Leonard Shatzkin

Back when my father, Leonard Shatzkin, was active with significant publishers — the quarter century following World War II — he observed that very few books actually took in less cash than they required. That is not to say that publishers saw most books as “profitable”. Indeed, they didn’t. They placed an overhead charge of 25% or 30% or more on each book so most looked unprofitable. But that didn’t change the fact that the cash expended to publish just about every book was less than the cash it brought back in.

The exceptions were usually attributable to a large commercial error, most commonly paying too much of an advance to the author or printing far more copies than were needed. But, absent that kind of mistake, just about every book brought back somewhat more revenue than it required to publish it.

This led Len to the conclusion that the best strategy for a publisher was to issue as many titles as the organizational structure would allow. That was a lesson he passed along to the next generation of publishing leadership that came under his influence. And the leading proponent of that business philosophy was Tom McCormack, who worked for Len at Doubleday in the late 1950s, then went on to Harper & Row before he ascended to the presidency of then-tiny St. Martin’s Press in 1969. Tom often credited the insight that publishing more books was the path to commercial success as a key component of the enormous growth he piloted at St. Martin’s over three decades.

(I checked in with Tom, who is long-retired as a publishing executive but a very active playwright, about how many books didn’t claw back the cash expended. He told me that his “non-confirmable recollection” is that the percentage that did at least get their money back ranged from 85% to 92%. He recalls “incredulity” from his counterparts in other houses, whom he believes simply couldn’t “wrap their minds around the meaning of the statistic: revenues minus disbursements.” He went on to tell me that this number “seemed effectively irrelevant to them. They had an overriding and deeply flawed notion of something they called title-profitability. They thought they were analyzing the profitability of a title with their ‘p&l’.”)

Despite the apparent immutability of the fact at the time that most titles brought in incremental margin, many publishers who were losing money would come to the opposite conclusion. They would decide they should cut their lists, pay more attention to the titles they published, and create more profits that way. I remember discussing the futility of that approach in the 1980s with my friend and client, Dick McCullough, who was at that time the head of sales at Wiley. When I observed that the publishing graveyard was littered with the bones of publishers who pursued cutting their lists as the path to profits, Dick said of their efforts to cut “yes, and very successfully too”.

I got another lesson about this reality in the late 1980s when a company I consulted to (Proteus Books) sued its distributor (Cherry Lane Music) for a failure of “due skill and competence” in the sales efforts for Proteus Books. One of Proteus’s expert witnesses was Arthur Stiles, who had been Sales Director at several companies, including Doubleday, Lippincott, and Harper & Row. Stiles confirmed that big and competent publishers routinely put out thousands of copies of titles in advance of publication, with extremely few failures in terms of getting the initial placements. He was testifying in a time that was still like what my father experienced: the industry’s title counts were growing, but so were the the number of bookstores in which they could be placed.

Those days are over. And, coupled with the ebook revolution, the implications of that are profound.

A few things happened to change the environment so that it became no longer true that even big publishers could get all the distribution they needed on every title to assure a positive return of cash.

1. The title output of the industry has grown enormously. In the 1960s, the total output of the industry was in the neighborhood of 10,000 titles a year. Now it is something more than 30 times that number published traditionally, with a multiple of that number being self-published. Each new book is competing against more new titles every two weeks than a book fifty years ago would have competed against in a year!

2. Nothing published ever dies. Fifty years ago, stores were smaller and, while there’s no easy way for me to measure this, I’d guess that the active backlist across publishers was probably no more than 25,000 titles. Superstore growth in the 1980s, the efficiency of Ingram as a national wholesaler, and computer systems that helped stores track their inventory and sales fueled backlist expansion. Even in the early 1990s, the total of truly competitive titles was probably in the low six figures. But then came Amazon’s unlimited shelf space and Ingram’s Lightning Print to deliver one copy at a time, and, even before ebooks, the competitive set of available titles had probably jumped to seven figures.

3. Bookstore shelf space is declining. Nobody who has been reading this blog needs much elaboration on that point.

What that means is that a list-cutting therapy that McCullough and I saw in the 1980s as suicidal and which McCormack explained repeatedly was folly is no longer crazy. (Oh, how I wish my dear departed Dad was around to discuss this with!) And the new conjecture in this blogpost is that the day might come when a publisher with an extensive backlist might decide that the most profitable path would be to hardly publish any new titles at all!

The portfolio of any longstanding publisher today contains a lot of backlist which is pure profitable gold in the ebook era. Contracts often give publishers the rights to a book for the life of copyright if they continue to sell it. (I’ll confess here that there is a caveat to this point coming up in an italicized postscript below.) So a major publisher doing $600 million and up (of which there are six), almost certainly has triple-digit millions of sales in its backlist, which is increasingly shifting to digital. Even the most sober industry observers are seeing revenues exceeding 50% from ebooks in the next two or three years, which would mean that substantially more than half the units of these books are selling electronically.

So, let’s say you’ve got a company doing a billion dollars in annual revenue and barely eeking out a profit or perhaps even losing money. With a strategy of continuing to publish what you own as ebooks, you can see digital backlist revenue of $150 million, decaying by 10% a year, with gross margins giving you $100 million or more in cash flow. Offloading all the print operations for which you own rights to a distributor or competitor will provide incremental revenue as well. (You only need help for the offline print sales. Getting the online sales requires no operational capability.) You’d then need a minimal organization to do some marketing (not a lot), sign up and put out some additional titles that would be chosen for being risk-free (not a lot), and to handle the administration and royalty processing for your thousands of contracts. Five or ten million ought to cover those costs very handily.

Of course, the other thing you could do is sell your rights to that backlist. But I think it would require somebody to overpay in relation to your net discounted cash flow to make that attractive because the costs of keeping it all for yourself would be so minimal.

One hopes that today’s publishers are looking at the simple statistic Len and Tom authored: revenues minus disbursements by title. No doubt today’s biggest publishers are looking carefully at the performance of their copyrights in a way that sorts the new titles from the backlist. But doing so is only useful if they’re apportioning their costs properly across the title base. If they are, what is described in this post will be evident if and when it is true. In the meantime, careful focus on new title acquisitions and accepting that the healthiest way to manage for the future might be to reduce the commitment to new title development will have to replace the clear truths that guided smart publishing strategy for previous generations.

