This is a puzzle which I am compelled to bang my head against in public, despite the manifest and demonstrated disinterest of even this community. Regardless, I have spent my entire adult life, and the second half of my adolescence, trying to figure out the mechanics and economics of the publishing business. I have been a writer, a typesetter, an editor, a photographer (out of self defense), a designer, an art director, and a co-publisher. Often at the same time.
And I am now baffled, not simply by the present, which can be explained as a kind of tech-driven Darwinian winnowing process exacerbated by the economy, but by the future.
I am baffled because I cannot see into the future to understand how publishing -- of magazines, newspapers, or even books -- will continue to make economic sense, except for the biggest companies in the least satisfying of ways.
You've come this far, please jump with me.
I believe in the art of magazines. Deeply, passionately, professionally. I believe in the unique power of a properly orchestrated magazine to bind together disparate readers into a community: to educate, to invigorate. I am shaped by the power of Gordon Parks' photo essays in the Life of the 1960s. More than that, I believe in the power and subtlety of the written word.
Now...traditionally magazines and newspapers have had three possible income streams: subscriptions, advertising, and newsstand (single issue) sales. Depending on one's business model, you weighted your emphasis to one of those three revenue sources. Because single issues sales pay publishers six or more months after the fact (or not at all; there have been periodic distributor bankruptcies in small publishing that have crippled some of my friends and competitors), that's a difficult leg to stand on for small publishers, but some of the bigger players do. For most of us, subscription income is a steady cash flow source, and advertising allows us to exist. To survive. To thrive. And if you attract sufficient readers, readers of the right sort, advertising has to follow.
Only it doesn't, anymore. My little magazine closed after 13 years not because we had lost readers, but because the music industry had so traumatically changed that our advertising base no longer existed, and it seemed unlikely that anything would rise up to replace Many small niche music magazines closed in 2008. But it goes beyond that, well beyond that, and well outside the niche I have occupied for most of my professional life.
At the same time, the huge corporations which produce paper for the publishing industry was closing down plants to choke off production (see: OPEC) and raise their profitability. And publishers' costs.
At the same time, the big publishers convinced the U.S.P.O. to rewrite centuries of rules and advantage their ability to use fancy software and huge circulation numbers to justify a lower per-unit cost. And a higher cost for small publishers.
At the same time, the number of newsstands available to independent publishers -- principally independent bookstores, but also, in my former category, independent record stores -- have ceased to exist. Gone and not replaced. A few years ago we were told that there was a structural limit to the number of newsstand issues a small publisher could put into the marketplace, about 30,000. I don't know what that number is now, but it might well be half that. That's the difference between having a business, and having a hobby. Or being out of business. (For those who read the Washington Monthly, as I have for years, they are the kind and size of publication reduced by this transformation in the marketplace.)
Why? Because at the same time the music industry has slaughtered itself (don't get me started; or do...), the book business has slid toward the abyss. For example, just yesterday I received word that the venerable Harry J. Schwartz Bookshops in Milwaukee, WI, is closing, after 87 years. Two of the four stores will reopen under the hopeful ownership of their former managers. Now, I've only been to Milwaukee once, overnight, to watch a baseball game in the old stadium and drink a few ounces more hefeweizen than proved wise the next morning. But I met one of the management team from Schwartz last fall at the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association meeting in Dearborn, MI, and he was an astonishingly smart and well-read man. And very good at his job. But sales at Harry Schwartz were down 17 percent. And the economy isn't, y'know, improving. So if they can't figure out how to make it work anymore...it gives one pause.
But, see, if there are no independent bookstores or record stores, or, even, alternatives to the Big Boxes in all categories, there is simply no place for a small niche publisher to go. There are no newsstands. (I am the magazine buyer for my in-laws' bookstore now, and I can tell simply by the blank spaces on our wall how many titles have ceased to function this year. I keep adding them, and they keep disappearing.) There is no way to reach an audience.
Oh, online?
No. Nobody has yet figured out how to make money serving 30,000 readers online. Online ad rates are a fraction of what print advertising generated, and web designers and the constantly changing software and sociology of the wed mean that staying viable online is at least as expensive as paying the printer (and employs far fewer people, I might add).
The problem in book publishing is, as with the music industry, the death of independent retail is killing the publishers as well. Amazon is not a substitute for a well-read clerk who knows her clients. Especially not if you're a small publisher.
But, again, people are still reading. They still want books. They still want mediated media with copy-editors and art directors and all the frills. But somehow the national online marketplace has destroyed the residual value of used books. (I now accept that my CDs are worth nothing. Oh, well.) My dad sent a clipping from The New York Times, recent but undated, under the headline "Bargain Hunting, and Feeling Sheepish About It" which talks about the .01 books one can by on eBay and alibris, simply because people are clearing out closets (and I hate those pernicious shows on HGTV teaching people to throw stuff away...such a vile piece of advice to a collector of junk!). That means the used book business, which some retailers of new books had embraced as a tonic to their problems, has been horribly devalued as well.
And so, reports the NYT's David Streitfeld...
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced that it wouldn't be acquiring any new manuscripts, a move akin to a butcher shop proclaiming it had stopped ordering fresh meat.
See...when the major labels quit making 45 singles, all the sudden the punk rock world began making 45 singles because there was all this manufacturing capacity and prices were cheap. That's not happening in publishing. Paper prices have not, so far as I know, gone down, despite the mega-printers who must now be struggling to pay the interest on their expansionary loans. And so despite the failure of numerous magazines (and the fewer pages most are publishing this year), there appears to be no break in sight for printing prices.
And even if there were new lower printing prices for publishers (we writers have already devalued ourselves), where do you sell your product now?
My last entry here quoted from an December 2006 Atlantic article by Michael Hirschorn headlined "Get Me Rewrite!" and included this snippit:
...perhaps newsprint will find a financially sustainable market among the elite and elderly (or perhaps it will have a nostalgic vogue not unlike that of, say, heirloom tomatoes)...
...and, again, have you ever tasted a real tomato?
No matter. I've been thinking about that quotation, still. OK, maybe print is going to recede into an elite indulgence for the over-50 crowd. Well, I know a lot of really good writers and illustrators and photographers and designers, and I've met some here (indeed, I succeeded in luring one of the kos luminaries into the latest bookazine I'm associated with, but I'll crow about that another time when it's actually in print). So I started tinkering in my head with an idea to do a simple, fun, collective art project that might come out once or twice a year, geared to the elite connoisseurs of the printed word.
But I can't figure out where the money comes from. And I can't figure out where to sell it. And I'm good at this, or at least I used to be, or, at least, I used to THINK I was. My wife has been stocking and buying a bookazine called Craft, which sells for $14.99. I've been paging through it, thinking, because they seem to have figured out the new paradigm. Except that yesterday she told me they'd just laid off 14 percent of their workforce.
You may not care, although if you've come this far I suspect you do. The future of print may not matter except to doddering idiots like me who can't adapt to the new paradigm.
Except for this: What IS the new paradigm?
Is intellectual discussion really going to be reduced to a text message?
I'm serious. The language changes. Our expectations of language change. I've discovered, reading to my five-year-old, that many of the books I read as a child are linguistically unapproachable for her, and she's a smart kid. But the language has changed. Every generation kvetches that communication has been diminished by the younger folk, and I don't mean to argue that point. What I don't understand is how we are meant to communicate substantive, subtle ideas in the new media.
Obviously, since I've written far too many words here, and on exactly the wrong day.