanks to my British publisher I did have a choice. I could put the creative process
first. I could just about afford to write a complete first draft before showing anything to
Asher. Surely he would be pleased at seeing a whole first draft, something much more
than the contract called for, something which could then benefit from his creative
editorial input.

Talk about starry-eyed naivete!

Arrogance was no surprise at this level, but I was not prepared for editorial
ignorance. Asher was not pleased with the first draft I had turned in. He thought it was
sloppy.

Duh.

Of course it was sloppy. It was first draft. I’m not sure he ever quite got the concept
of first draft, being mostly a reprint editor. For when I asked for his editorial input, I was
told that he didn't want to comment until he had seen a rewrite of the whole novel. Like a
low-end Hollywood producer, Asher had just wanted to see pages as proof that I wasn't
goofing off.

In like West Coastal manner, it was made clear that Knopf/Vintage would cut me off
and reject the book on the basis of what I hadn't wanted to show them in the first place
unless I convinced Edward Kastenmeier, Asher's right-hand man, that I would and could
take his direction.

In show biz terms, I had to pitch a rewrite to get the first draft stage pick-up to do it
and the money that would then be owed me if it was. At this game I was well-schooled,
so I had little trouble slinging the necessary manteca to convince Kastenmeier to tell
Asher it was okay to pick up the option.

This was enough to tell me that while Kastenmeier couldn’t edit on the creative level
to which I was accustomed--having previously had very good luck and learned much
from the likes of David Hartwell, Michael Moocock, Nick Austin, and so forth, who were
proficient in that art and knew that was an art--he might be good enough to be be useful
in making the transition to my first historical novel in terms of letting me know when I
was putting in or leaving out too much local color, or slipping into anachronistic modern
vocabulary, imagery, and metaphor. At least he wasn’t the producer’s schmuck nephew.
I took the rewrite notes and I went back to Paris and went to work.

Meanwhile my friend, French director Diane Kurys, had met the French Ambassador
to Mexico, Bruno Delaye, who was an admirer of my work. I had done events for
cultural programs of the French government in France and New Caledonia, Bruno wanted
to meet me, and so he arranged for me to do likewise for his embassy in Mexico.

One of these events was a press conference, and when a writer does a press
conference, he's always asked what he's planning to do next, and off the top of my head
came an old passion to write the definitive story of Cortez’ conquest of Mexico. The
next day it was all over the newspapers.

Well why not? It was to become MEXICA, the novel I would write after THE
DRUID KING, and my British publisher made a deal for it on short outline.

I finished the second draft of THE DRUID KING and sent it to Edward Kastenmeier
two months before a planned trip to New York in September 2001, and made an
appointment to go over it with Kastenmeier on September 12th.

You do remember what happened on September 11th?

Crazy at it may sound, on September 12, I kept my editorial meeting with Edward
Kastenmeier. Midtown was functioning as if everything were normal . Nothing could
have seemed crazier than that, right?

Wrong again.

Kastenmeier had marked up the manuscript sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase,

as if he was a college teacher and I was a student. He had run paragraphs together,
rewritten sentences attempting to bend the prose of an historical novel closer to his style-
deaf concept of standard modern English. Worse than useless, much worse. When I
dared to mildly complain, he hautily proclaimed that “you’re working with an editor at
KNOPF (I could hear the capital letters), not Tor (I could here the miniscules).” Things
being what they were, I held my temper well enough to refrain from telling him that if
this novel were at Tor, I would be being edited not by the likes of him but by David
Hartwell.

Yet despite the amazing arrogance on display, he had so little confidence in his own
editorial judgement that he had had his assistant reading ahead of him and also marking
up this mess in a different handwriting.

It was an editorial process that made even doing the last rewrite of script to the order
of Jacques Dorfmann during a total eclipse in Bulgaria (I am not making that up) seem
like a session with Maxwell Perkins. I was constrained to debate virtually every sentence
with Kastenmeier, who would not deign to admit what I well knew--that he had run all
those paragraphs together to reduce the page count and therefore the retail price of the
printed book. After all, we are KNOPF, we do not stoop to such grubby commercial
considerations. Sure you don’t.

