News
Is Publishing Too Top-Heavy?
As megabestsellers command more
of publishers’ marketing budgets
and retailers’ shelf space, breaking
out the next crop of hit makers
has become a challengeB
ook publishing has long been a hits-driven busi-
ness. The bestsellers, the logic went, paid for the
flops. And it was the authors of those in the
middle—the so-called midlist—that publishers
hoped to build into the next crop of bestsellers. But midlist
sales have faltered enough in recent years that there is a
growing concern among publishers and agents about how
the business can create new hits when the field they once
turned to is, well, disappearing.
Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy, during a discussion
of the company’s second-quarter results, pointed to gener-
ating interest in midlist books as one of the biggest challenges
facing all publishers.
Though the hits-driven nature of publishing has not
changed in recent years, the nature of those hits has. Due
to a number of coalescing factors—including a shrinking
physical retail market and an increase in competing enter-
tainment driven by the proliferation of streaming TV
platforms—book publishing has watched as a handful of
megaselling titles have begun to command an ever-larger
share of its sales.
According to NPD BookScan, which tracks an estimated
80% of unit sales of print books, sales of the 100 bestselling
adult titles increased 23% in 2018 compared to 2017. All
other titles ranked below that top tier either fell or remained
flat. On a 52-week rolling basis through Oct. 5, 2019, the
sales of the top 100 books rose another 6% over the com-
parable 52-week period ending in 2018, while, again, all
other sales levels either fared worse or stayed flat. Taken
together, sales of the 100 bestselling print books rose
nearly 30% over a period of about two years, while books
that ranked between 101 and 10,000 saw their total print
unit sales fall 16%. Books that ranked below 10,000 remained
flat in the period.
Kristen McLean, executive director of business develop-
ment at NPD Book, noted that the sales growth of the top
sellers in 2018 is owed, in part, to the outsize success of
political books. However, as political book sales cooled in2019, the 100 most successful adult titles of the year have
still gained more readers, posting a 6% sales bump over the
previous year.
The cause of the widening gap between the best and the
rest is a system in which the only thing that seems to beget
success is success. So what, many are wondering, can they do
to turn their promising lower-tier sellers of today into their
established bestsellers of tomorrow?
The cycle that creates this system is a frustratingly circular
one. “The top books—[which are] most often [earning] the
highest advances—require serious capital and resources to
push them into the top slots,” McLean explained. And pub-
lishers, she added, “are under serious pressure to recoup
their investment” on their most expensive acquisitions. The
situation, she went on, “is amplified by the need for books to
earn their shelf space in mass market retail—big books are
a better bet” for those types of outlets.
A publisher at a major house agreed that, to an extent,
publishers have contributed to the gap between the top
sellers and those below. With social media offering a variety
of ways to promote titles that are selling, publishers usually
put more resources behind books that are succeeding in
order to maintain momentum. As these books get the lion’s
share of the houses’ focus, other titles are left to find audi-
ences on their own.
As one Big Five editor who specializes in commercial and
literary fiction said of his category, “There used to be a lot
more books that could sell 40,000–50,000 copies. Now
more sell fewer than 10,000 copies.” It seems, he said, that
“it’s either feast or famine.”
Those suffering from the famine are, to an extent, a group
once known as the midlist. Ironically, if you ask most editors4 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ NOVEMBER 4, 2019
2018 vs. 2017 Unit Sales Performance by Sales Rank
SOURCE: NPD BOOKSCAN