Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [296]
AND YET, behind the facade of prosperity, growth, and optimism, there was a certain unease to be felt, a kind of après nous le déluge feeling that it was all too good to be true and wouldn’t last. For the simple truth remained that the old problem of book publishing hadn’t changed: You shipped out a lot of copies, you were at the mercy of the big bookstore chains to get them displayed and sold, and the ones they didn’t sell you took back for full credit.
Much of what had happened to book publishing since the 1960s would have seemed incredible or marvelous to Max Schuster, Dick Simon, or Bennett Cerf, but the retail end would have seemed depressingly familiar. It was merely, on a larger scale, the same old story that had been worrying publishers ever since the Depression. Now, of course, it was further complicated by the fact that there were only two major bookstore chains, which wanted to dominate the publishing process, insisting on changes in jackets, titles, prices, and so forth, before they agreed to stock a book in any quantity. The business had mushroomed far beyond anybody’s expectations, but it still stood on feet of clay when it came to actually selling the product.
Snyder thought that he had found a solution: expand into textbook and informational publishing, which were more predictable businesses, and where the rate of growth and overseas expansion were far more favorable. Others thought that the solution might lie in pursuing market share. This was the “German solution” to the problem, based simply on the fact that in Germany, where the book business was dominated by a very few major players and where book clubs were far more important than in the United States, market share mattered as much in selling books as it did in selling refrigerators or any other kind of consumer goods. Newhouse had dabbled with the strategy, perhaps accidentally, as a result of simple eagerness to acquire more and more publishing companies, perhaps because to anybody in the newspaper and magazine business, market share is the Holy Grail.
The Newhouse organization, like the rival Gannett organization, had been adept at turning places with two or three newspapers into one-newspaper towns, on the sensible principle that the best competition is no competition, and transferred the same simple technique to the magazine business, insofar as possible. Thus, growth and sheer size were not simply a question of ambition, but of strategy. If you added together Random House, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, Villard, Crown, Times Books, Ballantine, and Fawcett, not to speak of innumerable London publishing houses, you could begin to think about dominating the market, in addition to which, if one of your imprints failed to pick up a major author, there was at least a good chance that one of the others would. Really, on paper, it looked like the answer to the problem—one or two major publishing companies confronting one or two major bookstore chains. Reduce competition, and you could minimize your costs by consolidating shipping, marketing, bookkeeping, and so on, eliminating much of the inherent wastefulness of traditional book publishing.
It looked to some like a reasonable idea, but in practice it didn’t seem to make much difference, maybe because there were simply too many major players left and maybe because nobody at Random House took it seriously. In any event, people’s attention at Random House as the nineties unfolded was riveted on the question of whether Harry Evans, the energetic and media-conscious former journalist, was a swashbuckling genius who had found at last a way to popularize books and authors or a loose cannon about to sink the ship.
To outsiders, it seemed