Rocket Bomber - article - business - retail - The Enduring Appeal of Cheap Pulp - even in the ebook era

I love comments on the blog — but I love personal, directed email more. Obviously the blog is a tax upon my time and mental effort; conversation with readers is my only recompense.

Hi Matt,

I love your blog. And reading it the other day, it occurred to me that you might be the person to ask about something that has been troubling me about book sales numbers. (I’m a bookseller, too, as well as an author — www.cassandrachan.com.) Month by month, the sales of MMs go down by a lot. August was 21%. And yet, that’s not what I’m seeing in my store. There, hardcover sales of bestsellers are solid, but otherwise I’m selling nothing but MMs and trade paperbacks. The number of customers who ask me if a hardcover book comes in paperback and then, when the answer is no, don’t buy the hardcover has risen astronomically since the economic downturn. And yet trade paper sales are usually down a bit, too, though not as much as MM.

So what’s up? I’ve thought up a couple of possible explanations, but none that satisfy me. First is that my store is an anomaly. Second is that the majority of sales are taking place online and people don’t buy MMs online because of shipping fees. In which case, I would love to see the numbers broken down into sales from physical stores and sales from online (is there such a breakdown available?)

Maybe you don’t know any of this, and maybe this email has just made your eyes cross with boredom, and if so I apologize. But if you felt like giving me some pointers, I’d appreciate it.

Thanks,
Cassandra

##

When it comes to mass market paperbacks, there are five things to remember.

Three about how (& why) they are published:

1. The very name, mass market refers to the past history of this format being sold through non-traditional outlets: newsstands, supermarkets, drug stores.
2. The format, since it was much cheaper, was used extensively by small genre publishers to reprint material that had previously been serialized in magazines: the so-called pulp paperback. As time marched on and the anthology magazine as a category began to wither and die, Mass Markets were also used (primarily by romance publishers but also by sci-fi and mystery imprints) to publish mass-market original novels — cheap editions of material from first time authors or others who might have some appeal within their genre but which weren’t expected to sell well.
3. Sales of just about anyone’s backlist, but particularly prolific NYT-Bestselling-Author types, is primarily in the mass market format. I’m sure there are some outliers in the group, and as a readership gets older they pop for more expensive trade paperbacks [easier on the eyes] but for the most part, perennial backlist titles are also mass market paperbacks.

& two additional points about the market:

4. Buyers of Mass Market paperbacks are cheapskates. Perhaps not scroogian, legendary cheapskates, but price point is their primary motivator…
5. And they read a lot – Addiction levels. Harlequin (and perhaps others?) even had subscription programs. These heavy readers tend to specialize, but they are still our most loyal customer: maybe they just jones for one author, but buy Everything that author touches, or they love cat mysteries [still don’t understand the cat mystery people], or they read epic fantasy or hard sci-fi or police procedurals or supernatural romance or spy novels or epic hard sci-fi police procedurals with a hefty dose of romance and at least the trappings of common supernatural tropes…

[he’s not a vampire, he’s from an alien species that acts exactly like vampires for whatever reason, and he’s come to Alpha Hemoragic 5 as a diplomat for the Nosphatarians – but he’s really a spy – and he’s just been framed for murder! and only brave Earth Special Agent Mary Sue knows the truth, both about the strange death of Senator McGuffin and the hot passion that burns behind and beneath the pale blue eyes and pallid skin of Mandark, Prince of The Ashenfallus Mountain — plant tongue firmly in cheek and have some fun with the proper nouns & adjectives and these things write themselves]

…and I kind of wish I were kidding about the genre-bending that is going on. Some days I can’t tell our romance & sci-fi/fantasy sections apart.

##

Mass markets have a different returns process — you might have read the admonishment on the copyright page at some point: “If purchased without a cover etc” — as retailers have only to return the cover for proper credit, and then trash the rest of the book.

I’ll give you greens & other recyclers a moment, as we need to pause anyway for the librarians and other book lovers to also shudder in horror at the process:

Yes, mass market “pulps” are so cheap, and so little valued after their sales cycle is over, that it is literally too much trouble to ship the books back. They aren’t worth the return freight charges. Mass market paperbacks are ‘destroyed’, the stripped cover returned as proof. These cheaply printed books, made of the most common newsprint-grades of paper, are doomed to an early death anyway; their pages grow yellow and brittle in as little as two decades time.

A cheap, disposable form of a book; one that will hold up to some repeated reading, and that might even be handed down from one generation to the next, but will not make it to the grandchildren. There are technical limitations built into the medium that can only be overcome with periodic and continual re-publication of the work.

Yes, indeed: the first e-books were introduced in the 1930s — except back then we called ‘em paperbacks, and it wasn’t online sales but rather sales through newsstands that was the “new media” market place.

I don’t have historical numbers, but I’d be willing to bet paperbacks saw triple digit growth through their first years as well, eventually claiming up to 9% or 10% of the market in as little as five years from their first major introduction — and here’s the modern reiteration of the hype — Anyone at Penguin [now owned by Pearson] or Pocket [now owned by Simon & Schuster] care to comment on the first decade of their sales?

