On The Right - marketing of books

National Review, July 12, 1999 by William F. Buckley Jr.

Godforsaken Books

NEW YORK, JUNE 1

Books are on my mind because 1) today the Wall Street Journal's inside lead tells us, "Borders to Try/A New Weapon: Printing Books/Inside Its Stores"; 2) today is the publication date for my 40th book (title withheld, for the sake of propriety); and 3) yesterday I completed reading the galleys of a striking exploration of the book scene called The Making of a Bestseller-From Author to Reader, by Arthur T. Vanderbilt II.

Fifteen years ago the retired drama critic Stuart W. Little and I launched an enterprise. Situation: About 45,000 books are published every year. Eighty percent of them are remaindered (that means, disposed of: sold to secondhand houses or to anybody else; or destroyed) before the end of Year One, making "shelf space" for newer books that come along. Result? If you want a year-old book, you might not be able to find it. Bad for the reader and awful, truly awful, for the writer. The idea was to encourage publishers to return to the authors 100 or so unsold books before remainder time, allowing them to advertise their existence in a special catalogue, the Buckley-Little Catalogue.

The enterprise failed for lack of circulation of the catalogue in bookstores, but never mind: Two businessmen materialized who bought the business for a very modest sum and a few months later went bankrupt and hid from an adamant collector whatever assets they had. Among their enterprises was to be a device that foreshadowed the WSJ's story: "Borders Group, Inc., in a deal to be announced today, has taken a minority stake in an Atlanta start-up company called Sprout, Inc., that will eventually let the chain's stores print high-quality paperbacks in the store in about 15 minutes. 'Making a book will be no more difficult than making a latte at Starbucks,' brags Sprout's 30-year-old co- founder, Henry Topping." Cost to the consumer? About the same as the original edition. If it works, that is a high moment in the moribund life of Buckley-Little.

But consider the ambient scene. "The initial hurdle to selling books," Mr. Vanderbilt tells us "-and it's a Matterhorn of a hurdle-is that nobody reads. Selling books in the United States is like selling videotapes in a country where 75 percent of the population doesn't own a VCR, and the 25 percent of the population that does, hasn't a clue how to operate them."

The author rubs the gritty data in our faces. We are a nation of 250 million (as of 1990). The sale of a mere 50,000 copies can put a book on the bestseller list. Sell more than 1 million and you have a runaway bestseller, even though that means 0.5 percent of the reading public has bought it. The highest sellers in recent years are 1.3 million, Tom Clancy; 1.2, Stephen King; 1.1, Danielle Steel; 850,000, James Michener; 475,000, Jackie Collins; 450,000, John le Carre; and 330,000, Ken Follett.

How does that compare with other reading publics? John Steinbeck, we learn, was astonished that the print run in Denmark for one of his books was identical to the print run in America. Denmark then had a population of 5 million.

The figures are most awfully discouraging. A 1993 survey released by the Department of Education tells us that 90 million Americans over the age of 16 lack the reading and writing skills required for employment. Seven hundred thousand students, the Department of Education grieves, graduate "without the ability to read their diploma."

Vanderbilt goes on to discuss aliteracy, a word that does not exist in the American Heritage Dictionary on which I rely, and which means, as one would reason, the ability to read without the desire to do so. "This affliction," Mr. V. observes, "even among high-school and college graduates, is rampant." Aliteracy is most evident, in everyday life, aboard airplanes. Walk down the aisle and observe passengers who deprive themselves of reading.

How to achieve bestsellerdom? The author hits us with a dismaying figure. It is that to expect a person to buy a new book, the author must contrive to cause the prospective purchaser to hear about it six times in one week, by whatever means: advertisement, radio/television interview, a neighbor or friend who has read the book and liked it, mention of it in society or gossip columns. That is a very tough assignment, much harder than writing a book.

Speaking of John Steinbeck, I recall the story that one day in the Thirties he turned on his publisher, the distinguished Harold Guinzburg of Viking Press, and said: "I write it, you sell it."

That's just great, but you need to be a J. D. Salinger to get away with it. He promoted his books by refusing to do so. The rest of us labor at Barnes & Noble.

So What Now

For China?

NEW YORK, MAY 28

When Rep. Chris Cox answered questions on the matter of Chinese espionage, he spoke matter-of-factly about what should be done if one or more Chinese-Americans were tried and convicted. "They should be executed."

Holy Moses! It has been a long time since we executed traitors. And the general feel of the modern situation is that the Rosenbergs were executed in the age when McCarthyism was rampant, and such a dark age is behind us besides . . .