From Barbara Fister’s Place, January 30, 2010
I’ve been mulling over how to respond to the amazing profile of James Patterson ™ in The New York Times Magazine, but the news that Amazon has instantly removed Macmillan’s books over a dispute on e-book pricing adds an interesting wrinkle. “Removed” is an oversimplification; used copies are on sale, because Amazon and the seller make money on those, but Macmillan and their authors do not. There is no indication, of course, that new books exist and could be bought elsewhere. Amazon will sell you the book, just not share profits with the publisher and, by default, the author.
Comments on news threads like this tend to fall into patterns:
- E-books are way too expensive.
- My words as an author are MY PROPERTY and you will pry DRM from my cold, dead hands.
- Traditional publishers should die already.
- I’m a writer. How’m I supposed to make a living?
- Amazon is great.
- Why isn’t everyone acting like Baen/O’Reilly/Cory?
- Self publishing is the future.
- Cut out the middleman. Sell direct.
- But what about indie bookstores?
- Indie bookstores suck. I get much better deals at Amazon.
Within days, Amazon blinked, grudgingly. But let’s set all that aside for now. Here’s what struck me about the Patterson profile.
Transformers – More than Meets the Eye
The subtitle of “James Patterson Inc.” is “How a Genre Writer has Transformed Book Publishing.” There are really two stories here: one aggressively business-minded author has created a highly successful brand and sold millions of books; publishers drool over big hits, and he’s hit his home run farther than anyone other than God when he wrote The Bible (but damn, forgot to inscribe “copyright shall last forever” as the eleventh commandment or he would be rolling by now. Think of all the derivatives! The children’s versions! The movie rights! But I digress.)
The other story is about changes in the book industry that set the stage for Patterson, inc.
Like movie studios, publishing houses have long built their businesses on top of blockbusters. But never in the history of publishing has the blockbuster been so big. Thirty years ago, the industry defined a “hit” novel as a book that sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in hardcover. Today a book isn’t considered a blockbuster unless it sells at least one million copies.
The story of the blockbuster’s explosion is, paradoxically, bound up with that of publishing’s recent troubles. They each began with the wave of consolidation that swept through the industry in the 1980s. Unsatisfied with publishing’s small margins, the new conglomerates that now owned the various publishing houses pressed for bigger best sellers and larger profits. Mass-market fiction had historically been a paperback business, but publishers now put more energy and resources into selling these same books as hardcovers, with their vastly more favorable profit margins. At the same time, large stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders were elbo