THE CAREER NOVELIST
(depending on the deal) rewrite the manuscript, edit it, and supply
everything from illustrations to cover art, mechanicals, film, mar-
keting support—even finished books.
Packaging is an old profession. Its roots are in nonfiction. Art
books, textbooks, heavily illustrated medical and scientific books, and
the like are the province of the packager. A more recent trend is the rise
of the packaged trade book. Titles like The Joy of Sex, TheWay Things Work,
and New York Public Library Desk Reference are successful examples.
Fiction, too, has long been packaged. Earlier in this century,
Edward Stratemeyer and his syndicate created the Bobbsey Twins,
Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Dana Girls—overall,
125 juvenile series. More recently, Lyle Kenyon Engle's company
Book Creations generated the best-selling Kent Family Chronicles, The
Americans, and Wagons West.
Publishers can also become packagers, as with movie noveliza-
tions and Star Trek titles. It can be argued that whole genres have
been packaged: the steamy contemporary romance, for example.
This category was not invented by any single author, but evolved out
of a competitive quest for new product lines during a war between
Harlequin and Silhouette Books.
Today, the science fiction field is overloaded with novels con-
nected to movies, TV shows, computer games, role-playing games,
and comics. Packaged product is encroaching, too, on the mystery
field. Celebrity mystery "authors" are taking up slots, and publishers
are even filling up their lists with mystery series created in-house
and owned outright by them. What next?
To see what tomorrow may look like in a packager-dominated
genre, one has only to look at the mass-market YA and middle-
grade categories. Here, packaged series abound. In the eighties it
was girl-oriented YA series like Sweet Valley High. Nowadays it is a
flood of copycat middle-grade horror series. Such books can be
delightful, but what happened to single authors? They are still
around in hardcover, but fewer and fewer are making it in paperback.
Packagers rule the YA racks.
Why do publishers buy from packagers? The reasons are not
difficult to understand. For overburdened editors in our downsized
industry, it is tempting to believe that packaged product will be easy