The Economy and Novels

I'd like to know where you got the idea that the publishing industry/book market is in decline.

Unless we have a couple of big houses fail (and they won't) I'd think this is a non-issue.

A mass market paperback novel's cheaper than a movie ticket, cheaper than a month of cable or internet service, cheaper than a T-shirt, as cheap as a lunch at McDonald's, cheaper than some museum admissions... heck, you can buy seven new paperbacks for the price of an X-Box game.

If you want to read, you'll read. Even if you don't have two dimes to rub together you can go to the public library (although the public library is facing its own budget setbacks...)

I don't have any evidence one way or the other, but I'm not worried.

I Agree with Fillanzea.

Reading is one of the cheapest leisure activities around, so I don't think book sales will really slump. People won't go out to eat or to the theatre or the movies. But they have to do something and that will be stay-at-home things like reading, dvd rentals, computer games, knitting, procreating, scrabble, weaving quilts, growing vegetables etc.

As writers we have the cheapest hobby of all. Even if we couldn't afford a PC or even paper and pens, all we need is a patch of dirt and a twig and we can still write

I agree that novels in any form represent a good value for the money. Book sales are down, like everything else. I think it's going to be felt most by the debut author and the midlist author. The big houses will focus on the sure things, King, Patterson, Griosham, et al. The new projects will be scrutinized harder than they otherwise might have been. The midlist author suffers because they lack the same name recognition as the heavy hitters.

Is this anything we can do about it? Not that I see. Either or books will get published, or they won't. So what's new?

Books compete with movies, TV, and video games for time, not money. It's true that they are pretty cheap as far as entertainment goes. But it's not the price of books that's at issue here. My very rudimentary understanding of economics tells me that people are going to be less likely to put anything on their credit cards. Publishers have to anticipate the effect on the market ahead of time before they set their publishing timetables, determine their print runs, and scale their royalty advances. Right now, the effect isn't looking good for anybody.

We inveterate readers who always buy books will keep on buying books, but that doesn't account for the real problem: that publishers will act more conservatively. They will trim their expenses and push fewer books onto shelves. Meanwhile, the casual book-buyers who plop a spare $10 down at the airport and leave the books on the plane for the next person to read are going to be watching their pocketbooks a little more carefully.

I think worrying about the economy and how it affects publishing is a futile excercise. I mean, what can you do about it? Nothing.

One thing to remember, is that books sold today won't be published for 12-18 months. You have no way of knowing what the economy will be like then.

I could see publishers becoming pickier about what they buy for a while. Maybe not take as many chances. But it's impossible to determine if you'd fit into a risk category or not, so it's probably not worth worrying about.

The only thing you can control is how good your book is. The better your book, the better chance you have at publication. Same as any other day really

Novels are very cheap entertainment. Historically, in hard times, novels take off.

Fillanzea said:

A mass market paperback novel's cheaper than a movie ticket, cheaper than a month of cable or internet service, cheaper than a T-shirt, as cheap as a lunch at McDonald's, cheaper than some museum admissions... heck, you can buy seven new paperbacks for the price of an X-Box game.

If you want to read, you'll read. Even if you don't have two dimes to rub together you can go to the public library (although the public library is facing its own budget setbacks...)

I don't have any evidence one way or the other, but I'm not worried.

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Add to that the fact that for the price you get a lot of value for your money. A movie may take 90 minutes to an hour to watch but a book can take a day, days or weeks to read depending on its size and how fast you read. Excellent value for money!

You can read a book again and again too, over a period of time. I can buy a good paperback novel (eg top 20 bestsellers in bookstores) every week for less than the cost of buying a daily newspaper.

Just a few novels published in 1930, the first full year of the Great Depression and a year or so into that terrible time:
/As I Lay Dying
/Absalom! Absalom!
Light in August
Murder at the Vicarage
The Maltese Falcon
The Good Earth
East Wind, West Wind
A Bed of Feathers
Narcissus and Goldmund
Tender is the Night
Sound and Fury (published 7 October 1929, twenty days before the stock market crashed.
There's a lot more. I wouldn't worry.

If writers listened everytime someone said "the book market is in decline" bookstores would have gone out of vogue around 1928. A story well told will always find a market. Novels (and movies, tv, etc.) are escapism. As Jim said, hard times tend to be good for escapist endeavors. But strangely enough, so are good times.

scribbler1382 said:

If writers listened everytime someone said "the book market is in decline" bookstores would have gone out of vogue around 1928. A story well told will always find a market. Novels (and movies, tv, etc.) are escapism. As Jim said, hard times tend to be good for escapist endeavors. But strangely enough, so are good times.

Click to expand...

Quoted for truth.

James D. Macdonald said:

Novels are very cheap entertainment. Historically, in hard times, novels take off.

Click to expand...

That's good to hear.

Even in hard times, perhaps more so in hard times, libraries are still around. They purchase books and, in some countries, pay the author a percentage when books are borrowed.

Having said that--I think it depends on the publishing company. I know of one publisher having such a hard time paying royalties that they've cut back on publishing the books on hand.

I think the one hit that book sales will take will be in the expensive hardcover area - gift books, coffee table books, hardcover political tomes that people buy to demonstrate their party bona fides.

I believe that books people read for pleasure - especially genre books - will weather the storm.

I read where publishers and others in the industry said that in spite of the recession book sales have remained stable thus far. Frankly, I don't believe them. First lets see the tally of book sales through 2009.

I've also read where the American Library Association said that during recession years borrowing of library books raises something like 500% -- surely that's telling me something.

Independent book stores are closing at a record pace, and even the sales of some book mega-chains are way down.

Most every week I read where some publishing house has had to lay off workers.

I also read that some planned take over deals have been canceled due to the world wide economic crisis. And I imagine there are a whole lot of other things going on we know nothing about.

So I do believe that the economic situation has definitely put a damper on our industry. Not that new writers won't get picked up by agents and publishers, not that books will stop selling, not that publishers won't buy books from agents and/or writers -- all this will continue to go on, but IMO not as vigorously as before. But writing is what I do for a living, and has been for 30 years (I also love it to death). I've been through this before but was lucky enough to not have it interfere with sales of my new and already published works. So, I'll continue to do what I do and hope for the best. I hope everyone else can and will do the same thing. But I think it naive to think that the publishing industry will be exempt from the economic crisis.

Strangely, the entertainment industry does pretty well in times of recession. And as has been pointed out multiple times in the thread, books (at least mass market paperbacks) are a pretty inexpensive way to be entertained.

Independent book stores have been getting whacked for years. Long before the current economic climate. Big block stores are taking a hit on their floor stock due to online sales. None of it translates into bad times for writers. Books sold are books sold. We may not like the culture shift of the venue, but that's another issue.