Books are books are books, and we (as a literate species) have invented progressively faster and cheaper ways to produce them — and the latest twist is e-books. But from where I sit, e-books aren’t that different from the mass market paperbacks printed in the 30s, or the 60s, or 5 years ago. There has been a steady progression of books into all sorts of markets, and inflation-adjusted prices remain steady (or get just a bit cheaper) year by year.

There is a permanance to a leather-bound folio of vellum or parchment, though — or in a carefully bound modern book printed on acid free paper — when stored in a proper library, and cared for over generations. Sure, we can get a “book” today—in scant seconds with ebook downloads—for the price of a burger

[historically, paperbacks and mass market editions: also priced equal to your lunch, most places, most decades]

but past a single read: will you keep these “books”? Will you treasure them? If you treasure them enough, will you eventually want an archival copy, up to and including a leatherbound omnibus?

##

One can buy a used clunker for $500 or a Tesla Roadster for $128,000 — and both get you from point A to point B. A rolling heap and a range-limited electric model both have their trade-offs, their limitations, their advantages. Drivers instinctively know this, or quickly pick it up [given the opportunity to experience one or the other or both]

Books are a good bit cheaper than fully-electric sports cars and it could be argued that most of us have much more experience with books. In some of the arguments about e-books, though, I have to stop and think that I’m being sold an electric racer for the clunker’s price — and being pitched that this new ‘e-book’ has the best features of each, while also (quietly, secretly) being burdened with the limitations of both.

Cheap also means disposable – and replaceable only with a new cheap version. Electronic means I’m dependent on expensive hardware, and on an outlet, and on near constant hardware & software upgrades — which at some point may stop being backward-compatible.

Open standards and honest, open archival efforts offset these concerns, partly. We’re still entrusting the whole accumulated corpus of human knowledge to a format that may not survive even a generation, and reliant on a physical base [infrastructure, hardware, software, file formats, encryption & DRM & copyrights] that might cripple the whole thing even if we still know (or could figure out) how the other 99% of the New Model Library works.

##

So far my ranting is far afield of what Cassandra originally asked — Mass Market Paperbacks: apparently, still selling in bookstores; so what’s up with the trend?

First up, month-to-month and year-to-year trends are subject to outside forces [Dan Brown, Oprah, movie adaptations of Dan Brown novels followed by Tom Hanks interviews on Oprah] that have nothing to do with books-per-se and publishing is a gambler’s game to start with, and hard to build a living off of in the long term. Oh, sure, back in Epstein’s Day publishers sought out talent, and good books, and hoped that one pick out of twenty — or a hundred — ended up as a bestseller so they could earn back enough to do the same thing next year – but it hasn’t been the 1920s for ninety years now and all the publishing houses have been bought up by Media Conglomerates and all the capital-E Editors are gone — or are now Vice Presidents in charge of this or that and “Publishers” and editors-in-chief of progressively larger-in-scale but smaller-in-scope imprints — often imprints that, at least in name, used to be publishing houses in their own right before consolidation.

Good books are still coming out – but I have to wonder how much of that is in spite of the new corporate structures, not because of them.

Wow. Even trying to get back on topic, I can still manage a rant.

Anyway:

This is the oft posted presentation of numbers from publishers.org, the Association of American Publishers, who release monthly press releases with sales figures compiled from their seventy-odd members.

We all love and treasure these numbers, which is why so many [book] news sites link to them each and every month, and republish their conclusions like it’s delivered by a burning bush, or at least carved in stone. As I myself have recently pointed out, though, we often conflate publisher revenue with retail sales – and even though we all “sell” “books” it doesn’t quite work that way. [Compare for yourself: AAP numbers ≠ Census retail numbers]

For the past two years, when it comes to bookstore sales, you’ve been able to rely on my blog for three things: a willingness to find original sources, a proclivity toward math that borders on the downright obsessive, and a drunken disregard that adds that, flavour, a certain je ne sais quoi

Here, let me process those numbers for you: so, sure, there are sales reported in the millions. Bully for publishers. Book sales are great.

But.

And.

Assuming a hardcover book price of $26, a trade paperback price of $15, a mass market paperback price of $9, and an ebook price of $10 — we can twist the AAP numbers closer toward actual units sold

And now we have a storyline.

##

Aparently ebooks were crap until January 2009. Sure, growing, etc, but not enough to impact the other book sales trends. Throughout 2009, ebooks were trending slowly up, showing much improved sales but not impacting unit sales of other formats to any degree, yet. In 2010, the whole mess goes bonkers.

So What Changed?

Was it the simultaneous introduction in November of 2009 of the Apple iPad, which pulled in the early-adopter geek audience, and the B&N nook, which similarly engaged the die-hard book [weekly mass-market buying] audience?

I’ll leave that as an exercise to the student.

We’ve only nine months of data since i- and e- took my chosen field and new-technology-a-fied it. The picture is incomplete; we’re going to need data from this upcoming holiday sales period [Nov-Dec-Jan] to square the circle and see how ebooks [bought exclusively for personal consumption; you can’t “gift” an ebook to someone yet] affects (or doesn’t) the usual sales of books during Q4.