The history and analysis are all valid, but there is one big monkey wrench in this scenario I’ve sketched. There is a provision in the 1978 copyright law that allows authors to reclaim rights to their books after 35 years. Titles published in 1978 become eligible for reversion, called “recapture” apparently, starting in 2013. (With logic that is ironically typical of what Congress does when it touches copyright law, older titles are on a slower track for liberation.) Agents are planning for this; publishers will have to deal with it. I am given to understand that publishers can only retain these books for life of copyright by, in effect, reacquiring them. (Should be lots of fun!)

So, in fact, the backlist attrition might be faster than 10% (but it might not, because ebooks may create more readers for backlist than we had before as well.)

It is also true that many publishers have already been moving in the direction I suggest: pruning their new title counts and being particularly cautious with midlist. Of course, there was a conviction by many that list-pruning was a good strategy even before it actually was a good strategy, but the execution of it has been much more rigorous over the past decade.

Share this post

An ebook of the first two years of The Shatzkin Files is now available and will be linked for the forseeable future from our left nav bar. This post is the introduction to the ebook, which explains how it came about.

My friend, Joe Esposito, first told me about blogs in the early part of the first decade of the 21st century before just about anybody else I knew had heard of them. I am not sure why it took me many years to start one of my own.

I’ve been training for this gig for a lifetime. My Dad insisted that I learn to touch-type when I started fooling around with a typewriter at the age of 8. (As he said, “either we teach him the right way, or he’ll teach himself the wrong way.”) Three months of twice-weekly lessons got me up to 42 words a minute on a manual typewriter, but trained my fingers to do the right thing so that today on a computer I can do about 3 times that speed. By the time I was 11, I was filing copy on a weekly basis on the Little League games for our local newspaper. I got paid too: 15 cents a column inch. The newspaper job actually continued for the next several years as I moved on to covering high school sports.

In my junior year of college, I started writing a weekly column I called The View from Underneath for the UCLA Daily Bruin. I don’t know how good it was or how many people read it, but it got me a certain amount of notoriety. Because of the column, I networked my way into the Bobby Kennedy presidential campaign and, after his death, a slot as an assistant to Pierre Salinger on the 1968 McGovern effort at the National Democratic Convention. (That was the one in Chicago that featured police against protestors in the streets and which villainized Chicago’s first Mayor Richard Daley to that generation of young liberal activist Americans.)

Between the end of The View from Underneath and the commencement of The Shatzkin Files blog, 40 years passed. I did plenty of writing in the meantime: some books (mostly about baseball), a bunch of articles about publishing in trade publications in many countries, and, starting in the mid-1990s, speeches on publishing and digital change delivered at industry forums and then preserved on my website. The posted speeches were a great boon to my professional career, making it possible to build credibility (and “brand”) among people who never attended these live events.

Others I know had blogged daily, or almost daily. Richard Charkin, now Managing Director of Bloomsbury, wrote every day when he was head of Macmillan. My friend Gwyn Headley, Managing Director of the stock agency fotoLibra, told me that when he started blogging, he did so with a list of 365 topics in hand so he’d always have something to choose from on a day he wasn’t feeling creative. Richard gave up his blog when he changed jobs and I don’t think Gwyn kept up the daily habit very long either.

In my case, I blogged six times the first two or three weeks, then five times the next few weeks, and it diminished from there to what is now a one or twice weekly post. It seems like it usually takes me about 1500 words to get in and out, although some posts run a bit longer. I find that I need to review what I’ve written at least three times a few hours apart after I think I’m done to make sure I’m happy with it. Occasionally, a post gets to that point and gets scrapped.

As I think must be normal with these things, the audience for the blog just grew. As of this writing, The Shatzkin Files has about 1700 subscribers who get the blog delivered as an email to their inbox. A number generally ranging from half that to twice that (and occasionally, quite a bit more) reads the posts on the site. The comment strings keep getting longer.

Fortunately, one of my regular readers is Cameron Drew, who, like me, came into the book business through the most honorable possible path: working for his father. I knew David Drew, one of the great book sales reps of my generation, long before I ever met Cameron. Since Cameron has gone to work for Kobo, the global ebook retailer spawned by Canadian retailer Indigo, he and I have seen each other at conferences and trade shows. He told me from the very beginning that he was a loyal Shatzkin Files reader.

Early in 2011, Cameron told me he often found it useful to refer back to previous posts of The Shatzkin Files but that doing so through the website was clunky and difficult. “Your stuff should be collected into an ebook,” he said. “If we did it at Kobo, would you give us a 30-day exclusive?”

I was extremely flattered. “I’ll happily give you 60 days,” I said.

And thus we have this ebook.

If you live in the world of trade book publishing — the publishing that has reached its audience primarily through bookstores for about 100 years — you know we are all in a different world than we were in when I began The Shatzkin Files blog in February, 2009. One of the early posts speculated that it might be  harder for Amazon to hold onto their stranglehold on ebook sales than their hegemony on online print sales. At the time, Kindle was extending its dominance of the ebook marketplace by enabling the Kindle owners to access their ebook content through the iPhone and other devices. And Amazon’s pricing policy of selling below their cost was beginning to scare publishers.

Then, around the first anniversary of the blog, Apple’s iPad and the iBookstore arrived on the scene, offering publishers the opportunity to implement the so-called “agency model,” under which the discounting of ebooks is effectively stopped. I attribute to that tactic, along with the introduction of the iPad, the Nook, Kobo and Google Editions, the stabilization of ebook distribution in a multi-retailer market with evolving global competition. So, two years later, it looks like that early post was right.

We’re going to see a lot more change in trade publishing in the years to come. I expect the next two years to present even greater challenges and more drastic change than the last two years have. Since The Shatzkin Files began, the extremely challenging times we’ve expected for bookstores have become very evident. Over the next two years, the extremely challenging times it has seemed to me must follow for general trade publishers will probably become equally evident.

