Rick Simonson

Back To It
July 7, 2008

Back from the Fourth, which for some of us (retail barricades) feels like one of the very few times when things quiet down on the usual busy fronts (email, calls from New York), and I/we get to partake of the slower pace, as well. Such is not the case around the year-end holidays. Memorial Day always feels quite wrapped up in BEA preparations (everyone else on holiday and one is in on Sunday, producing backlist orders). For years, our store (Elliott Bay) ran around the big Bumbershoot Art Festival, which had in it a lot of literary programming - we were hauling and shlepping around all of that weekend.

This time, a few pleasant family and social obligations notwithstanding, it was a genuine chance to sit still and read. What I read I'll save for a later note; it was (primarily) a quartet of books that ended up being read in some relation to one another ... and I've put off finishing them. That is imminent, however.

Two articles I meanwhile read appeared independently of one another but felt related - not only for what they said, but also they felt a bit part and parcel to this time of year, when the popular genre fiction titles ('beach' reading for those places that have beaches and are warm enough, though 'airport' reading could also describe them) are expected to be in massive numbers of readers' hands.

David Meghan's Boston Globe piece (which also ran in the Seattle Times on June 22) on the pressures exerted on bestselling authors to 'crank' the books out was one; then Twelve editor/publisher Jonathan Karp's June 29 Washington Post essay, "Turning the Page on the Disposable Book." 

The Meghan article talked diectly to authors such as Patricia Cornwell, David Baldacci, Michael Palmer, and Dennis Lehane - asking what pressures they felt, what results they yielded, how it affected the work itself. All noticed the tendency for the pressure to be there, with some pointed examples cited.

Jonathan Karp's piece included a 'handy' five-point list of the pressures publishers at the big corporate houses work under to achieve mandated annual growth. The increased 'output' of popular authors was included. But more to the point of the larger big picture, it  had within it ruminations on the amount of time many of the most enduring (and, ultimately, profitable) book took to be written and published.

In this buying season, though we're now at the point where we've bought for most of the big New York houses, there is this process of looking up authors and sales histories. One notices the increase in output with some authors - especially if co-authors are enlisted.

One of the things not mentioned - and wondered about here - as all of this bustle is supposedly aimed at this seemingly finite segment (people who read books) - is how readership is supposed to react to the increased productivity - and for how long. If, say, a reader enjoys whatever David Baldacci, Brad Meltzer, Janet Evanovich, Patricia Cornwell, Lawrence Block, and James Patterson and Co., to name a few, there would be more) write, and is able to do so if those writers are on a kind of two books-every-three-years cycle, how are readers supposed to increase their productivity? If those writers are all doing one book a year, or one every nine months, how are readers who enjoy an array of writers going to deal with it all?

It may work for awhile, especially in getting a newer voice established - Michael Palmer's example is mentioned in the Globe  article - but it feels at some point that something would have to give. There are exceptions, and we're not a popular/commercial fiction-driven store, but increased productivity on the writing/publishing end has generally not meant increased sales on ours.

Posted by Rick Simonson on July 7, 2008 | Comments (0)