Mysterious Matters: Mystery Publishing Demystified

Book Marketing: Then and Now

On vacation over the summer I found a nice hardcover original copy of Christie's A CARIBBEAN MYSTERY (1964), one of the Jane Marple books. Such books are always "finds" for me, even though it's fairly easy to find Christies, simply because of the huge number of them that exist. I haven't read the entire Christie catalog (in fact, the only writer whose entire oeuvre I've read is Margaret Millar) so I wait unti l find a nice old copy of a book I haven't read, and then I buy it and read it.

By the way, I should mention that the publisher Black Dog & Levinthal does beautiful hardcover editions of the Christie books at an unbelievably low price. You can get most of them on Amazon for about $8.50, less than what you'd pay for many trade paperbacks. So, even though BD&L isn't really a "small" or "independent" press (they're a division of Workman), I encourage you to support their commitment to keeping the greats in print at reasonable prices by buying these books - if not for yourself, then for a friend or teenager who loves reading (or one whom you want to start on that path).

The book I bought is the Dodd, Mead American edition. The back cover is a salute to Agatha Christie by 7 Top American Mystery Writers. I reproduce it here because I think it's such a classy bit of marketing combined with good, old-fashioned literary criticism--as well as fertile ground for modern discussion:

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ERLE STANLEY GARDNER: "Agatha Christie is tops in the mystery field. All of her stories have ingenuity, and in these days, when so many writers rely upon style and so-called motivation, it's a pleasure getting a yarn which puts your brains to work."

JOHN DICKSON CARR: "She has probably invented more ways of bamboozling the reader than any other living writer. Any young writer would find a whole course of instruction by studying her novels: watching the deft characterization while in full view she palms the ace."

GEORGE HARMON COXE: "In my opinion Agatha Christie stands alone among English writers of mystery and detective stories. No one I know of has done them so well for so long."

DOROTHY B. HUGHES: "My respect for Christie is boundless. She is certainly one of the all-time greats. I do not believe it possible to overestimate the debt that mystery fiction in general owes to Christie. She proves that quantity and quality can go hand in hand in peace."

HELEN McCLOY: "I have always enjoyed the novels of Agatha Christie. There is no other mystery writer who has maintained a greater output with a higher level of quality."

ELLERY QUEEN: "Agatha Christie has long been one of our favorite mystery writers. Surely she is one of the most imaginative and fertile plot creators of all time."

HUGH PENTECOST: "Like good wine, Agatha Christie improves with age. When she writes formula, it's the best formula; when she writes off the track, she keeps you, skillfully, from seeing round the curves."

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Also of note is the back flyleaf. Have a read and think about the publisher's technique for stimulating readers to buy other books by Christie:

MURDER
INTERNATIONAL

Three Complete Mystery Novels

by Agatha Christie

Here are three of Agatha Christie's breathless novels of mystery and suspense, set in the far reaches of the world in both time and place.

SO MANY STEPS TO DEATH

The disappearance of a famous British scientist introduces an exciting mystery with a spectacular Moroccan setting.

DEATH COMES AS THE END

A unique murder mystery, set in Egypt three thousand years ago, where the age-old violences of greed, lust and hate lead to sudden and tragic death.

EVIL UNDER THE SUN

Hercule Poirot, the famous Belgian detective, solves a baffling and macabre puzzle while vacationing at a British resort hotel.

 

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I find many things discussion-worthy about the American writers' tribute to Christie. In no particular order:

1. It's interesting that the term "mystery" is used throughout, not the phrase "crime fiction," which has a more modern flavor. Writers of this generation seemed to have an attachment to that word and were proud purveyors of the genre.

2. Several of the admirers comment on Christie's story-telling and plotting abilities, her methods for crafting a puzzle. This is one area where I think public tastes have changed; it's as much about character these days as it is about plot. I wouldn't ever acquire a book that I didn't feel had both, but I think readers had different expectations in the 1960s than they do today.

3. I've seen a lot of commentary over the years dismissing Christie for what is considered her inability to develop character. And yet I gree with John Dickson Carr: she does have a psychological thread running through many (if not all) of her books. Try THE ABC MURDERS sometime; in that book, Poirot is fixated on figuring out the killer's psychology as a way of tracking him or her down. 

4. We have a weird double standard today. On the one hand, writers who are too prolific come in for vicious criticism (I'm thinking particularly of Joyce Carol Oates). At the other end, given the short attention span of Americans, readers seem to want and expect a book a year by their favorite writers, which does not always lead to the highest quality output. Several of Christie's admirers point to the fact that she achieved both quality and quantity, no mean feat.

I would suggest to aspiring writers (some people call them the "pre-published") to take close note of the back flyleaf copy. Each book is described in a single sentence. This is something every writer should be able to do. Valuable not only for query letters and pitch sessions, but also for developing your message when talking to the book-buying public in libraries, supermarkets, and the like.