One thing worth using this introduction to say is that I take no pleasure in the big publishers’ pain. It is a matter of professional pride to me to not allow my preferences to color my predictions. I love bookstores and libraries and consider the top management of the big trade houses to be intelligent, ethical, and creative people. I consider many of them friends. The fact that the transition from reading and distributing print to largely reading on screens and distributing print online makes much of their skill sets and business models obsolete is not their fault. Nor is the fact that preserving their old business, and the cash flow it still yields, sometimes interferes with inventing the new one.

There are serious initiatives in the big houses to acknowledge the importance of verticalization (mostly in genres), to create direct contact with audiences, and to employ scale in search engine optimization and in locating customer clusters online that it is hoped will enable a new version of the horizontal, big book publisher model to leap the chasm of change. At the same time, the big publishers are figuring out how to step back from the enormous overheads associated with doing business the way they have for the past 100 years. How much change is sufficient, and how fast is fast enough, are questions we’ll only know the answers to with the passage of time.

Share this post

The ebook revolution is really beginning to remind me of the mass-market papeback revolution.

The mass paperback was really “invented” by Sir Allan Lane when he created Penguin in Britain before World War II. (Wikipedia credits a German publisher with the first cheap paperbacks a few years earlier, but Lane was certainly the first in English and deserving of some extra credit because the company he started continues in the same business to the present day.) Pocket Books in the US was also born just before the war. During World War II, historian and polymath Philip Van Doren Stern (who wrote, among other things, the New Yorker short story on which the movie classic  “It’s A Wonderful Life” was based) ran a program for the US military by which inexpensive paperbacks were made available to the troops.

After the war ended, mass market publishing really grew. Many houses — Ballantine, Bantam, Signet, Avon — were launched immediately following the war. The key to mass-market publishing was that it achieved distribution through the network of wholesalers that put magazines on newsstands and in local stores (often drugstroes) nationwide. Unlike trade books, which required an agreement between publisher and bookseller to get a copy of any book on a retail shelf, mass markets were “allocated” by the publisher to the wholesaler and in turn pushed out by the wholesaler to the racks they controlled.

The advantage of this distribution technique was that it enabled lots of copies to be pushed out to lots of places with much lower sales and distribution costs. The disadvantage was that it really only worked if books were treated like magazines, with “on sale dates” when they went out and “off sale dates” when they were pulled back and, like magazines, had their guts pulped while only the covers were returned for credit.

The paperbacks were typically priced at 25 cents when hardcover books were $2 or $3. (Compare that 8-to-1 or 12-to-1 pricing ratio to what exists today. It doesn’t.) And mass-markets were available in tens of thousands of locations nationwide, perhaps more than a hundred thousand, when bookstores were few, department stores tended to have only one location, and trade books were typically available in hundreds of locations, or at most a couple of thousand.

The much more widespread availability of these titles combined with their much lower prices created legions of new readers. And, in the beginning, most mass-markets titles tended to fit into “genres”. Westerns were a really big one fifty years ago. Bantam’s perennial bestselling author of westerns, Louis L’Amour, may still be the biggest-selling author in unit sales in (what is now) Random House history. Crime and science fiction lines were also popular as were raunchy books. I’m not sure that romance lines existed in the way they do now (although I’ll bet that among the readers of this blog are people who will tell me that answer); at that time there were lots of magazines peddling romance stories (as there were for other genres.)

If this is ringing some bells for an observer of the ebook transition who didn’t know paperback history, it is entirely intended to. Let’s ring a few more.

The hardcover publishers were very snobby about the paperback houses. Over time it developed that the mass-marketers were able to create enormous additional revenues from books previously published as hardcovers. (This did require the mass-market publishers to keep some titles on sale for longer than a normal cycle, which was not simple, but worth the trouble for books that sold really well.)

The name recognition of successful books, along with the ability to put words which said “established bestseller” on the cover, could be converted into huge sales given the much lower prices and much wider distribution mass-market could achieve. Over time this led to rapidly rising paperback license payments from paperback publishers to hardcover publishers. These were, by traditional contract, shared 50-50 with the authors. They provided a substantial, if temporary, bonanza for the trade houses in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

But the new marketplace also led to the growth of genre authors whose audiences were established for low-priced paperbacks. It was often difficult for those authors to move “up” to more expensive hardcover publication. Their audiences didn’t want to pay the higher prices, but they also didn’t necessarily shop in the bookstores and book departments where those books were found; they were used to buying their books at newsstands and in drugstores.

When I was first coming into New York from the suburbs as a kid in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was a fabulous selection of paperbacks at a drug store that occupied the corner location in the Grand Central building at 42nd Street and Vanderbilt Avenue. I found a series of baseball biographies there published by Sport Magazine. I remember a book about 1001 things you could get for free by writing away for them. And, of course, the public domain classics were all there. And I got some great trash like “I Sell Love” and a book about airline stewardesses whose title now escapes me but which was great naughty reading for an early teenager.

Then in the summer of 1962, when I was 15, I worked a 2-month stint at the very classy Brentano’s Bookstore on 5th Avenue and 47th Street. My assignment was downstairs in the brand new, just-opened, paperback department. The center of the basement contained the “trade” paperbacks, mostly academic, on shelves. Around the outside were the mass-markets in racks. The mass-markets were on racks arranged by publisher, because the publishers’ reps serviced them on a weekly basis.

Scribners Bookstore, across the street, didn’t deign to stock paperbacks for some years thereafter.

My dad, Leonard Shatzkin, told a story about the legendary Jason Epstein’s Anchor line of paperbacks at Doubleday (perhaps the first line of quality, or trade, paperbacks, but almost certainly the first such line to come from a mainstream trade house). Dad’s responsibilities as Director of Research extended to the sales force and he ran the sales conferences. At one such conference when Anchor Books (and Jason) were very young, Dad told me that Sid Gross, the head of merchandise for the company’s Doubleday Book Stores, tore into the whole concept of the cheap paperback. He hated them. From his perspective, it was bad for a book retailer to be selling 25 cent items instead of $3 items! Many other booksellers back then felt the same way.

