by
MOTOKO RICHNovember 11, 2008
For the book industry the question for the forthcoming holiday shopping season may be whether more people are like Francisco Clough or like Jacqueline Belliveau. Both were browsing in the Barnes & Noble on Union Square in Manhattan late last week, but Mr. Clough only looked, while Ms. Belliveau bought her second book in two days.
Dressed in a black suit and carrying a zippered leather portfolio, Mr. Clough, 36, said he had quit his job at a small brokerage firm on Wall Street six months ago. Fresh from a job interview, he flipped through a “Green Lantern” graphic novel but didn’t buy it. “There were probably five books I would have bought if I were not unemployed,” he said.
Ms. Belliveau, on the other hand, bought Carole Walter’s “Great Cookies,” just a day after purchasing
Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food.” An architect who was laid off recently, she has turned down invitations to travel and downgraded her gym membership. She has found another job, but Ms. Belliveau, 40, is still being careful about expenses — except books. “I like to have a collection of the history of what you read,” she said.
Like many businesses across the retail sector, the publishing industry has been hit by a raft of doom and gloom in the past few weeks.
Leonard S. Riggio, chairman and largest shareholder of Barnes & Noble, said in an internal memorandum predicting a dreadful holiday shopping season, as first reported in The Wall Street Journal last week, that “never in all my years as a bookseller have I seen a retail climate as poor as the one we are in.”
Last week HarperCollins, the books division of the News Corporation, reported that fiscal first-quarter operating income had slid to $3 million from $36 million a year earlier, despite its publication of the
Oprah Winfrey-anointed novel “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” by David Wroblewski. A week earlier Doubleday Publishing Group, a unit of
Random House, laid off 16 people, a 10 percent cut in staff. At the time the company said the move did not presage further layoffs in other publishing divisions, but industry insiders said they would not be surprised to see more.
Also this month Rodale, the magazine and book publisher, laid off 14 people in its book division, a little more than 7 percent of the staff.
Long before the current financial crisis, Borders Group, struggling against online and big-box retailers, had announced it was looking at a potential sale of itself. Given current economic conditions, publishers are nervously watching to see what happens with the company.
Now, most everyone in publishing is bracing for a difficult holiday season while trying to remain optimistic about the enduring allure of books.
“A book is still this incredibly lovely, respectable gift,” said Jamie Raab, publisher of Grand Central Publishing, and is “a lot cheaper than the other luxury items that people tend to buy at Christmas.”
“So we could get lucky and see that it really works in our favor,” she added.
Grand Central is enjoying strong sales of titles by the novelists Nelson DeMille and Nicholas Sparks, as well as of “Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World,” but it also is waiting to see how
Ted Turner’s “Call Me Ted,” for which it spent more than $5 million, will sell. Ms. Raab said the company had printed 625,000 copies and had shipped more than 500,000.
With several publishers reporting that booksellers were cutting orders for January, Ms. Raab acknowledged that she was concerned about a post-New Year’s downturn. “You know to a certain extent people will be in the stores during the holidays,” she said. “What will happen once there is no reason to be in the stores?”
Booksellers are trying new tactics to help ring up sales. At Book Passage, an independent bookseller in San Francisco and Corte Madera, Calif., Elaine Petrocelli, an owner, said she recently instituted a policy giving priority seating at book readings to those who purchase the book. Last month she sold 160 copies at a reading by Katherine Neville, author of “The Fire,” a thriller about a chess prodigy.
Still, Ms. Petrocelli said she had noticed an overall decline in foot traffic at her two stores compared with this time last year. As a result, she said, she has decided not to hire holiday-season help. Usually she hires three or four people part time.
Not surprisingly, publishers, too, are looking for ways to cut costs. Print runs are being scrutinized, and companies are trying to reduce the number of unsold copies that are returned by booksellers, a painful practice in the best of times.
Some publishers are also looking at their (famously generous) travel and entertainment budgets. Steve Ross, publisher of Collins, a division of HarperCollins, said he recently took a job candidate for a drink at a Midtown hotel and was shocked by the $22 price for cocktails. “I think it will be awhile before I will have the pleasure of meeting anybody there,” Mr. Ross said.
For now, both publishers and agents said the penny pinching was not yet sinking seven-figure book deals. Although some might be cautious about signing a debut novelist, most publishers said they were still aggressively pursuing deals for celebrity books and others with natural best-seller prospects. Last month Little, Brown & Company signed a deal with the comedian
Tina Fey for a sum reported as more than $5 million, and
Jerry Seinfeld was out with a book proposal this week that some publishers suggested could go for a high seven-figure advance.
“The paradox is we have to continue to acquire books and compete against each other in a tough marketplace,” said Jonathan Burnham, publisher of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins. “We’re trying to be fiscally responsible about royalty advances, and yet the big books are the books that everybody wants, so we’re still in this climate of having to pay large levels of money in these auctions. You can’t really step away from that.”
Christy Fletcher, a literary agent in Manhattan, said royalty advances for so-called midlist authors could come under pressure. “Something may sell for $50,000 that would have sold for $100,000 a year ago,” she said.
Publishers continue to plan for blockbuster sales of marquee-brand books. Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, for example, has shipped 1.25 million copies of “You: Being Beautiful — The Owner’s Manual to Inner and Outer Beauty,” Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet C. Oz’s next book in their best-selling series of advice titles, which goes on sale on Tuesday. HarperCollins has shipped more than 300,000 copies of “The Hour I First Believed,” the new novel by Wally Lamb. (In March that publisher had announced a first-print run of half a million, though these numbers tend to be exaggerated.)
One silver lining of the downturn: Because many books are not selling as well as they might have in a better economy, it does not take nearly as many copies to have bragging rights about being a best seller.
There still may be something to the theory, much circulated these days, that books can provide an escape from financial misery. When “Gone With the Wind” was published in 1936 during
the Great Depression, it sold a million copies in its first year and stayed at No. 1 on best-seller lists for two straight years — before it was a movie tie-in.
Then again, they didn’t have the Internet or television back then. But some publishing insiders suggested that readers might be looking for a respite from the digital world.
“I think that people have not been reading for the past year because they’ve been checking political blogs every 20 minutes,” said Larry Weissman, a literary agent. “At some point I think people are going to say, ‘You know what, this is not nourishing.’ I think and I hope — and maybe it’s just blind hope — I think there is a yearning for authenticity out there, and people are going to go back to the things that really matter, and one of those things, I hope, will be reading books.”
Source: A version of this article appeared in print on November 11, 2008, on page C1 of the New York edition.
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