I’ve been working with books, and blogging about them, for a few years now, and reading them for a little longer. There’s something that I’m finding increasingly troubling: the majority of the books I purchase to read, or receive for review, shouldn’t have been published. At least, not in their current state.

I’m not talking about taste here: I like to think I’m wise enough to tell the difference between a book that’s not for me and a book that does a bad job of fulfilling its own goals. So much of what I see is half baked. These are books which don’t fully commit to their ideas, that are full of new-writer twitches and mistakes that should have been ironed out by a good editor. Typos and grammatical issues abound. (Shhh… That’s okay on a blog; it’s not okay in a published book.) Horror stories reach me about copy editing outsourced to cheap but non-native speakers (like the academic who had his manuscript returned to him with all of the Latin words spell-checked into the nearest English word), and I’m forever tripping over misplaced commas. However, it’s not the missing copy editing that’s the primary problem: it’s the missing structural work. The days of Maxwell Perkins are long gone, but we may need them back if the industry is going to survive.

While I’m not usually one to shy away from writing a negative review, I’m finding it increasingly hard to review these books. When we review books, we review authors, but in these cases, the authors aren’t really the ones to blame: I’m sorry to say it, but it’s the publishers.

Publishers do both authors and readers a disservice when they release a book which should have been developed further, or even when they should have shelved the book and held the author in the paddock pending the next one. When this happens, the reader doesn’t get fair value, and the author’s entire career is put in jeopardy.

Before we start waving pitchforks and lighting torches outside their offices, however, we have to accept the fact that publishers can only afford to do so much. Good copy editing costs a lot of money, and good developmental work costs even more. They’re also time-consuming, meaning there’s a limit to how much in-house staff can do.

This is where we come to discounting. Discounting is where a publisher takes the money they could have used to properly develop their book, and gives it to Amazon instead.

How discounting works

My figures are a few years out of date here, but plus or minus 5% and you’ll get the idea.

Publishers sell their stock to retailers at a discount. A few years back, this was around 35% of the price of the book—so a £6.99 paperback would wholesale at £4.54. However, the leading chains, Amazon, etc. demand higher discounts—up to 60% or more. If a publisher gives a discount of 60% on a £6.99 paperback, they only make £2.80, and that £2.80 has to cover all the same things that the old £4.54 had to:

  • Book production
  • Marketing
  • Author royalties
  • Running the company
  • Cover the cost of producing and then pulping returned stock
  • etc etc

Even jacking the price up to £8.99 would only yield £3.60.

Given the way the walls are closing in, it’s not hard to see why a few corners get cut when it comes to developing new writers and editing existing ones.

You may also have noticed that there’s a vicious circle here:

  1. Major retailers own a larger proportion of the market.
  2. Major retailers demand higher discounts from publishers.
  3. Publishers receive less money for their books.
  4. Based on higher discounts, major retailers undercut competitors (e.g. independent stores)
  5. Competitors go bust.
  6. GOTO 1

(Apparently this cycle can’t happen fast enough for some publishers, who occasionally try to speed up the process by offering their new titles to the major chains not just with extra discount, but as exclusives.)

The threat from self-publishing

The number of authors self-publishing is increasing fast, and this is a bad thing. It’s a bad thing for readers because the vast, vast majority of self-published books are rubbish, and it’s a bad thing for authors because they don’t get read, and they don’t get the support they need to grow. Traditional publishing should be standing out among all this rubbish, the imprint a seal of excellence. This assurance—that the book, if not to your taste, will at least be properly written and edited—is really the principal added value that publishers can provide to readers.

Whose responsibility?

It’s tempting to say that consumers have the responsibility here: that we should vote with our purchases and send a message by choosing the full-priced books from the independent booksellers, or direct from publishers. Like a lot of people, I try to do this from time to time, especially if there’s a small publisher or independent bookshop that I want to support.

However, just as directors have the responsibility to ensure maximum profitability for their companies, so too do consumers have the responsibility to themselves to ensure fair value on the things they purchase. When a publisher discounts to allow a book to be sold for £5.49, that publisher is sending me the message that £5.49 is all the book is worth. Only a fool would spend, say, £10.99 on something that even the manufacturer suggests has a value of only £5.49.

Furthermore, there’s no doubt in my mind that, when we pay full price for a book, we’re now paying over the odds because the RRP is set to compensate for a retail discount of 60% or more. In other words, if we buy a paperback for £10.99, we’re not only paying for our own copy, we’re also subsidising the copy of the guy who’s paying £5.49 in a half-price promotion on Amazon.

This artificially inflated pricing means that consumers aren’t fulfilling their responsibility to themselves if they purchase at full price a book which has had its price set with high discounting in mind.

In other words, I am being responsible to myself when I pay £7.99 for a book worth £7.99. I am not being responsible to myself when I pay £10.99 for a book worth £7.99, that’s been priced to allow it to be discounted and sold for £5.49.

What can be done?

At this stage, this isn’t such an easy question to answer. We really need to re-establish the essential value of a book. Is a paperback novel worth £3.49 or £8.99? When I open a hardback of the latest novel from Joe Author, am I reading something worth £18.99, or something worth £8.99 with free super saver shipping?

I no longer know the answers to these questions.

What I do know is that we need to get back in touch with how much books are worth. However much this is, consumers need to be willing to pay these prices, and publishers face just as much of a challenge: they need to be willing to charge them, with only a reasonable discount to even the largest retailers.

Otherwise, a book will only be worth the cheapest price at which it can be bought, and that’s not a price which allows for proper development and editing.

Only when we can pay and charge a fair price for books will publishers be able to properly focus their resources on maintaining the standards of excellence that we all want from our industry. In the meantime, next time you’re about to pick up that heavily discounted book, think about what isn’t included in that cheaper price: the prospect of a fully functional publishing industry.