Buildings on either side us were evacuated because of bomb threats and then
reoccupied. It went on all day and into the evening, for I could not let Kastenmeier leave
until the nightmare task he had inflicted on me was done and I could escape with what
was left of my sanity if not my respect for the creative editorial level at Knopf or at least
the Vintage imprint thereof.

I returned to Paris and put together a clean final draft of THE DRUID KING. But I
was then put through literally endless picayune rewrites that accomplished nothing but
cost almost a year of my life lost in agonizing wheel-spinning. Time Warner UK, long
satisfied with the novel, scheduled it for February 2003, while Knopf was wasting my
time, while I and my agent, thoroughly exasperated, were on the verge of pulling the
book and taking it elsewhere.

But I had gone through time-wasting hell and demeaned myself repeatedly in order
to be published by Knopf. This had been not only the worst editorial experience I had
ever had, it was worse than anything I had imagined even while dealing with bottom-
feeding publishing low life for the Scott Meredith agency. I had paid a very heavy price
in time lost, aggravation, swallowed pride, and creative ennui. I had bet a couple of years
of my life, and I wanted the payoff.

For surely Knopf could not have maintained its prestige and power for so long if they
didn’t have the publishing street smarts to publish novels as well if not better than any
other American house, if they didn’t have max mojo with the chains, the review outlets,
the cultural movers and shakers, and so forth, and I knew that while THE DRUID KING
would be easy to resell as a finished novel for more money (more naivete but Russ Galen
believed it too), I also knew that there was no other publisher in New York who could do
the actual job of publishing a novel, as opposed to editing one, better than Knopf.

By then even a former like misty-eyed naïf knew who and what Sonny Mehta was.
Or thought he did.

His formal name was Ajai Singh Mehta. Sonny was the, ah, son of a middle
important Indian politician who had played a significant role in the struggle for
independence from Britain. That’s why he was called Sonny and by the time he hit
London and landed a job as a paperback editor he had kept it. In Swinging London, a
woggish name might not be a problem, but not all London swung like a pendulum do, so
it was probably a good career move.

Sony made his commercial bones by extracting SO LONG AND THANKS FOR
ALL THE FISH by famously extreme means from Douglas Adams and it became a big
hit. Cut to much later, and he’s called to New York to take over Knopf from the sainted
icon of New York’s Brahmin literary establishment, Robert Gottlieb, a circle in which
this move by Bertelsmann of Germany, which now owned it through Random House,
was not exactly appreciated. How Sonny Mehta accomplished this feat of magic, or who
upstairs in dear old Deutchland might have done it for him, or why, I neither know nor
can imagine.

But there he was above Asher and Kasteinmeier at Knopf and there his word was
law.

So I politely prevailed on Sonny to bring the forever editing process to an end, order
his minions to either approve and schedule THE DRUID KING as it was (which was not
exactly massively different from how it entered this tunnel of tedium) or reject it and I’ll
take it elsewhere. I was not so crude as to put it in words of one syllable, namely shit or
get off the pot.
 Never heard anything from Sonny, but soon thereafter Kastenmeier told me that
publication of THE DRUID KING was scheduled for next May, a good mid-spring
month, and that there would be a buy of a partial ad in the New York Times Book Review.
But that proved to be the high point of the Knopf publishing process.

First I was sent a proof of the dust jacket. Knopf’s star art director, Chip Kidd
(advice to all publishers--fire any art director as soon as their name becomes known to
the public) had taken photos of some gnarly twigs and photoshopped them into the letters
of the book title. Murky brown against black background, no other illo. Suck City in
terms of rack pop. My heart sank when I saw it. But Kastenmeier professed to love it,
and anyway had to because Kidd was a greater power than he was, and I was in the same
position, only more so.

To give you an idea of how bad the cover really was, when the book finally came
out, Dona and I looked for it in the new books rack. It wasn’t there! We couldn’t find it.
Major panic!

We finally did. It turned out we had looked past it three times without noticing it.
And I was the author.

It couldn’t get any worse, you say? Naive again. It already had.

When I got the spring Knopf catalog THE DRUID KING wasn’t there in May or
anywhere else.