What I find particularly fascinating, comparing then and now, is the complete lack of chronology on the back flyleaf. Nowhere does the copy state that you should read book A first, then book B, then book C. In comparison, I was looking on the St. Martin's Minotaur Website recently, and I noticed that all of their series books now say "#4 of 22," for example, with 4 being the author's fourth book in a series of 22 novels. Plenty of publishers are also putting these numbers in large type on book spines, too, no doubt in reaction to the number of readers who want to follow a series in order. I have actually seen some comments on Amazon reviews by very irate readers who were annoyed that the reviewer had chosen to read a later book in a series first!

I'll admit this is a puzzle to me. In an age of the Internet, where people are hypertexting all over the place and seem to have maximum attention span of fifteen seconds, it seems odd that so many readers are adamant about reading a book series in order. Maybe it's a way for readers - who by definition have a higher attention span than average - to force some organization onto the chaos of the rest of the world. But I also suspect it has to do with the idea of grasping onto a character and watching him or her develop over the years. There seems to be the expectation that the chief character will grow, have new life experiences, develop wisdom, and so forth with each passing book - although I think there are as many examples of long-running series where this does NOT happen as series where it DOES.

With Dame Agatha's books, the order in which you read them doesn't matter much. Probably you wouldn't want to start with CURTAIN first, but even if you did, you wouldn't enjoy the earlier books any less. Some of the characters in A CARIBBEAN MYSTERY, it occurred to me, showed up in an 1971 Christie book, NEMESIS, which I'd read at least a dozen years ago. So clearly those recurring characters couldn't have been the killer in A CARIBBEAN MYSTERY, but hundreds of books have come and gone in the last dozen years, and I didn't remember any of it.

All of this said, I didn't think A CARIBBEAN MYSTERY was one of Agatha's best. It was a little talky and the story was only so-so. Still, I devoured it in a couple of nights, because that's what one does with Agatha, and that's why she still sells like hotcakes, 45 years after her death.

I also wonder which writers working today could achieve this level of tribute. Definitely P.D. James and Ruth Rendell, though I'm not much of a fan of the latter. Michael Connelly. Laura Lippman. Michael Koryta? The late Michael Crichton?  

A Question of Rights

Recent comments on the blog, and emails to me, have brought up questions of distribution. Specifically, why is it that (for example) Australians can't buy English books in Australia, or German readers can't buy U.S. books in Germany?  

The answer lies in the rights negotiated and granted in the original publishing contract.

Make no mistake: Publishers of all stripes have one thing in common. We want people buying and reading our books. At the end of the day, that's how we bring in money and pay the bills (including royalties to authors). We have no reason to ever knowingly or willfully prevent people from purchasing our products; doing so is against our self-interests.

Running up against our desire to sell books are two main impediments, however.

First, there is the issue of piracy, both domestic and international. As we have all discovered, it becomes next to impossible to control your intellectual property once it gets into digital format. Even with DRM (digital rights management), it's not hard for the tech-savvy to turn a purchased ebook into a file illegally uploaded to a fileshare site, while publishers watch almost helplessly as thousands of people illegally download the property, thus depriving us of revenue and our authors of money. For this reason, in the early days of ebooks, I was very much in favor of releasing ebooks only after a period of time had elapsed - the way we typically see a paperback come a while after the hardcover. The huge growth in fiction sales on Kindle, Nook, etc., has changed my mind somewhat; but make no mistake, the piracy issue is very much there and costs the industry billions of dollars per year in lost revenue.

Even with the printed book, there are certain international markets where printed piracy is the coin of the realm. These include China and India. A publisher may decide to do everything it is power to prevent printed books from reaching these markets, where copyright laws are laxly enforced. People will scan the book, then print it cheaply and sell it on the street; and I don't think we can be blamed for not wanting to support the black market. Of course, it's a losing battle because any pirate can go on eBay, get a copy of the book, and still sell illegal copies of it. So why would we spend all that time, money, paper, and distribution in getting books into areas where we'll lose our shirts? 

Second is the issue of negotiated rights. Nowadays there really is no such thing as "the publisher" of a work. Agents negotiate rights of different kinds to different publishers, going with the highest bidder. Rights can and do include: hardback, trade paperback, mass-market paperback, ebook, serialization, and so on. And then add to that geographic rights: You can have U.S.rights, North American (U.S. & Canada rights), European rights, world rights, and so forth.

In the case of books written in English, an agent might decide that the best publisher in the U.S. is not the best publisher in another country with a sizable English-speaking population, such as Australia or the UK.  Local/national publishers tend to be better with local marketing/publicity than the U.S. publisher, even though all the big houses have an international presence. We might be prevented from selling our book in Germany because the agent has a German publisher interested in bringing out both an English and a German version of the book simultaneously. And since the typical publishing contract is at its core an assignment of exclusive rights to sell the product, we may be prohibited from selling an eBook in markets to which we do not have the rights. This would explain why, for example, one of my books might not be available as an eBook in Australia.

