The Egatz Epitaph

Publishers I’ve spoken to are wary of many aspects of their business model in light of the transition the industry is undergoing. As dead tree books are replaced by their digital equivalents, a very practical question arises. As one old friend who wishes to remain nameless confided, “how do I know if Amazon or Apple sells 1000 or 10,000 copies of one of our titles? 100,000?”

With physical books, it’s fairly easy to get an accurate quote of the numbers retailers are moving because publishers control what is being shipped. Thanks to the Great Depression, they even know what is being sold, and often, how quickly. In the First Great Depression, independent retail bookstores—then the only kind of retail bookseller—were offered new books by publishers with the guarantee they could return whatever didn’t sell. Thanks to this practice, retailers had less risk, and thus could keep their doors open when Americans had trouble feeding themselves, let alone buy books.

In Manhattan, we often see sidewalk hustlers with card tables offering the latest bestsellers at drastically-reduced rates. These are new, first editions, and where they come from is the subject of another story at another time. What is not so amorphous is the fact that any retail industry will suffer from what managers have for decades euphemistically dubbed “shrinkage.” What they actually mean is theft: stolen merchandise, plain and simple.

One huge loss sector is the retail book industry’s own workforce. Consider the disgruntled minimum wage employee working for a big chain bookstore. It’s fairly easy for them to forget to ring up a few books when their friends come to the register with a large stack of titles. This drives fraud prevention specialists crazy. Everyone knows it’s been happening for decades, and, like the never-ending War on Drugs, War on Poverty, War on Illiteracy, etc., it has no effective solution palatable to either the consumer or the employee at this time.

The leading e-book sellers are in a unique position. Since the major publishers were unable or unwilling to create a technological infrastructure to sell e-books, they have no choice but to get in bed with Amazon and Apple, to name the top two. Like all publishers, they will need to carefully review data they’re given by those sellers, and hope they’re not getting skimmed off the top, like the way many other industries function as a matter of course. This will, inevitably, open the doors for accounting firms, forensic accountants, IT specialists, and, but of course, an endless parade of lawyers to strategically place their upturned hats into the ring.

Where does this leave authors of e-books? As usual, on the short end of the stick. Without authors, publishers have no product, yet authors are the ones with the most to lose, the ones with the most ways to be violated by a long line of business interests since they reside on the bottom of the publishing food chain. Publishers not only take their due before anything trickles down to authors, but now there will be a larger and more nebulous set of accounting rules and practices put in place before publishers’ numbers, in turn, can be trusted. In short, it’s not a great time to be an author unless you’re one of the highest-paid authors able to command obscene advances even your own books might not make back.

To be sure, there will be spreadsheets, presentations, and statistics galore to back up claims of fair and accurate reporting of each e-book transaction. In the end, though, the only thing authors will be able to take to the bank is what they are given by their publishers.

We live in strange times, and they continue to get stranger. Joan Littlefield has recently offered for sale the unwashed toilet formerly belonging to J.D. Salinger. She’s hoping to get one million dollars for it. Salinger, disgusted by publishing practices by the early sixties, famously retreated to Cornish, New Hampshire to write without worrying about money. Nice for him. Old J.D. also abhorred the idea of Hollywood and/or Broadway getting their hands on his work. It makes one wonder his thoughts on the inevitable demise of the printed book. Since we can’t ask him even if he was speaking to journalists, all we can do is wait for his survivors to begin the garage sale of his manuscripts to publishers, and the rights to Hollywood and Broadway, much in the way of how we saw the Kerouac Estate do when Stella Kerouac died. No doubt, the will of one man, the sole creator and owner, has zero rights after he’s dead. If you think otherwise, behold the ongoing lessons of what’s happening to the Barnes Foundation after the death of Albert C. Barnes.

With Apple posing the largest threat to e-publishing frontrunner Amazon (who currently sells e-book titles below cost in hopes of becoming the Microsoft of e-books) and their Kindle—possibly the most poorly named product since Whack Off! Insect Repellent or AYDS Appetite Suppressant Candy—it looks like there’s troubled accounting already. In June, Apple claimed it had 22 percent of the e-book market. Author Joe Konrath offers a different reality. HarperCollins is claiming they’re selling more e-books than dead tree titles. Amazon, a publicly traded company, is strangely and notoriously tight-lipped about sales of both the Kindle and e-books. When you have a product delivering reading material with a name that instills images of Nazi book burnings, you probably have a lot you need to keep on the d-low.

What the publishing industry is now facing is more of the same. Not only are they attempting to get Americans to actually read again, but they’re trying to sell them an expensive piece of technological hardware before they buy their first title. As always, there’s little writers can do, except keep cranking out their work and hope they’re not going to get shafted even further by a few more layers of creative accounting before that thin royalty check, if any, shows up in their mailbox.