I called Kastenmeier, but we ended in effect crying “what the fuck?” together. He
himself hadn’t know it had happened, or rather not happened, until he got the catalog. He
was innocent. Asher was innocent. Further inquiries confirmed that they were telling the
truth.

THE DRUID KING had been moved from May and into August by the only one who
could have the power to do such a thing unilaterally without the editorial end even
knowing, Sonny Mehta.

The two weakest months in which to publish a novel, are January when readers and
their wallets are recovering from the Holidays as best they can, and August, the dog days
before the hot September launches.

A cover even I couldn’t notice on the racks until it was pointed out to me. Unilateral
banishment to an executioner’s month. And a cheaper British trade paperback out a half
year before the Knopf hardcover edition. I knew in my gut that the novel had been
torpedoed. If I needed further proof, I had given the Knopf pr people an air-quality tape
of a half-hour interview I had done with Woody Allen. I am an ace interviewer and
interviewee and maybe five minutes into a 30 minute tape, we were playing off each
other. Many people who had heard it said it was the best interview Woody had ever
given. The point of course was to use it as a mighty demo to get radio interviews and
maybe TV. And we had flown to New York from Paris on our own nickel to do pr
because Knopf was not offering to pay for it. Or for anything else including advertising.
Nor did they arrange a single signing. Or radio interview.

Nada. Rien de tout. No New York Times Book Review ad. No ad elsewhere that I
ever saw. A perfect nothing.

If I wanted to completely tank a novel, I couldn’t have done it better. No one could
have because it was a perfect job. And if I wanted to tank a writer’s commercial viability
and kick his ass down the cellar stairs into the Death Spiral, I couldn’t do it any better
than having the top publisher in New York publish a novel and guarantee its commercial
failure. Because no lesser house, and that’s every other house in the eyes of Sonny
Mehta, would believe that they could make a writer viable again after Knopf had failed.

Including Knopf itself. Time Warner had already published THE DRUID KING in
Britain, and bought the treatment for MEXICA, and I was well into writing the novel.
The plan had been to submit the MEXICA treatment to Knopf as the option novel when
the catalog came out, but when THE DRUID KING was moved to August, I decided to
wait for a complete clean draft of MEXICA to be in the strongest possible position.

When the finished first draft of MEXICA was submitted to Knopf, they had 60 days
to exercise their option. The option period expired without a word, a clear breach of
contract, but we decided not to press them, since by then THE DRUID KING was going
to be published in a month or two, and false hope that something magical, like a major
review in the New York Times Book Review, said I might as well wait for a Deus Ex
Machina. In October, my agent pressed Knopf for a decision and was told "we are not
prepared to make an offer at this time." There was no formal rejection nor was the
manuscript returned.

Phone calls and emails to Sonny by my agent were never even answered. Meanwhile
I found out that MEXICA had not even been read by anyone but Kastenemeier's lowly
assistant.

So I sent an email to Sonny apprising him of the situation.

The only reply was the return of the manuscript.

In a technical way I have to admire the perfection of the hatchet job, though I didn’t
exactly admire it at the time, nor entirely understand the full extent of the grave damage
that it had done to my career. So here I sit writing this, years later, with two novels,
OSAMA THE GUN that was well published in France, and MEXICA, well-published in
England and a best seller in Mexico, that have not been deemed publishable in the United
States. Because I am not publishable in the United States.

There are those who contend that I have been “blackballed” by some publishing
conspiracy. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it because all it took to render me
commercial unviable was what Sonny Mehta did to THE DRUID KING and the cold
equations of BookScan and the Death Spiral. And it would seem that no amount of
literary excellence or hot thematic material can allow me to write my way out of it in my
own country.

Nor, of course, am I the only writer with a long track record to be proud of up to his
neck in the tarpit at the bottom of the Death Spiral, only perhaps the first to go public
with it. Why? Because I’m approaching my 70th birthday? Because I survived a
stomach cancer crisis that almost killed me? Because the remnants of the cancer might
still do the job? Because if not me, who, if not now, when? Or, more positively, because
my French publisher, and France itself, has my back?