My father’s reaction, pretty typical for him, was to support the contrarian and revolutionary view. He pushed the reps to make Anchor Books a success and, a few years later when Epstein had moved on to Random House, Dad created the Dolphin Books line of quality paperbacks to complement Anchor, whose title selection was pretty highbrow, with public domain and more popular current titles.

That anti-paperback snobbery was widespread and the separation between trade and mass-market publishing persisted for a long time. For at least a couple of decades, paperback houses didn’t do hardcovers and didn’t try to put their titles directly into bookstores (as bookstores started to carry mass-markets, at first they bought them from the wholesalers who racked them) and the trade publishers didn’t try to access the mass-market distribution system. This changed in the 1970s. First Peter Mayer and Bill Shinker pioneered the use of mass-market techniques for oversized trade paperbacks published by a mass-market house (Avon). Then a few years later, Bantam starting publishing hardcovers with distribution to mass accounts.

In the end, mass-market distribution was dismantled by a number of forces. The best retail accounts started buying direct from publishers rather than through the local wholesalers. The number of titles grew so that the “allocation” methods wouldn’t work anymore; there were too many publishers and too many titles for a diminishing number of pockets to handle, so the more expensive negotation method became required.

Patterns are being replicated now with inexpensive and widely-available ebooks. New authors are being spawned. Genre fiction works best. Books that were previously successful in more expensive formats can find new audiences as their prices come down and they go where new customers are shopping. And traditional publishers are sure that their “quality” protects them from low-brow competition, even while that competition is taking millions of customer dollars and countless hours of customer mindshare off the table.

But here’s how that old story ended. Mostly, the mass-market publishers won. Penguin bought Viking. Bantam bought Doubleday and then Random House. Simon & Schuster survived largely because they merged very early with Pocket Books. What is now Hachette is largely called Little, Brown, which was a hardcover house, but it really developed over the last two decades of the 20th century as Warner Books, a mass-market house. Really, only HarperCollins and Macmillan of the current Big Six are true descendents of the trade publishers that were dominant when mass-market publishing arose.

There are a slew of differences between the transitions; ebook publishing has a title glut to deal with just like mass-market did, but the challenges are not the same when you don’t have printed books to manufacture and ship around and your distribution isn’t limited by shelf space or pockets to display them. And authors couldn’t do it themselves in the mass-market era the way they can today. But there is a very basic lesson I think publishers better take on board from this history.

Much-less-expensive editions, combined with access to audiences for authors that couldn’t get past the gatekeepers in the established houses, can create millions of new readers that weren’t available to the legacy products at the legacy prices.

And that can lead to economic power that can ultimately swallow up large chunks of the legacy publishing establishment.

I posted more than six months ago that I had read my first self-published ebook, a history of the 1962 New York Mets called “A Year in Mudville”. Then I had an exchange in the comments string of my last post with Joe Konrath, who used to be published by NY publishers but is now finding it much more lucrative to do it himself, and a reader named Chris. They urged me to read a self-published ebook bestseller, “Wish List” by John Locke. It was fabulous, sort of a cross between contemporary bestselling author Carl Hiaasen and a relic of the early mass-market days, Jim Thompson: bold, caustic, and funny with characters you like who suddenly do outrageously anti-social things. Locke has apparently come out of nowhere with just his talent to help him and is selling shedloads of ebooks. (He’ll certainly sell another one or two to me!) I am not price-sensitive about my reading and I haven’t ever shopped the 99 cent pile, but Locke is certainly evidence that there is stuff in there that is the equal of anything the big publishers are doing at major multiples of that price point. It will be an interesting challenge to see if any major publisher can deliver enough added value to make a deal with Locke or Amanda Hocking, another writer who has found a huge market without any help from the establishment.

Share this post

The title of “nicest person on the planet” is now open. The longtime incumbent, Ruth Cavin — also a veteran book editor who was known to many as the doyenne of mysteries — died early Sunday morning at the age of 92. She was still holding down a full time position as an editor with the Thomas Dunne Books imprint at St. Martin’s at her death.

What is unique about Ruth’s career is that she didn’t become an editor until she was past her 60th birthday and didn’t start her more than two decades at St. Martin’s until she was 70. She was sort of the Grandma Moses of mystery editors.

I had the very good fortune to have known Ruth all my life.

Ruth Brodie grew up in Pittsburgh where she first met my mother, Eleanor Oshry, when they went to kindergarten together. They were active together as schoolchildren in the YPSLs (Young People’s Socialist League, the youth arm of the political party that was led by Norman Thomas) and they both attended college locally at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon).

The story in the family is that when my father, Leonard Shatzkin, went out to Tech in 1938 to get his degree in printing, he had the phone number of two girls in his pocket: my Mom and Ruth. He called Mom first. She said she knew he had both numbers, so she kept him too busy from that point on to have time to call Ruth.

But they all became friends and worked together on the Carnegic Tartan, the school paper, on which Ruth was a columnist, Dad eventually the editor, and Mom the managing editor.

I realize as I write this that I never asked Ruth exactly how she ended up in New York after college. What I do know is that between when the war ended, during which my Dad had been exempted from service because he was working on the Manhattan Project, and when my arrival could be anticipated (which would have been late in 1946), they thought he would be drafted. My parents organized a going-away party for him for which the guests were all married couples except for two single friends: Ruth and a young Business Week writer named Bram Cavin.

The families remained close, personally and professionally. When Dad started the Dolphin Books imprint at Doubleday, he was able to hire Bram as an editor. In the early 1960s, the Cavins with their young children, son Tony and twin daughters Emily and Nora, moved to Pleasantville near where we lived in Croton and we saw them increasingly often. They moved to Cleveland in about 1964 when Bram took a job as an editor with World Publishing and Ruth’s home was my stop the first night I was driving across the country to go to UCLA in 1965.

Ruth was not working full time then but was active in anti-war politics. She was also interested in whatever you were interested in. I remember in the late 60s when bands starting putting out “concept” albums sitting with her for an hour with the Moody Blues’ “Days of Future Passed”, talking about what was “different” about all this, or whether anything really was.

