Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [65]
Book publishing, “the business that capitalism forgot” in Life’s words, was suddenly glamorous, along with such businesses as “electronics [and] vending machines” and was being revolutionized by the use of some “mechanical brain” that could predict or create best-sellers. Indeed, Doubleday, Life reported, was already experimenting with an ambitious new sales program that would take the guesswork out of the book business. Doubleday salesmen were to be “armed with portable dictating machines” and sent out to take continuous inventory of the Doubleday titles at bookstores across the nation. These reports would be airmailed back to New York, where Doubleday’s executives would be able to plot how many copies of each title had sold and how many were still on booksellers’ shelves. “With uncanny accuracy,” Life marveled, Doubleday statisticians would then be able to predict the sales of a book and identify a best-seller, “just as an election night statistician can predict the outcome of an election from the early results of a few scattered precincts.”
Since Doubleday’s ratio of best-sellers to failures was about the same as anyone else’s throughout the sixties, it can be presumed that this futuristic scheme failed to pay off. It was, however, typical of the sudden optimism that overcame publishers and investors at the time. Wacky ideas proliferated as share prices rose: instead of editors choosing which books to publish by reading them, “sales experts” would determine the right “product mix” for each list; “books would be sold through the mail to people who read magazines” (as if the book club had not already been invented); and publishers would strive for market share, since “the only way to get more books read is to put more on the shelves,” in the words of Doubleday’s then-chairman Douglas Black, who had apparently not been told that they were returnable.
The Wall Street Journal, too, commented on the “book boom,” though more cautiously, noting that book publishing was now “a growth industry.” But it pointed out that many of “the perplexing problems” of the business—like picking the winners from the losers—had yet to be licked and described the process as “a gigantic dice game.”
Publishers have always been eager to eliminate the risk factor, either by branching out into what might seem to be more “secure” businesses, such as textbooks or “information” (dictionaries, encyclopedias, et cetera), or by concentrating on “staples,” such as cookbooks, auto-repair manuals, and the like. As Wall Street beckoned, they became even more concerned to show that theirs was a fundamentally sensible, predictable, feet-on-the-ground business, not a crapshoot—a business for grownups, not one dominated by spoiled children in the form of editors and authors. Interviews and articles tended to emphasize marketing and merchandising, as if the editorial side of the book business didn’t exist. About this time, a business expert called in to evaluate S&S came to the conclusion that we would be better off if we published only bestsellers—advice that was passed on to us with a straight face by Leon Shimkin, whose pained expression made it seem as if we were stubbornly resisting the obvious. He had charts drawn up to show how much better off we would be by not publishing books that didn’t sell and concentrating our energies on those that did. Just think, he would whisper hoarsely, how much work we would save if we published only best-sellers!
IF THERE was one thing I had learned after almost two years in book publishing, it was that the amount of work invested in a book seldom bears any relationship to its success. Most editors, in fact (I am no exception) spend a lot of their time on the literary