Quien sabe? I don’t entirely. And if that’s a mystery, ask yourself, as I have
frequently since the dark deed was done, why in hell did Sonny Mehta do this to me?
Does not compute logically. Sonny caused Knopf to contract for THE DRUID KING on
the basis of the screenplay. When I appealed to him to end the procrastination of Asher
and Kastenmeier and either accept or reject the final draft of the novel, it was accepted.
It was scheduled for a good month.

And then it was executed . And the ax had Sonny Mehta’s fingerprints all over it
because, given the corporate configuration, no one else could have moved it to the
execution month of August so unilaterally that even Kastenmeier and Asher didn’t know
it was being done until after the fait accompli.

So why would he torpedo a novel he himself had caused to be contracted for and
then rescued from purgatory? What act of lese majeste had I unwittingly committed
somewhere along the line against Sonny Mehta to cause him do it? What had I done that
so pissed him off?

Did he even really know himself?

Maybe not.

I mean, imagine that you are Ajai Singh Mehta. You are a lapsed Sikh in
predominately Hindu India, therefore a bit of an outsider. Your father is of sufficient
prominence that in his shadow you are known as “Sonny.” You migrate to Britain where
Indians are still wogs to much of the unreconstructed nativists there and that putdown
becomes a pragmatic name change for an outsider.

You secure an editing position with a secondary paperback house doing science
fiction and fantasy at a time when the New Wave of New Worlds, Michael Moorcock,
Thomas Disch, Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and so forth, and yes, prominently Norman
Spinrad, and the editors publishing the new speculative fiction are something of a fave
rave in Swinging London. But your job is more or less to concentrate on the traditional
stuff., so you don’t quite get to be one of them. You’re can’t really be a literary hipster.
You’re still not an insider.
 But somehow you break out with the Douglas Adams editorial feat, and somehow
you end up in New York as the head of Knopf. But the replacement of the ultimate
literary icon Robert Gottlieb by a one-time Indian paperback science fiction editor from
Britain is not exactly greeted with hosannas by the high falutin’ literary establishment, so
you’re a still something of an outsider to the snide hides who consider themselves the
insiders.

But you’re also the most powerful publishing executive in New York, hah, hah..
Now they have to kiss your ass whether they like it or not.

So ever since he was a kid in India, Ajai Singh Mehta inhabited the fringes of the
moving spotlight circle, not for any lack of skill, intelligence, ambition, or editorial talent,
as you finally proved by making it to the very top as Master of the Publishing Universe in
New York, Sonny, but because of a series of unjust condescending attitudes, truth be told
you maybe still haven’t quite cleaned the last of that shit off your Gucci bootheels.

So yeah, Sonny, you screwed me very badly indeed for no rational reason, but I’m
still a proficient novelist, a calling which at its higher levels forces you to empathize with
your characters, and you’re now one of mine in this context, so I can’t really not
empathize with your trajectory in the acquisition of the power to do it in the first place.

How can I not? BUG JACK BARRON, the novel that finally my bones, was
rejected by the SF publishers in New York it wasn’t “real science fiction” and by the
mainstream publishers because it was. It was rescued by Michael Moorcock and New
Worlds in Britain, where it was notorious cause celebre enough to be denounced in
Parliament and for my name to be mis-spelled in the newspapers all over the place when I
was publicly denounced as a fascist by a communist, though mostly what shrieking
descended was the other way around. So I had my 15 minutes and then some while at the
time you weren’t getting any.

I’m still getting it in France, but in my own country I’m mostly widely known as the
author of a famously classic Star Trek episode, and you got the power. If I were not the
victim, as a novelist, I would have to acknowledge that your life story has had a thematic
happy ending, certainly from the point of view of the hero of the tale, Sonny Singh
Mehta.

Not that “Norman Spinrad” is more than a spear-carrier in that epic bildundsesroman
of self-made transcendent transformations, but post facto I can see how you might have
grown irefully weary at being asked to plunk your magic twanger one time too often by
someone letting on that he knew you when, and thereby perhaps calling up one too many
sense memories of what it was to be Sonny Mehta then in the mind of the current Master
of the Publishing Universe.