In the early 1970s, my father started The Two Continents Publishing Group, setting up a trade book distributor on what is now the PGW-NBN model before there really any prototypes. Dad hired Ruth as his first employee to do the publicity. She also sold the subsidiary rights. I got the entirely-too-inflated title of Director of Marketing which meant that I got credit for a lot of what Ruth did.

Her output was prodigious. She wrote all the catalog copy, edited or wrote press releases, flap copy, and rep information for what grew into many dozens of books a year. She called on all the book clubs and all the senior book reviewers. Meanwhile, she had written a couple of books. One was called “Dinners for Beginners”. Another was on inter-urban rail transportation, mostly in the midwest, called “Trolleys.”

And, I must stress, it would be an understatement to say she had a smile on her face every day. Ruth had a smile on her face every minute. Nothing flustered or annoyed her. When you knew her well, you knew she had smiled her way through some pretty significant annoyances. She had a mastectomy in 1941. (She told me about two years ago that she now thinks she didn’t have cancer; that the diagnosis was a mistake.) She had a pacemaker installed in the late 1960s. I’ll bet that very few people who knew her had any idea about either of these things.

When the Shatzkins sold out of Two Continents in 1979, Ruth was 61 but definitely not done working. She was looking for new worlds to conquer. She managed to get a job at Walker and Company, a family-owned independent publisher that did a lot of mysteries. And thus did Ruth become a mystery editor.

Among the people she worked with at Walker were Philip Turner, who went on to work at Random House, Kodansha, and Sterling, and David Sobel, later at Wiley and Holt. I had an exchange with David yesterday in which he said, tongue only partly in cheek, that Ruth taught him everything he knows.

Ruth would teach you without it feeling like teaching. Every conversation was with an equal; every relationship was collegial. Her respect for other people was universal and deep and entirely genuine.

Tom Dunne was the man who “discovered” Ruth (when she was 70) for his imprint but he had support for the idea from then-CEO Tom McCormack. McCormack (another Doubleday alumnus originally recruited by my father) told me that he had a previous good experience with Joan Kahn, a mystery editor who had been retired by Harper at age 65 and then gave St. Martin’s ten great years.

Ruth started five years older and gave them more than 20!

The enormous productivity that my family and I saw in Ruth at Two Continents continued to be her reputation at St. Martin’s. I heard over the years that she routinely acquired, edited, and put into production more books than anybody. Since I pitched a few and sold her a couple over that time, I can tell you that she did all that without stinting on any part of the job from first contact through contract and editing and launch. Working with her was a positive experience for every author I know who did it.

With greater diligence since my Mom died in 2007, I’d see Ruth every few months outside the holiday season. We’d have lunch. She’d come along to see my nephew A.J. Shively in a play. I took her downtown a couple of times to get new hearing aids. I could see her decline. The scoliosis in her spine had her bent over so her back was nearly parallel to the ground. That meant she couldn’t breathe. We’d have to stop 3 times on the one block walk from her office to the restaurant she frequented.

Her memory, which, for names, had been sliding for years, started showing other lapses. I’d always ask her about her job. She always had a determination to keep it; the time she spent in the office with her colleagues was precious to her. A couple of years ago, she told me a bit abashedly that her company had insisted she stop taking the bus down from Grand Central to the office and provided her with a cab and then a car to take her back at the end of the day. (This was at the time that Bram was in a home near the White Plains train station, and Ruth stopped and saw him every evening on the way home.) A year or so ago, she said there was a plan afoot to have her work at home sometimes because the travel to the office was exhausting her. But she loved being with her colleagues. And she revered her boss, Tom Dunne, who really was the one who gave her this magnificent post-retirement-age career.

I had a conversation with St. Martin’s Publisher Sally Richardson (Dunne’s boss) about Ruth at a party for Al Silverman’s book three years ago. Sally was saying that she was working on making sure Ruth got a decent winter coat; she was so frugal and unconcerned with her own comfort that Sally had to, more or less, do it for her.

I told a few people at Macmillan that I wanted to acknowledge them publicly on Ruth’s behalf for the extraordinary sensitivity and generosity they showed her over the last months, perhaps even years, of her life. Although Tom McCormack made the point that they had learned that a “no age limit” policy made sense through their experience decades ago with Joan Kahn, that policy would not have obliged them to give her the extra support and reduced expectations that she must have required in the recent past.

They did that because they loved her, which was an inevitable consequence of knowing her well, so that isn’t extraordinary. But the fact that the company, particularly a company of the size of Macmillan, treated her better than many families would, is both rare and worthy of commendation. From this lifelong friend of Ruth’s, thanks very much.

Share this post

One thing I’ve heard often and dismissed is that we need print to preserve intellectual property. I figure that digital files are less destructible than paper and that, with any care at all, it should be possible to create more reliable preservation of bits than of atoms.

I still think that. However…

A month ago I was helping my sister clean out some of the old files of my father’s (now gone over eight years, but it takes a while to get around to this stuff.) Among his papers, I found the hard copy of a speech I had delivered at a VISTA Conference (VISTA is now a company called Publishing Technology) in November of 1995. As I started to read it, I realized I hadn’t seen it in a long time. I checked and it wasn’t on my web site. I checked further and it wasn’t in my hard drive.

So if Dad hadn’t saved this printed copy, I wouldn’t have had it to show you. I’m glad he did. Ironically, the speech was titled “How Quickly Things Change”.

The speech is too long (I’ve learned a thing or two about brevity in the past 15 years), for which I apologize. It is on the site without edits or corrections or updates (both because I’m honest and because I’m lazy). But I think many people of my generation and close to it will enjoy the refresher course about what the world of digital change looked like to book publishers in November of 1995. And the many people now thoroughly engaged in the issues that concern this blog and our industry who were still in school or in short pants at the time might be amazed at how little we knew at what was, at least for trade, the dawn of the digital publishing era.

