Meanwhile, the infrastructure of paperback book distribution was undergoing significant changes. The dramatic rise and expansion of bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble siphoned business away from wholesalers’ franchises, both in cities and suburban malls. Computerized sales information enabled publishers, wholesalers and retailers to better track the performance of categories and identify winners and losers among specific books and authors. And the stunning advent of amazon.com leveraged the awesome power of the Internet to link supply and demand.

Assessing these patterns, paperback distributors began asking themselves why they needed to employ human labor when they could more efficiently and economically service bookstores and other outlets by shipping books directly to the retailers. Yes, it would mean that the human element -- the guy in the station wagon who knew which towns loved historical romances and which preferred contemporary ones, which adored westerns and which were big on science fiction – would be removed from the equation. But -- well, that was progress!

The big agencies pulled the plug in that summer of 1996 when whole fleets of drivers were discharged, and in the following years the wholesale distribution workforce was reduced to a fraction of what it had been in its heyday.

The Bottom Drops Out

Most publishing executives were slow to recognize the implications of the nosedive in the wholesale paperback distribution business, dismissing it as one of those occasional and inevitable shifts to which the industry had always adapted. What was the big deal? Fewer romances and other genre novels would be published, wasn’t that all there was to it?

In fact, the consequences were nothing short of calamitous. The impact was felt in every sector of the publishing business, from what got written to what got published to what got read. It wasn’t long before customers in west Texas or Nebraska or South Carolina discovered that many books by their favorite authors were no longer being stocked in their local stores. When customers or store owners complained, they were told to take it up with the distributor – in Vancouver or some other far-flung location reachable only by an 800 phone number.

The Rise of the Airport Model

A key result of the shift in distribution patterns was the streamlining of the way retailers ordered books from publishers. Why pick and choose among thousands of titles that might sell only a handful of copies? Wasn’t it better to follow the formula that worked so well at airports, ordering only the top fifteen or twenty bestselling books by branded authors like Nora Roberts, Robert Ludlum, John Grisham and Stephen King?

As paperback publishers awoke to the new buying patterns, they were forced to choose between star authors and those whose sales performance fell below a minimum level. At first the triaging was restricted to marginal genres like westerns, but as the last decade of the twentieth century progressed the definition of “marginal” broadened to embrace every category of book that fell below an ever-stricter definition of commerciality, a process akin to the lowering of the bar in a limbo dance. Limbo indeed: authors who had made a living for years from sales of ten or fifteen thousand copies of their paperbacks were now being dropped by their publishers as the minimum sales quota increased to twenty or thirty thousand copies or more.

Like the men and women who distributed their books, a lot of authors were thrown out of work, and the grim truth finally dawned on publishing executives. It wasn’t just genre titles that were affected by the seismic shift in book distribution; paperbacks of every kind were being hit by the pullback.

“What are the Author’s Numbers? What is the Author’s Platform?”

As the publishing industry entered the twenty-first century, book industry executives began requiring editors to produce elaborate profit and loss projections and other corporate-style analyses of the potential viability of books and authors. What was the sales performance of previous books? Did they “sell through” satisfactorily or did returns cross the threshold of unprofitability according to the latest formulas devised by bookstore chain number-crunchers? The mantra of “The Bottom Line” was invoked ad nauseam at every editorial committee, and editors were constantly reminded, “We can only afford to publish hits. If you can’t project a big profit on a book, turn it down.”

Editorial financial projections were aided by an Orwellian innovation called BookScan, instituted early in 2001 by Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems, the world's leading provider of airplay tracking information for the entertainment industry. BookScan offered subscribing publishers weekly analyses of sales by most major book retailers. Within moments, editors could access vital sales statistics on previously published books and authors, elevating performance parameters over traditional but less quantifiable values like compelling storytelling or stirring prose.

And what about the author? Was he or she attractive and mediagenic? Did he or she have a “platform” – an organizational base such as a hit television series or chain of fitness centers capable of promoting the sale of books? Was the author willing to buy large quantities of books for giveaway or resale by his or her franchise?

More and more, the importance of traditional literary criteria took a back seat to “The Numbers” and “The Platform.” Promising but modestly successful novelists discovered they could not get their second or third books published, and aspiring newcomers could not sell their books at all. As for nonfiction, no matter how compelling the memoir or business guide or social commentary might be, publishers were disposed to reject it because the author was not “branded.”