Which is as far as I’m about to descend here from phenomenology into

psychoanalytic channeling. The salient points here are that whatever motivated Sonny
Mehta to so mortally wound my career commercially in the United States and are that
had the power to do it, and that that power came as much from the current nature of the
publishing business as from one particular man’s position at the top of the pyramid.

Without BookScan, order to net, near monopolies on the retailing end, and a
conglomeritized industry where the great idioyncratic independents like Scribners,
Random House, and yes Knopf, have become mere brand names owned by a scant
handful of multinational corporations, a Sonny Mehta, running on whatever motivation,
would still be able to assassinate a single novel by publishing it badly, but not the
author’s ongoing career.

Or not for sure, anyway. Back in the day, you could write your way out of it if you
were good enough by writing a novel great enough to be recognized as a great novel by a
single editor with the passion and the leeway to ignore the previous strike-out at bat and
swing for the fences. Back in the day, there were many more editors like that because
there were many more independent major publishers, hence much more real competition
on the acquisition end, hence as much reliance on analog editorial judgement as digital
Nielsen numbers.

Unlike the current situation, you didn’t need to be a Sonny Mehta to pluck a winner
out of nowhere and publish it to succeed, quite a few people had that positive power, and
no one really had the negative power to tank a career by tanking a single book.

Good Lord, am I backing myself into a corner where I’m forced to conclude that
writers would be better off in a publishing industry with more Sonny Mehtas? I guess I
am. When there were more of them, when there was more real competition among them
and their independent publishing houses, the negative power of any of them to do harm
beyond a single book was limited and the positive power to magically rescue orphans
from the storm was much more widely distributed.

Say what you want about Hollywood crassness, the money mavens out there know
one thing the publishing industry seems to have forgotten. Half the movies that get made
are going to lose money and the profit will come from the ones that are hits. You don’t
have to be a genius to figure that much out, even though the most puissant computer
program will never get it. It may even be that the publishing industry remembers that
much.

But you’re not going to really know which is going to be which until you place your
bets on your own best instincts and roll the bones.

The players in Hollywood know that that’s the nature of the game. The players in
the publishing industry who might know it are an endangered species and those who do
know it and have the independent power to act on it unilaterally may already be just
about extinct.
 THE PUBLISHING DEATH SPIRAL part three--The Death Spiral of the
Publishing Death Spiral

“It’s better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.”

So maybe I’m an incurable optimist, though herein I like to think that what I’m doing is
looking ahead with a cool visionary eye and extrapolating accordingly, which, after all, is
what I’ve been doing in the majority of my fiction for four decades or so, besides which
(see GREENHOUSE SUMMER) the mutational future of the publishing industry is
going to create both losers and winners, just like the warming of the planet.

The publishing industry, with its order-to-net, and BookScan program, and returns, and
warehouses, and so forth, and the resulting Writers’ Death Spirals, will not survive the
next five years in its current form, and that’s a conservative estimate, the inflection point
is more likely to arrive in only a year or two.

The words “publisher” and “publishing” and “book” won’t even mean the same thing
anymore at the other side of that singularity. Ebooks and ebook readers like the Kindle
and the Nook are in the early process of beaming the dominant current publishing model
into the tarpits with the dinosaurs and the audio cassette but it’s really a lot later than the
CEOs of the “publishing industry” think or want to think. “Publishers” will also be
distributers and the point of sale retailers, and “books” will be definable not as physical
objects but purely as immaterial literary content.

You want to read the handwriting on the wall, re-read the recent claim by Amazon that
it’s now selling more ebooks than hardcovers. Even if it isn’t yet quite true, a subject of
some dispute, it soon will be.

You want some cold equations, consider that Amazon, Apple, and Google each are
capitalized for far more than any conventional publishing conglomerate, none of them are
“publishing companies,” but they’re all getting deeper and deeper into the ebook end, the
tail that is even as I write this well on its way to wagging the dog.

No warehousing costs. No shipping costs. No returns. No printing costs. And

they’ve already eliminated both the wholesale distributers’ take and that of the retailers at
point of sale. Amazon and Apple could even afford to give low-end ebook readers away
to assure the economic dominance of their electronic goods and Amazon may be
subsidizing the price of the Kindle already.