At the time I made this speech, the obsession of most book publishers was to take advantage of the seemingly-vast amounts of data that could be packed on a CD-Rom. Several major publishers had formed “new media” divisions or departments to start creating what were, in effect, enhanced ebooks or apps out of their intellectual content. The industry was only on the verge of consciousness about how important connectivity was. In the speech’s opening sentences, I say “last year at this time, very few of us had heard of the World Wide Web” and I myself had been online since before the 1992 election. But “online” then meant, for most people, being connected within the walled gardens of America Online, Prodigy, and Compuserve.

I was happy to be reminded that I got a number of things pretty damn right at that early stage.

1. When most people in publishing didn’t believe it, I said that getting online was much more important than making fancy new products on CD-Roms.

2. I suggested resisting the trend to “new media divisions” because online communication was the key going forward and the move to exploit it should not be siloed.

3. I identified cell phones as (arguably) the fifth big new technology adoption of the past 20 years (the previous four being the VCR, the audio CD, the fax machine, and the personal computer.) But it is a time-capsule moment to recognize that the cell phone wasn’t ubiquitous yet.

4. I saw that professional publishing would shortly become mostly electronic, particularly directories.

5. I didn’t name it Wikipedia, but I did envision an encyclopedia online that is “dynamic, interactive, and perpetually being updated by organizing on-line tools to solve an age-old need.”

6. I said that we’d reach “universal connectivity”, defined as the point when just about everybody above the poverty line would be online, by the year 2000. At the time 16.6% of adults had internet access and only 10% had used the internet in the last month. By the way, those numbers constitute a reasonable approximation of where ebook uptake is today.

7. I said newspapers would be crushed first, magazines second, and that we’d be glad we’re in the book business as internet use grew.

8. At the time of the speech, there were 100,000 active domains and under a million home pages. In what I remember was an audience-gasp moment, I said that the small merchant on the corner would also have a presence on the Web. As I put it, Time Warner and MCI would be “joined, literally, by the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, and the local real estate agent.”

9. At a time when “several hundred” American publishers had web sites (“plus 38 British, 31 Canadian, and a handful of Australian”), I cautioned publishers against thinking that having web sites would substitute for having booksellers. Some people thought they might.

10. I said there should be a web page for every book, although I was somewhat over-ambitious in how I saw it developing organically and being part of the development and early marketing process.

11. When publishers were thinking of digital products almost exclusively as CD-Roms, which were “enhanced ebooks”, I saw the value of just delivering the text file to be read on a screen. (Of course, I thought we’d deliver them on diskettes, and I was wildy wrong about that!)

12. I concluded with a summary of all the ways online could be involved in our business, from agent submissions to marketing to make the case again that “new media divisions” were not the answer for publishers as they entered the digital age.

Of course, there’s a lot I didn’t see coming. No mention of iPods and iTunes and disaggregating the album into songs. (But I did see the impact of disaggregation on newspapers.) No mention of piracy or DRM. And although it had existed for a few months at that point, no mention of Amazon. (I did say that “it will be some time” before we’d be selling substantial numbers of books online, which turned out to be true. Amazon was still two or three years away from having a significant sales impact for most publishers.)

My job in these VISTA conferences was to deliver a message which was “way out there.” I was supposed to throw caution to the wind, to be the guy who could say things that most people wouldn’t say even if they believed it. In some ways, the greatest utility of the speech today is to show people where “way out there” was 15 years ago, in November of 1995.

So a belated thanks to my wonderful Dad for saving a hard copy of this speech. But I’m not changing my mind about the fact that usually, digital files will be more enduring than paper.

Share this post

Only a short post on a rainy Sunday, a little folksier than usual. But I did think of something sort-of analytical at the end.

But when I write about my Dad, nice things happen. Last week I got this link sent to me by a friend in London, reminding me of the disclaimer in In Cold Type. Dad was actually pretty proud of it. I also got a call from a retired CEO who encountered him early in his career and was permanently influenced. And next week I’m having coffee with a literary agent  who started her career working with a dose of his mentoring at Doubleday in the 1950s.

Dad’s book is a tour de force. Nobody ever thought more analytically about every single process in trade publishing or brought such a comfort level with technology to their thinking.  He should have gotten more attention for correctly predicting the inevitable decline of mass market publishing at a moment when few saw it: very shortly after what remains the biggest paperback deal in history. (That was Princess Daisy by Judith Krantz, from Crown to Bantam Books, for $3.1 million, in 1979.)

It was a real struggle for Dad to get the book published. Although, as Dad pitched it, this was a book for everybody in book publishing and anybody interested in book publishing, that could only be true in the Cliff’s Notes version. Indeed, this is a book only for people with a deep interest in publishing. But time has proven that, for those, it is compelling.

David Replogle was the head of Houghton Mifflin’s trade department in the early 1980s and he had worked for Dad at Doubleday in the 1950s. All of the big houses had turned the book down. Was it because it wouldn’t sell well enough? Maybe. Was it because they didn’t want their authors and agents and shareholders asking them whether they did things the Len Shatzkin way, which they usually didn’t…? (What were those? Standardized trim sizes and text designs, much larger sales forces, statistically-driven print and pricing decisions, publishing companies encouraging retailers to allow them to manage  inventory at the point of sale…) I believe the nuisance factor crossed more than a few minds. Anyhow, Replogle, in a decision that was X parts business and Y parts sentimental favor, signed the book.

It sold well enough in hardcover to warrant a trade paperback edition. And when it reverted, Dad was one of the first to sign up for Lightning Print, almost two decades after he wrote In Cold Type. New technology always did appeal to him.

Clicking on a few links that I hadn’t for a while for this post made me realize something new about The Long Tail. While Dad’s book is in Lightning, there’s hardly any reason for somebody to buy the POD version anymore. The combination of the ones we’ve sold over the past 10 or 12 years and the relentlessly-increasing efficiency of the online used book supply system means there are probably enough copies in circulation to require bulk demand — for, say, 25 or more copies — for it make sense to do anything but shop the net for used. This is happening book by book. It would mean that the valuable shelf life of many scans for POD purposes might be considerably shorter than forever and that some books probably sell their very last newly-printed copy every day. That’s a new thought to me.

