In recent news, Powell’s reported that their online used book sales have skyrocketed. Which makes sense, given the economy. People try to sell their books for money, which gluts the market, and people would often rather purchase cheaper books than new books.
So, given that used book sales spike in times of financial crisis, and given that used book sales don’t funnel any money to publishers or authors, this explains why even in a economic downturn we’re seeing what Gideon Lewis-Kraus calls the “mutual assured destruction that is the book auction,” where celebrity authors receive gargantuan advances. To contradict the purists who prefer a more socialist dispersion of advances across the author spectrum, huge advances do have a type of business sense behind them.
The trouble with the book market is that it doesn’t have a critical cultural mass — that is, people at work don’t ask if you’ve read a certain book, they ask whether you’ve seen a certain movie. What that does is make most books independent of time. You could read a book now, you could read it five years from now. And when you read a book five years or fifty years after it’s published, then you have the opportunity to buy it used for dirt cheap (all those 1 cent, shipping only Amazon deals).
This is why publishers have to bet big on authors with large platforms (Condoleezza Rice, Tina Fey). The greatest money is made by books that make a stir in culture — books that have to be read new, read now, not read later. Because two years from now those books will have lost all their cultural cachet — they’ll be hopelessly anachronistic. Thus people can drop money on them now because of necessity.
I don’t have much sympathy for those complaining about celebrity author advances and the impact of used book sales on the market. I understand their plight, but they’re really complaining about a larger cultural shift, one away from books and towards more ephemeral and more electronic forms of entertainment. Although book industry has not done as badly as the newspaper industry in adopting to a competitive landscape governed by mega-corporations and internet-savvy consumers, I fear that publishing will have a day of reckoning similar to journalism in the near future if new models of doing business are not found. Of course, this is what everyone says — just before they admit they don’t have a viable model either.