Soon or later, maybe even right after reading this, Jeff Bezos, or Sergei Brin, or Steve
Jobs, or all of them, are going to ask themselves why they should split the ebook take
with “publishers.”

Our web stores are the retail point of sale where we get paid immediately and directly.
What the “publishers” do for us is manufacture the product we sell and front the cost. Or
they did. With ebooks, they no longer manufacture a physical product and there are no
more paper, ink, or press time costs.

Do we really need them?

Well they do buy the intellectual and artistic product from the writers. They employ
and pay the salaries of editors to do this by exercising their literary and commercial
judgment and by working with the writers to perfect the product. This is a necessary
function, since without it, we’d be swimming in an infinite sea of amateur crap ourselves
trying to play gatekeeper.

But is there a reason why we can’t do this ourselves? Wouldn’t we come out way
ahead if we just paid salaries to an editorial staff of our own to do the same jobs and kept
100% of everything minus royalties?

Duh.

But wait a minute! The publishers front money to writers in the form of advances to
allow them to earn a living while they’re writing the books. And they pay editorial staffs.
And the more commercially juicy the likely product, the larger the advance commanded.

So what? There isn’t a publisher in the world with the capital and cash that we have.
We can’t hire editors? We can’t afford to pay writers advances? We can’t afford to
compete with what the “publishers” can and do pay out?

Duh.

There you have it. There’s the inflection point. When the ebook web stores become
publishers themselves that’s the ball game. The entire traditional publishing structure,
business model, industry, and reason to live, gets thrown down the willy hole.

Only those who adapt will survive.

For while the “publishing industry” as we know it cannot survive, individual

publishers could by adopting the same business model themselves. Retain editorial
staffs, compete with advances, set up their own web store sites to retail their ebook titles,
rather than go through Amazon, or Apple, or any other third party online outlet, and
likewise keep 100% minus royalties.

The “retailers” become “publishers” and the “publishers” that remain are those that
become “retailers” and since they’re all the same thing, someone has to come up with a
new name for the industry. Call it the “book industry” maybe, since every company in it
will be doing the same everything as every other, from the writer’s fingers on the
keyboard to the customer downloading the book onto....

Onto what?
 Is there a catch?

Yes there is. Greed. Would-be vertically monopolistic control freak greed.

As things stand now, Amazon’s Kindle is the best selling ebook reader and was at least
originally intended to lock purchasers into the Amazon online book store by locking them
into Amazon’s proprietary format, and hence its online bookshelves and of course at
Apple, Steve Jobs’ strategy is even more strongly vertically monopolistic, as witness
what the iPod and iTunes has done to the music industry

Indeed he current major players seem to have learned their business models from
Steve Jobs. Tie your immaterial artistic and commercial products to a format that locks
customers into to their online stores, like iTunes, which the customers download onto
hardware whose software you control, like the iPod and iPad. Or the Kindle or the Nook
and whatever Google eventually comes up with.

But this is going to be a transient condition as time and technology advance at warp
speed towards something we could call the universal ebook reader. Barnes and Noble’s
Nook uses ePub as its directly downloadable format from the B&N online bookstore, but
via computer link you can already read RTF and maybe DOC files too, though not via
direct download by 3G or WiFi connection, so already you’re not entirely locked in.

The prices of existing ebook readers are coming down fast, with the Kindle and the
Nook leading the price war, and by the Christmas shopping season, there will probably be
something available for the magic number $99. And many smaller companies are
beginning to market ereaders. And there are 800 pound hardware gorillas out there who
haven’t gotten into the game yet--Toshiba, SanDisk, Sanyo, Nokia, etc. Hardware
manufactures, some or all, or at least one of which, will steer clear of selling the ebooks
and just sell ebook readers.

That’s the next key inflection point. The universal book reader.

The main difference between the universal book reader and readers like Kindle or
Nook is that they can read all sufficiently economically viable formats. The same book
reader will let you flit from Amazon to Google to Barnes & Noble to Project Gutenberg
to whatever significant electronic book sellers there be, like a hummingbird from flower
to flower, just as you do on the Internet itself.

