With Books as With Films, It’s Business as Usual

There is nothing like the annual orgy of print that is the American Booksellers Assn. convention to persuade an author that he should take up a less crowded trade, like trapeze repair or snake taming.

At Anaheim over the weekend, shuffling along those three football fields’ worth of aisles and stumbling over the booksellers with their cartons-on-wheels heavy with literary loot, it was possible to suspect that the standard figure of 55,000 book titles a year in the United States is a serious underestimate.

Of course there were books in several languages on display, as well as maps, calendars, globes, doilies, shelving and everything else that might help the bookseller turn a profit.

Amid the tumult--and the actors dressed as space-persons, monsters and oversized animals--it is not easy to discern large truths. Yet it struck me again that there are some remarkable parallels between the business of book publishing and the business of movie making.

Both have been seized and not necessarily improved by what we can call the process of agglutination. The large have gotten larger. So many publishing houses have been telescoped together that one of the visiting book critics predicted dourly that at next year’s ABA there would be only two booths, one for each of the surviving giants.

By one estimate, 60% of all retail book sales are done by the two major bookstore chains, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, whose purchasing power gives them a life-or-death control over the fate of many books, especially first novels and other fragile works.

Books and movies have always been profit-making enterprises, and there was a bottom line even before anybody thought to call it that. Yet the entrepreneurs who built the movies were closely attuned to the mass audience from which they themselves had emerged. They had a passion for the medium and solid instincts about it (at least those who survived and prospered did) and, above all, they were daring gamblers in and out of the office.

The passions in the publishing houses may have appeared more genteel--tea in the afternoon, quickly followed by very dry Manhattans just round the corner. But the passion for the printed word and for the men and women who wrote the words was undeniable.

Publishing never spun profits like the movies and, especially at the working levels, the passion was in lieu of fat salaries. To a considerable degree, that is still true.

But the later history of book publishing, as of the motion picture industry, has been the rise of the professional manager whose principal allegiance is to the bottom line, double and triple underscored.

Passion, including a passionate trust in one’s own instincts, has been a casualty on both coasts, which is to say in both industries. It has not disappeared from either. It exists, frustrated in both Manhattan and Hollywood.

But the gambles, also on both coasts, seem no longer to be on the adventurous and daring but on the very high-cost sure things: the zillion-dollar “Rambo” sequel in the West, and in the East the musk-drenched potboiler novel in which the bodices have been pre-ripped and on which the author’s advance would buy a yacht.

The positive side of things, to be noted equally in books and films, is that bigness has begat smallness: the rise of the independent.

Independent production and boutique distributors of film are now to be reckoned with in Hollywood. They live amid constant fiscal peril and anxiety (even as their spiritual ancestors did in the Hollywood ‘teens and after). Occasionally what they turn out is exploitative rather than exhilarating. But given half a chance they do films that enlarge the possibilities of the medium. “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “A Trip to Bountiful” and “The Moderns” come to mind--all, as it happens, financed by the feisty young FilmDallas.

Distribution problems (that 60% slice controlled by the two chains) make independent publishing even chancier. But the work of the university presses, the small presses (some no larger than a couple’s spare bedroom) and the valiant self-publishers (triumphs of conviction over logistics) carry a fearless vitality.

What these presses do, in often harrowing financial circumstances, is provide a hearing for new authors and unorthodox ideas that is becoming harder to get in the major houses.

Peter Gethers, who heads Villard Books, a specialty imprint within Random House, thinks that the prime casualty of the changing nature of publishing has been the so-called midlist book. Editors, he argues, still hope to find the new voice, whose first book will be a critical but probably not a commercial success but whose subsequent works may be both.

But between those small books that are bets on tomorrow and the big-advance best sellers, the turf is bare, Gethers says. The comparisons with the movies seem clear.

The independents are frequently able to make their films for $5 million or less; the major studios can’t put two people in a rowboat for under $20 million. The mid-range film (which would, I suppose, cost $10 million these days) is harder to find.

In all these matters Hollywood is further advanced than publishing. Television precipitated the changes in Hollywood, where the founding moguls were about played out even as television took hold. The movies embraced the uninvolved managerial generation before publishing had to.

It seems a last irony that a casualty in both films and publishing has been the sense of their own past. The past is neither Willa Cather nor King Vidor, Scott Fitzgerald nor Rouben Mamoulian; it is what did well yesterday afternoon.

I sensed a few literary ghosts wandering the aisles at Anaheim, wondering quite what to make of it.