Fighting Trim

Like the man said, “Be careful what you wish for.”

Over the past couple of months, Thomas Nelson, the $250 million Nashville- and faith-based publisher, has been quietly trimming its list. Now planning to produce 50% as many titles as in the past (Nelson released about 500 new titles in fiscal 2006), the house has, not surprisingly, also cut staff. A “strategy-driven” move, in the words of CEO Michael Hyatt, the cutback is directly connected to the reduction in titles. “When you [cut your output], [a company] doesn’t require the same infrastructure,” Hyatt said.

As someone who has been whining publicly for years about the overproduction of books in this country (just under 300,000 at last Bowker count), I read the news of the Nelson-trimming—well, maybe, since it’s 50%, I should say “slashing” —as positive. We simply do publish too many books to give them each a fair share of potential market and reader attention. (You’ve heard the carping about the fewer outlets for review, etc.? Well, I actually don’t think there are really fewer, they’re just different, but that’s another story and don’t get me started.) While I hadn’t initially thought through to the job-losing that would surely accompany such a move, I also understand, all too well, that in these difficult times, hard decisions about staff have to be made. Add to that the fact that Nelson has decided not to show up at BEA—and that just about every publisher’s contingent at the London Book Fair was smaller than in previous years—you can’t help but realizing that cost-cutting is the root cause of most publishing moves these days.

So I bet it’s just a matter of time before other publishers start taking a page from Nelson’s (the publisher’s, and mine, no relation) playbook and start editing their lists. But any satisfaction I might take from that—see? I was right! Even a smart guy like Michael Hyatt thinks so!—is tempered by the grim realization that we’re not going to go back to the good old days, when the executive-to-title ratio was a little bit better than 1 to 1,000; I mean, people will be fired.

I wonder, too, that if my dream were to be writ large, just which books would get edited off lists? Something tells me it won’t be the Tom Clancys or John Grishams who will be published less. And it probably also won’t be the teeny-tiny novels that, sell or no-sell, are merely rounding errors to their publishers. No, as usual, it will be the midlist guy who gets squeezed, the guy whose first couple of books performed decently, by old-time publishing standards, but who never broke out. Writers, say, like, Garth Stein, whose third novel The Art of Racing in the Rain, was recently released by Harper.

Garth Who, you ask?

Oh, he’s just your average midlist writer who even USA Today calls” relatively unknown.”

The thing is, Racing was just chosen to be sold in 7,000 Starbucks nationwide.

Oh, right. That Garth Who.

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