Merchants of Culture. John B. Thompson
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some of those working in the paperback houses began to realize that their business model – which made them dependent on the hardcover houses even though they, the paperback houses, were generating the real volume sales – was not a terribly good one. There were even cases where the publisher at a paperback house who had came up with the idea for a book was obliged to find a hardcover house to publish the initial hardcover edition, so that they could then license the paperback edition from them. ‘It would be like me coming to you and saying “look, I don’t have any editors here, edit this book for me, publish it in hardcover, I’ll give you the book to do that and then I will pay you some portion of the success I have after you do that,”’ explained a publisher who had started his career as an editor at a paperback house. Some of the employees at the paperback houses – usually the younger ones who were less wedded to the traditional model and less worried about offending the hardcover houses who were their traditional source of product – saw the need to start publishing books on their own. So in the 1970s the paperback houses began to originate their own titles, initially publishing them as paperback originals and then, by the late 1970s, publishing their own hardcover books. Crucially, they applied to hardcover publishing some of the techniques they had developed in the world of mass-market paperback publishing, such as using more attractive packaging and extending distribution to non-traditional outlets, and they were able in this way to achieve hardcover sales that were unprecedented in volume. This was the origin of the ‘hardcover revolution’.
The hardcover revolution
As the mall-store chains evolved into the chains of superstores that were being rolled out across the country, the hardcover revolution gained momentum. The application of mass-market publishing strategies to hardcover books dovetailed nicely with the non-traditional merchandising methods of the chains, including the use of discounting and dump bins; and the fact that the chains were opening large superstores across the country and developing more efficient systems for supplying their stores meant that the volume of books that could be put out into the marketplace on publication was much greater than it had ever been. In the 1970s, a book that sold 500,000 copies in hardcover would have been a huge success, practically unheard of in the industry. Thirty years later, an equivalent success would be in the region of 8–10 million copies – that is, around 20 times greater. In the early 2000s, hardcover sales in excess of a million copies were not unusual, and new books by brand-name authors often sold more than this. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, first published in 2003, had sold more than 18 million copies in hardcover in the US alone by 2006 – albeit exceptional, hardcover sales figures of this magnitude were simply unimaginable in earlier decades. As the sales of hardcovers increased, the old relationship between hardcover and paperback publishing was gradually inverted: whereas in the 1950s and 1960s, paperback publishing was the financial driving force of the trade publishing business, in the 1980s and 1990s hardcover publishing was increasingly becoming the financial foundation of the industry.
There were three other aspects of this hardcover revolution that were particularly important. First, as paperback publishers realized the value of publishing their own books, they began to use their growing financial strength to acquire hardback houses. This enabled them not only to expand their publishing programmes but also to secure their supply chains, so that they became less dependent on buying books from hardcover houses which were commanding higher and higher advances for paperback rights. This was a principal driver of the so-called ‘vertical integration’ of the publishing business, which became an integral part of the conglomeratization of publishing houses that characterized the period from the 1960s to the 1990s.
A second aspect of the hardcover revolution is that it diffused the principles of the mass marketing of books throughout the industry as a whole. Prior to this revolution, mass-marketing techniques were restricted largely to the province of mass-market paperback publishers, who were commonly looked down upon by many who worked on the hardcover side of the business. But as the hardcover revolution gained momentum in the 1980s, practices that had originally been developed for the mass marketing of paperbacks became increasingly commonplace throughout the industry. Partly this was because, with the growing vertical integration of the industry, the bifurcation into hardback and paperback publishing, which had been such a pervasive feature of the industry in the 1970s and before, was beginning to break down. Partly it was also because many of the managers who rose to positions of power in the new publishing corporations that were taking shape in the 1980s were people who had honed their skills in the world of mass-market paperback publishing and were now able to introduce – even impose if necessary – more market-oriented values and practices into those sectors of the industry that had hitherto remained rather aloof.
Cover design is a good example that illustrates how, in the day-to-day activities of a large publishing corporation in the late 1980s, the market-oriented values of mass-market paperback publishing began to prevail over the values and practices of the traditional hardcover business. A senior executive who had come out of mass-market paperback publishing and joined one of the large corporations in the 1980s recounted how, at the time, those who worked in the hardcover division were very resistant to changing the covers on their books in response to what sales reps might say:
I remember going into a planning meeting one day in the hardcover division and I brought the sales reps in. They’d been to these meetings before but never with a voice. Most of the books had no jackets but one book did – it was a major title and the sales reps were whispering to me that the cover was terrible. One put his hand up and said ‘I think I’m going to have trouble selling that book with that cover.’ Well, I can’t remember who attacked him first – it was either the art director, the publisher, the editor or all three. It was like ‘Who the hell are you to be telling us whether or not we’ve got it right?’ And I shook my head – it was a pivotal moment for us because I went back in afterwards and said, ‘You know what, stick with that approach and you’re absolutely going to fail. These sales guys have to go in and sell your book to the person who’s going to sell your book, and if you can’t sell to them they can’t sell your book – you’ve got to wake up to it.’ Some got it faster than others but I would say that over the course of the next couple of years we turned over almost all of those people. Some just never got it.
For many editors and publishers who had learned their trade in the world of traditional hardcover publishing, this confrontation with the values and practices of mass-market paperback publishing was a rude awakening. For many it was a question of either adapting to the new way of doing things or getting out. Some adapted and even thrived, going on to forge very successful careers as hardcover publishers who embraced the principles derived from mass-market paperback publishing and put them into practice in developing their hardcover lists, becoming legendary figures in their own right. But many of the old-school hardcover publishers of this time – the late 1980s – simply disappeared, forced out by the cultural revolution taking place at the heart of the firm.
A third consequence of this transformation is that it led, slowly but ineluctably, to the withering of the market from which the revolution had originally sprung – that of the mass-market paperback. This was due partly to the very success of the hardback revolution of the 1980s and early 1990s, and to the capacity of the new systems of distribution created by the book retailing chains to get large numbers of hardcover books into the marketplace very quickly. It was also due in part to the increased use of discounting by the chains and by other retailers who were selling books, a practice that greatly reduced the price differential between hardcover and paperback books. In the 1970s and before, the price differential was commonly around 10 : 1 – a mass-market paperback might cost a tenth of the price of the original hardcover edition. By the 1990s and early 2000s, when some retailers were selling new hardcovers at 40 per cent off the retail price, the price differential could be as little as 3 : 1. Moreover, as the baby-boomer generation which had driven the paperback revolution of the 1960s and 1970s began to age, they became more affluent and their needs began to change. The difference between $5 and $15 for a new book mattered less to them than the ability to get it quickly – why wait for another year until the paperback edition was available? – and to read it in a format that was kinder to ageing eyesight than the small typeface of the mass-market paperback. Hence, as the sales of