The tech is not exactly cutting edge wizardware. In hardware terms, a standard
universal reader is something companies like Toshiba and Sony can mass market for a
hundred bucks. That will be the el cheapo version, with a WiFi connection, and a decent
enough browser to navigate the universal book bazaar, preloaded with the software to
read just about everything on the immaterial shelves. Twenty bucks more gets you 3G
too, kid. Hey, call it forty, and it’s also a cell phone.

Nothing that couldn’t have been done with last year’s tech, it’s all there laying around
to be packaged together into a universal book reader, with or without bells and whistles,
that will be almost as ubiquitous as upscale cell phones because it will also be a cell
phone, if you want to buy a fancy model, and the stripped-down model for under $100 if
you don’t.

That’s where the tech is taking the nascent ebook biz whether the current business
model likes it or not, and nothing that doesn’t adapt to that evolutionary environment will
survive.

Chaos?

You betcha!

But what’s wrong with that?

When I was first visiting France, all four of the radio networks were government
stations, and no privately owned broadcasting was allowed. When I came back a year or
two later, the government had made a drastic change in policy, and had deregulated radio
broadcasting. But that’s all they did. They didn’t assign frequencies, there were no
official regulations, the government deliberately created an evolutionary chaos, the idea
being to wait a while to see what emerged from the Darwinian process and then sort that
out.

That kind of creative chaos is where the “book industry” is headed, and this is the
United States, not France, so the government has nothing to with it. Okay, it’s going to
happen whoever likes it or not, but will it be a good thing?

The answer, of course, is what it always is, what it always has to be, another question--
good for who?

Good for readers. With no more shipping, printing, warehousing, returns, or splitting
the retail price with another entity, book companies won’t need anything like the
capitalization and cash flow that publishers need now, so there will be many more of
them and therefore real competition on pricing, since the real cost per copy amounts to
nothing really more than the royalties paid to writers, and so the price of ebooks will
come way down.

They will be the mass market books of the 21st Century as paperbacks were of the
20th and priced accordingly, and like the obsolete mass market paperbacks, easily
affordable upon publication by a mass readership including kids on modest allowances.

Good for mass market ebook reader manufacturers not tied to the economic war over
content, who will sell scores of millions of universal readers and benefit from economies
of scale, bringing the prices of the universal readers down even further. Instead of a
Death Spiral, a rising tide that lifts all boats.
 All boats?

Well maybe not. It’s going to be condition terminal for any company trying to hold on
to the old vertically monopolistic business model of locked readers and propitiatory
content formats, and no one is going to miss them. Goodbye to order-to-net determining
print runs and distribution since there will be no print runs or economies of scale, since
once in the computer system, every copy of an ebook costs the book company next to
nothing save the writer’s royalty, and none of them exist until they are already sold, so
goodbye to BookScan, rendered redundant, as they genteelly put it in Britain.

Goodbye therefore to the Publishing Death Spiral. Every title will sell according to its
own individuality, with the writer’s past performance relevant only to the sizes of the
advances offered. Goodbye to the disappearing backlist, since anything ever published as
an ebook will be available on a one by one basis forever.

So it’s going to be much better for writers than the current configuration. The usual
competition on advances based in part on the previous track record maybe, but the midlist
and the backlist will be reinvigorated, because the only real gamble book companies will
have to make is on advances, not manufacturing or distribution. There figures to be hot
and heavy bargaining over the amounts of advances versus the royalty percentages, and
what will replace the current standard contracts will probably be no standards at all but a
wide range of contracts trading off advance sizes to royalty rates, a positively chaotic
environment that will probably continue indefinitely, like Mao’s concept of permanent
revolution applied to the thousand paths to the bottom line.

Better days for writers, that is, for writers with some talent who somehow manage to
stand out from the white noise static of all the hopeless self-published stuff that will
inundate the Internet, and take it from one who worked in the Scott Meredith Agency fee-
for-reading biz, 95% of such stuff will always be crap.