Faced with these grim options, authors resorted to increasingly frenzied measures to get published. Established novelists wrote under pennames to disguise the poor performance of their earlier books, or strove to produce blockbuster “breakout” novels long on sex, violence, and plot but short on craft and characterization. Without supportive publishers to carry them while they developed their talents over four or five books, new novelists focused on gimmicky concepts with “log lines” that could be pitched like movie scripts. Nonfiction authors plumped up their credentials or hired public relations specialists to burnish their images and enhance their media exposure. Others subsidized the purchase of large quantities of their own books to drive up their “numbers.” Literary agents were besieged by writers frantically seeking the advantage of representation by successful dealmakers. Self-publication soared, especially as electronic and print technology and Internet promotion brought the costs of vanity books down to proletarian levels.

As a shrinking marketplace combined with the pressure to publish books profitably, a sort of Boyle’s Law came into play. Those familiar with this physical principle know that such conditions accelerate molecular activity and produce heat, an apt metaphor for the growing anxiety among authors and editors.

And that brings us to today.

What options do authors, agents and publishers have under the circumstances described in these articles? What strategies must they employ to navigate between the ever-narrowing choices in the traditional publishing landscape and the almost infinite ones in the emerging world of virtual publishing? In the final installment of this series, we’ll examine the conditions under which the game must be played if literary endeavor is to continue fulfilling its mandate to inform, enlighten and entertain. In particular we will focus on the roles of “gatekeepers” in the publishing process -- editors, agents, bookstore buyers, reviewers and critics – who separate gold from dross in our literature. If those roles are being “disintermediated” by the forces I’ve described, and the filters between writer and reader continue to be dissolved, who is going to decide what we read?

Copyright 2004 by Richard Curtis

Richard Curtis, president of Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., is a leading New York literary agent and a well known author advocate. He is also the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including several books about the publishing industry.

He graduated from Syracuse University in 1958 with a BA in American Studies and from the University of Wyoming with a Masters degree, also in American Studies. He joined the ScottMeredith Literary Agency after graduation, and was foreign rights manager there for seven years. In 1967, he launched a freelance writing career, and has had some fifty books published by many major houses. In the early 1970's, he began his own literary agency, and in 1979 incorporated it. Richard Curtis Associates, Inc. currently represents close to 150 authors in all fields. The agency reports millions of dollars in annual sales for leading authors in every area of nonfiction and in such categories of fiction as romance, westerns, thrillers, science fiction, and fantasy.

His interest in emerging media and technology has enabled him to help authors anticipate trends in publishing and multimedia. He has lectured extensively and conducted panels and seminars devoted to raising consciousness in the author and agent community about the future of communications.

Early in the 1980's, he started writing an advice column for Locus, a science fiction newsletter, and out of his articles several books have been published including HOW TO BE YOUR OWN LITERARY AGENT, BEYOND THE BESTSELLER, MASTERING THE BUSINESS OF WRITING, and THIS BUSINESS OF PUBLISHING. He has testified as an expert witness in several publishing trials.

He was the first president of the Independent Literary Agents Association and was President of the Association of Authors' Representatives in 1996 and 1997. His company served for over a decade as agency for the Science Fiction Writers of America. In 1994, he received the prestigious Romance Writers of America Industry Award for Distinguished Service to Authors. In 1998 he was invited to serve on the editorial advisory board of Writer’s Digest. In 2000 he was invited to serve on the Publishing Master of Science advisory Board of Pace University.

Late in 1998, Richard Curtis announced the formation of e-reads, a publisher dedicated to reissuing, in e-book and print formats, previously published books in such popular categories as romance, fantasy and science fiction, and thrillers. The company commenced operation in 1999 with over 1200 titles, many by famous names in their fields, and concluded strategic alliances with all a dozen major distributors including Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Ingram Book Company. As a byproduct of his e-book activities, he collaborated with a programmer to create the Royalty Tracker, a program designed to quickly convert vast amounts of royalty information generated by e-book vendors into simple royalty statements. In 2002 Writers Digest Books published his HOW TO GET YOUR E-BOOK PUBLISHED co-authored by William Quick.

Richard Curtis is married to author Leslie Tonner and has two children. He currently resides in Manhattan. His hobbies are sports, music and painting.