Share this post

There is considerable concern among the trade publishing establishment about the future of brick-and-mortar stores. As well there should be. Retail stores provide the most efficient promotion opportunities for books: putting them in front of people poised to buy. They give clear signals about sales appeal by positioning and piles of stock of varying sizes; they make it possible to “look inside” of illustrated books in ways that no online presentation can match; they enable discovery through serendipity; and they put more different book choices in front of any person faster and more efficiently than any web page or smart phone screen possibly can.

But they’re troubled. Same store sales, or what the Brits call “like-for-like”, have been declining. That may be partly due to the recession, but it is also due to factors that won’t go away: shifts of sales to the Internet, to ebooks, and perhaps to substitutes in other media and the Web.

The magic that grew Barnes & Noble and Borders into behemoths was large store size and title selection. My first experience with this effect was a lesson from my father, Leonard Shatzkin. He took over executive responsibility for the Brentano’s bookstore chain as a vice-president of Crowell-Collier (later called Macmillan, a company subsequently bought by Simon & Schuster and not connected to the company now called Macmillan) in the early 1960s. The store in that chain that was doing least well was in Short Hills, New Jersey. They doubled the number of titles the store carried and it soon was the best-performing store in the chain.

But the “size as a magnet” concept took a back seat to mall store expansion by Walden and B. Dalton in the 1970s. As shopping centers were built across the country, the mall developers favored national chains, which were “bankable”, for their leases. Walden and Dalton rode that wave and added hundreds of stores. Meanwhile, partly assisted by the expanding wholesaling services offered by Ingram, independent stores thrived and grew their title selections beyond what the space-challenged mall stores could offer.

In the late 1980s, Bookstop, a discount chain in Texas, pioneered the “superstore” concept: a massive selection of 100,000 or more titles under one roof. This was the Brentano’s Short Hills effect writ large. By that time, Borders and Barnes & Noble, which already had larger stores than the mall stores, had bought Walden and B. Dalton, respectively, giving them critical mass to support robust central operations and provide leverage in their relationships with publishers. The new superstore concept suited Wall Street, and the two big chains were bankrolled to roll out superstores nationwide.

This was great for everybody except some of the larger independents which, up to that time, had the large title selection field to themselves. For publishers, it meant lots of additional shelf space for their backlist. For consumers, it meant a large increase in choice at hundreds of locations around the country. The attraction of 100,000 or more titles under one roof was compelling; these superstores didn’t need malls to bring them traffic. They were destinations worth traveling to on their own.

But then came the Internet, and Amazon. As we used to remind ourselves quite often ten years ago, “the Internet changes everything.”

And what the Internet did was to seriously dilute the attraction of so many titles under one roof. Now “unlimited” choice was available online: not a hundred thousand titles, but millions. Not just the books presented by active publishers and chosen by buyers, but all the books, in or out of print.

By the turn of the 21st century, it seemed to me that the powerful attraction inherent in the massive superstore selection was muted. I advised a client to “leverage your infrastructure to figure out how to make the small store work.”

But, by that time, both the big chains were phasing out their mall stores. This was not entirely a matter of store size, although it might have been seen that way. The malls the stores were in were often in suburbs from which prosperity had moved on. The effect of the Internet wasn’t just being felt by bookstores, but also by department stores, which were the “anchors” that brought traffic to the malls. So footfall at the mall stores fell, quite aside from any negative impact of a limited title selection.

In 2009, the mall store era has officially come to an end. First Barnes & Noble announced it was closing all the remaining B. Dalton stores. Then, this week, Borders announced it is shuttering more than half of the remaining Walden stores, which will leave only 130 operating, in January.

Meanwhile, it only takes a visit to a B&N or Borders store today to see that they are hardly stuffed with books; the ones I’ve been in lately appear to have more space than they need, and this is when stores are relatively full of merchandise.

Of course, larger stores can be more cost-effective than smaller ones for other reasons beyond the attraction of the title selection, even if that attraction is working well. There are per-store costs, of store management and central management attention, that don’t readily reduce with store size. And while the effect of a massive title selection at a retail location might not be what it was 20 or 40 years ago, more titles will certainly attract more traffic than fewer.

Meanwhile, the other big change in the book retailing scene in the past 20 years has been the growth in sales at mass merchants: Wal-mart, Costco, and the price clubs and supermarkets. These stores leverage existing traffic (one would think that few, if any, customers go there for the books) and deep discounting to make significant book sales with a very limited selection of titles, usually well under 5,000. They’ve been part of the problem for full line book retailers. Their pricing and ubiquity bleed off sales of the highest-profile bestsellers. In the 1970s, bestsellers pulled people into bookstores where they might buy lower-profile books. Today bestsellers are presented to the public at cut prices where people buy their groceries or school supplies, leaving the bookstores with the customers who still consider them a “destination.”

Both of the big bookstore chains, but particularly Barnes & Noble, own unmatched infrastructures to deliver a curated selection of books to dispersed retail locations. They found it impossible to make the small stores they owned in the mall locations profitable, even with those capabilities. (In fact, Borders, which doesn’t have a supply chain to match B&N’s, outsourced some of its shelf-stocking at Walden to wholesalers in recent years. It is inconceivable that B&N would ever do something like that.)

But bookstores are going to be getting smaller; we know that intuitively and the stock we see in the current superstores confirms it. And smaller bookstores, if they were planned to be smaller, would require less space, less traffic, and less sales to be viable.

Of course, smaller stores wouldn’t be a magnet for traffic; that’s what turned the Short Hills Brentano’s around and that’s what fed the whole superstore revolution.

So it would seem the combination for the future might be a B&N or Borders mini-store inside another large retailer. Remember, many other retailers are going to be having the same problem; figuring out to deal with having too much space, so there should be potential collaborators on the other side of the partnership. This will require a different kind of inventory management than the chains exercise now; more of a rack-jobbing approach. But their capabilities: to source books, select books, organize books for presentation, and to deliver books all over the United States, will have more consumer demand than they’ll be able to satisfy with only their own very large stores.