Agents make their money by maximizing royalty revenue for authors, so they cannot be blamed for wanting to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of the granting of rights. But our industry is not predictable. The agent may not be able to sell any Australian rights at all; meanwhile, the U.S. publisher is prevented from selling books in Australia. Thus the Australian reader is left in the lurch. Unfortunately, there is nothing that publishers can do about this.

I have even heard stories recently about agents trying to sell print rights separately from ebook rights. Frankly, I think any editor who'd sign a contract like that should have his head examined. All of the work goes into the print product; why let some other publisher free-ride on the ebook sales? But, as I always say, we're in a new world with new technologies cropping up every day, and business models are changing, so we shall see what the future holds. At the end of the day, though, everyone needs to remember that publishing is a BUSINESS and publishers exist to make PROFIT.  We're not nonprofit organizations, and we have the right to run our businesses in ways that minimize our costs and maximize our revenues.

One Big Hit or a Cult Following?

I'm always thinking about the connections among the different forms of "entertainment commerce" - publishing, movies, TV, music, and so on. It seems to me that in all these industries, successful people get forced into doing the same thing over and over again, with the public belittling or downright rejecting attempts to break out of the mold. 

What this comes down to, in any of the media, is the idea of "one person = one identity."  Thus actors are typecast; rock singers can't suddenly start singing rap; and writers must continue to write the same characters with more or less the same story.

This led to an interesting discussion in the office this past week. We wondered:

Suppose only two options are possible for writers (both quite good).  The first scenario: Author writes a blockbuster, but then never again writes a hit book. We know of the famous cases (like Harper Lee, of To Kill a Mockinbgird fame, and John Kennedy Toole, with his Confederacy of Dunces, which was published posthumously.) But there are plenty of much-beloved and admired mystery writers whose output was or has been far from prodigious. The late and much-missed Sarah Caudwell took a decade between books sometimes, and even one of my favorites, George Dawes Green, has had limited output. Charles Mathes, a personal favorite, gave up his novelistic career after four wonderful books that I still recommend everywhere I go. We editors can cajole, plead, and try to inspire - but it's the writer who writes the work while we sit back and wait for it.

The second scenario: Author has a cult following and writes a book a year for 20 years, never really breaking into the big time and selling just enough copies to keep the publisher interested.  A tremendous number of crime writers fall into this category.

Which scenario would most writers prefer?

My guess is that most would go for #2. As a publisher, though, I'd choose #1. Blockbuster books often continue selling years and decades later, and a healthy backlist is just wonderful for the bottom line. Once the work is written, keeping it in stock is relatively little work with very nice payoff for both publisher and author.  That revenue provides us with so much of what we need to continue our work: an income stream, money to take chances on new writers, attempts to keep up with the changing marketplace and all these electronic initiatives.

In contrast, #2 is a lot of work for relatively little income/profit. The truth of this statement helps explain why, in an era where profits/black ink rule the day, many publishers lose hope after the third or fourth book. The conventional wisdom (I'm not saying it's accurate, though it may be) is that if the author hasn't hit it by that point, s/he's never going to. At that point, continuing to invest resources in a cult figure becomes either fan service or simply relationship-based: author and editor have a good relationship, editor can convince various higher-ups that the small profit on Author X is better than a loss on Unknown Y.  

I think it's that perpetual search for the New Blockbuster that keeps us motivated as Editors. When we've signed up someone who makes it big, we're like the proud parents of Rhodes Scholars. Our midlist authors are those reliable oldest children who have a special place in our hearts but whose limitations we realize. As for those underperforming or problematic children, who continue to require our attention or make demands that we're unwilling to meet, they are kicked out of the nest to make their way in the world.

In the meantime, I think there are some takeaway points. The first, of course, is that the way you treat your editor really does matter when it comes time to decide whether or not you get a contract for your next book. The second is one of the joys of the independent or small press. We have lower thresholds for what we consider successful, which means that a "flop" at one house might be quite a hit for a smaller house. Over the long run, this might mean more revenue from a smaller house than from a larger house; and, of course, there are plenty of well-known people who started with a smaller house and then "graduated" into the big leagues.  I think independent presses have getting more attention in the last couple of years, though we still experience some prejudice. (I never tire of telling the story of an author, very active on a listserv, who wrote an enthusiastic email to our publicist, asking if he'd be willing to present to her group. As soon as she found out that our publicist works for a small press, she stopped answering emails and went from gung-ho to totally uninterested. A number of years ago now, but everyone in our office knows her name and has a good laugh over the phenomenon that we've named after her - but which I can't say here, of course.) Still, I wouldn't want to be anywhere else!