Still, it’s a pretty graph – just what can we learn here?

If you break it down by unit sales [given assumed price points, as stated above] why yes, indeed, e-book sales exceed hardcover sales, not only in January when Amazon Famously Announced This Feat but also in July and August of this past year — though one wonders why they didn’t similarly announce that hardcover sales exceeded e-book sales in March, April, May, and June – and presumably, given larger trends, Amazon’s sales of hardcovers in April were double the sales of Kindle e-books. Hm? Amazon? Am I wrong? You have your actual numbers, all I have are industry statistics and larger sales trends. If it is so important to note the first month Kindle sales exceed hardcovers (in units, not dollars) why don’t you report All the Sales Data from every month since?

Oh, because that might make you look bad, I suppose. It’s hard to admit that even e-book sales are seasonal, and that a January spike in e-book sales might perhaps be related to recipients of gifted Kindles trying out e-books before dropping the device in a drawer, never to be used again. [the same applies equally to B&N’s nook, and to all other devices even more so]

Those of us who can read a graph and who know book store sales are seasonal, and additionally, admit we’re in a freakin’ recession, look at the numbers graphed so far and wait with baited breath for the next three months of figures, from both publishers.org and the census bureau.

And three more months of e-book numbers will also help; to date — that is to say, from September of 2009 — it looks like ebooks are cannibalizing sales of both the new hardcovers and the mass market backlist: New Hardcovers, because e-books beat them on price (often by as much as $10) and the backlist not only due to price but also accessability: you can read that 12-year-old book next week, if a bookstore orders it for you, or in 10 minutes if you buy the ebook.

There are several classes of books that don’t do well e-, yet, but both hardware and software are catching up. Comics and Graphic novels are on this wish/hit/list. I can’t say if that’s a good thing or bad thing, yet.

##

And once again I manage to riff on the given topic for long minutes without answering the damn question: Mass Market Paperbacks: apparently, still selling in bookstores; so what’s up with the trend?

Part of that is market consolidation. When was the last time you saw a stand-alone news stand? And if you have, where was this rare beast? The “Mass Market” option for books is an anachronism; today “mass market” refers only to the format [smaller paperbacks, 4×6 or thereabouts, on the cheapest grade of print stock just above Russian Toilet Paper] and not to the sales outlets: Mass Market paperbacks are books, and sold through bookstores.

Many Traditional “mass market” retailers now sell hardcovers and trade paperbacks. – and sure, the smaller pulps are still there, too, but Oprah isn’t recommending ‘em. Books have moved from a specialty retail item to a general commodity; great, as one can pick up a book, even a hardcover book (if it’s a NYT bestseller) just about anywhere, but this also means there is little-to-no distinction between the book “trade” edition and the “mass market”

With the advent of the internet, both the Book of the Month Clubs & direct subscription services are dead. yeah, sure, you can bring up the anecdotal story of the 60-year-old grandma in Omaha who still waits for books [4-6 weeks] to arrive after mailing in the tear-out coupon from the back of her last great romance read — but this was an old model even in the 1980s when I was kid. Actually, I think the advent of Big Box Bookstores in the 90s killed this publishing model off long before internet sales of physical books or even e-books were the issue:

When a quality bookstore is available in 90% of cities and suburbs, what’s the need for an alternate sales strategy or channel? Drugstore paperbacks went the way of the general store dime novels of 1890-1910.

—so, more and more, the success of bookstores as a new class of retailers, and the slow death of newsstands, and retailers like Costco and Walmart stocking hardcovers, and mail-order subscription services slowly giving way to internet sales sites — which can often sell you a trade paperback or hardcover for very close to the same price as a retail MM paperback — and we see sales of the $5-$10 mass market books declining wholesale.

Mass Market Paperback sales are down.

Since publisher revenue is not the same as reported sales of “book retail”, a source like Publishers.org reports declines in the Mass Market format because there is no “mass market” for books anymore — or at least, there’s no differentiation between the sales mix at a supermarket, a Target, a Wal-Mart, the club warehouse, or the bookstore: we all sell hardcovers and paperbacks of various types.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, one of the few remaining places to find these formally “mass market” books – is what used to be the specialty retailer: the bookstore.

The only remaining distinction between bookstores and the “mass market” is that at a bookstore, we sell books: we have a much deeper backlist of individual authors, better representation of genre titles, the abilty to special order titles, and booksellers to recommend them.

Given the economy, the customer who used to buy a hardcover, a couple of trade paperbacks, a couple of magazines, and a Mass Market format backlist title is cutting back: now they buy just the magazines (though fewer of those) and the $8 or $9 paperback – because they still love books and love reading.

So we have both the perception (in bookstores) of increased Mass Market Paperback sales, and their increased percentage of overall sales (as unit sales of hardcover books are certainly down) and a certain pickup of sales that used to go out through other channels, even while the total sales numbers for the format (for publishers) decreases.

##

Hope that answers your question, Cassandra. And thanks for the email.