This is going to be a bigger problem than piracy. Indeed in some ways it already is.
Piracy is already a problem, but a technical one, combated by DRMs and whatever their
evolutionary descendants will be, a forever war that will never be won or lost but that the
book business can ameliorate and live with by whatever means necessary. But getting
work of merit noticed by potential readerships who would enjoy reading it is a problem
that is going to be much more difficult to deal with.

It already is. Newspapers and magazines are eliminating book reviews. Literary
criticism, in the broad sense of information on the contents of books before they have
been read, is moving to the Internet at warp seven, where it too becomes fragmentary and
amateurish by its very nature, as witness, for example, the “reader reviews” at point of
sale like those on Amazon, the fan sites targeted at every conceivable flavor of fandom,
and, hey, blogsites like this one which only require a computer and a connection for
anyone to netcast their opinions.

Democracy in action to be sure, and there is no one more fanatic than me about the
indivisibility of the right to sound off given everyone by the First Amendment, as witness
my commitment not to censor, edit, or reject any comments here, including the sort of
anonymous attack dog screeds which infest free speech wherever it is found and which
are the price one should be willing to pay for it.

But how are potential readers supposed to navigate this chaos? eBook companies like
the old publishers can always buy advertising, and some of them, by exercising righteous
literary judgment on what they acquire, would be able to establish a reputation for a
minimal quality as long as they kept to it, the acquisition end of editing. But if it buys
like PR, and barks like PR, it is just PR, and anyone interested enough to seek after
commercially neutral literary journalism in the first place will be sophisticated enough to
know it.

But without serious or at least seriously professional neutral reviewing that can be
trusted to be at least that and comprehensive enough to cover the full spectrum, how to
make a full spectrum of potential readers aware of what they might want to read if they
knew about it?

Well, there’s a monthly magazine in France called Lire (Read, more or less in English)
that’s been successful at what it does for some time now, and what it does is attempt to
review as much of what gets published each month as best it can, making the editorial
judgment as to what that is. The reading public buys it because it trust it. Not because
they agree with all the reviews, but because the coverage tries to be as universal as
practical and because it is commercially neutral.

Okay, that’s France, but this is the USA, and this is the 21st century, and such a
magazine would have to be on-line these days, where it would have to live by
advertising.

Or would it?

Not if it were subsidized.

Someone proposes to start an English language online magazine like Lire and pitches it
to the book companies or maybe some of them come together and do it as a consortium.
Pay a certain annual fee and your books get reviewed. If you don’t, they don’t.

It doesn’t buy you a favorable review or prevent a reviewer from trashing it. If it did,
the magazine would be worthless. It just gets your product reported on in respected
electronic ground. Like consumer reports, but with edge and point of view to make it
lively reading. And because it’s an online magazine, there’s no limit to how many books
are reviewed each month except how many book companies pony up.

What about getting those reviews written?

Are you for real? There are hordes of published writers out there struggling to make a
living, and while some of them might scorn “journalism,” very few of them, by the very
nature of the beast, see anything amiss in reading a freebie book (see E-GALLEYS FOR
BOOK REVIEWERS) and being paid a few dinners worth to write a short critique of it.
Sure beats flipping grease burgers on the night shift or driving a taxi.

And this is far beyond my business expertise, but it seems to me that the price of an
annual membership can be selected, modified, and maybe even stratified to sort the wheat
from the chaff. High enough so that only millionaire self-publishers will pay it, low
enough so that any serious small ebook company can afford it, which is to say those who
can’t afford not to.

What might such a membership price be?

Hey, don’t you remember, it was like the racing forms for the ponies, back in the day
the Nielsen company had some rating service for what they called “publishers” that gave
them writers’ track records and the current bookie odds so they could run software that
did the handicapping for them, or some weird shit like that and the publishers were
convinced they had to subscribe to it. But now that it’s gone the way of the dodo, and so
have they, and the ebook biz is isn’t looking to piss away money for information on
placing bets on what to buy, but it sure needs to spend it on something to tell the
customers what they have to sell.

That’s what we should charge to get books reviewed on credible neutral ground, a little
less than Nielsen charged for their service back in the day, google it and find out how
much they charged the suckers to subscribe to it, what did Nielsen call their racket...?”

BookScan or BookScam, something like that.