Share this post

To regular readers of this blog: I know I haven’t posted much lately, and this post has almost nothing to do with publishing (although there’s a book link in it!) I’m in London on my way to the Frankfurt Book Fair as I write it. I will resume more regular contributions to the dialogue about publishing and digital change, but posts may remain sparse for a couple more weeks…

Last weekend, the New York Times carried an obituary of a Polish cardiologist, socialist, and Warsaw Ghetto survivor named Marek Edelman. One untold part of his life story touched my family.

Marek Edelman was one of the leaders of what were (according to the Times) 220 armed fighters who constituted the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 19, 1943. Two of the others were a man named Friedrich (whose first name I’ve forgotten if I never knew…and, as you’ll see, I’m running out of people to ask who might remember) and another named Bernard Goldstein. Goldstein came to the US in 1948 and I knew him well in my early youth; Bernard died on December 7, 1959, which was the only day of my childhood when I remember seeing my father cry.

Friedrich was credited with being the man who followed the tracks out of Warsaw that carried the railroad cars that took Jews being removed from the ghetto to an unknonwn destination. Friedrich reported back that the destination was a concentration camp where the Jews were being exterminated. For that effort, and for his part in the doomed uprising of April 19, he was deemed a hero by the survivors after the war, particulary those in the Jewish Socialist Bund, which also claimed Edelman, Goldstein, and my grandparents on both sides as members.

Friedrich had a daughter named Elsa, born on December 18, 1936. Elsa was smuggled out of the Ghetto to live in hiding with a Catholic family in about 1941. Thus she escaped being killed when the Jews in the Ghetto were virtually exterminated during and after the uprising.

As the Ghetto was burning, Friedrich and Edelman were on a rooftop watching the final carnage. Friedrich extracted the promise from Edelman that if Edelman survived the war and Friedrich didn’t, Edelman would take guardianship of Elsa.

And, indeed, that came to pass. Elsa had been about 5 years old when she was “adopted” by the Catholic family, and although she recalled the necessity of concealing her story during the war, she was apparently happy in her new home. So when Marek came and took her away from her familiar and comfortable surroundings, honoring the promise he’d made to her father, it was a wrenching experience for a child then only about 9 years old.

The global organization of the Bund knew about Friedrich and knew about Elsa’s circumstances. They considered it anathama that the daughter of a hero could be consigned to such a bleak future, growing up in poverty-stricken, anti-Semitic Poland, even as the control of the hated Soviets (the socialists were very anti-Communist) was being established in the country.

So, using their power as a global organization, the Bund hunted for an American family that would take Elsa in and raise her in this country. My father’s parents, Julek and Helen Shatzkin, agreed to accept the responsibility. They were then in their early 50s; my father and his younger brother, Uncle Sock, were both in their 20s, married, and starting their own families. My grandparents moved from New York City, where they had lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn since arriving as immigrants in 1920, to northern Westchester. They built a house and prepared for a new life, raising a daughter in suburban post-World War II America. The political clout of the Bund found sympathetic help from New York Republican Senator Irving Ives, who sponsored the special legislation that allowed Elsa to immigrate legally to the United States.

Elsa was a girl of great talent: very beautiful and also brilliant. She was also always troubled, always haunted by the lives (intentionally plural) she had left behind. The spiritual gap between this young woman striving to be a “normal” American and my grandparents, who were culturally still very Old World, created strains. My grandmother was never particularly comfortable with the arrangement; my grandfather was smitten with his new daughter and wanted to spoil and indulge her. From the perspective of her 10-1/2 years younger nephew (which I was), Aunt Elsa was hip and pretty and virtually unapproachable for most of my childhood.

In the mid-1950s, Elsa graduated from Lakeland High School and went off to Cornell, majoring in English, from which she graduated in about 1957. She went on to study for a master’s at Columbia, where she met and fell in love with ayoung historian named Robert Dallek. They got married in about 1958. By that time, Elsa had changed her name to Ilse. I remember that Robert always pronounced it as she spelled it; she remained Elsa to the rest of us.

In about 1960, Ilse had a nervous breakdown. I remember visiting her in a mental institution of some kind (once again; I’m short of surviving family old enough to give me more details.) But she got out, ostensibly recovered; her marriage to Robert resumed. He continued to study for his PhD and she for her master’s.

Bernard Goldstein, like Marek Edelman, was a leader of the armed resistance. For the ten years I knew him in my childhood, he was much like a 3rd grandfather. My father had translated his memoir into English and it was published by the house Dad worked for, The Viking Press, as The Stars Bear Witness in 1948. (We have a copy of The Wallinscribed to Dad from John Hersey because Bernard’s book was critical research material.)

Elsa was always very uncomfortable in Bernard’s presence, which was very painful for him. He wanted to relate to her affectionately; he had known her father; to him, she was a flower that had amazingly survived the conflagration of Warsaw. But to her, he was a reminder of the beginning of her traumatic life and the loss of her real family. These perspectives could never be reconciled.

I remember spending the night at the apartment of Aunt Ilse and Uncle Robert in my early teens along with my friend,Tony Klein (now a Vermont State Legislator), after a rained-out Yankee game we had intended to go to. Ilse was then in her mid-20s. She and Robert came in from an evening out and Ilse proceeded to change into short shorts and start cleaning up the apartment. Tony was agog. This is your aunt, he said? His aunts were all old and dowdy; mine was young and vital and attractive. And tortured.

In October of 1962, Ilse committed suicide. She checked into a hotel on the upper west side, near where she and Robert lived, and took an overdose of sleeping pills. Apparently she left a note; I never saw it. My father got the task of identifying the body at the morgue. My grandfather went into an immediate depression; the pain of losing an adopted daughter he loved was compounded by the feeling of having failed in a political responsibility to the Bund. The electro-shock treatments prescribed at that time to snap him out of it were blamed by my family for the blood cancer that ensued and killed him in November of 1964.

In college, Ilse’s best friend was a woman whose married name was Faith Sale; her husband was the historian and social thinker Kirkpatrick Sale. Faith became an editor at Putnam. She died, much too young, of cancer a decade ago. Before Faith died, I had lunch with her to talk about my Aunt. This was more than 30 years after Ilse’s death, but Faith was still touched to uncontrollable tears by recalling the tragedy and pain of her friend’s existence.

In 1980, my parents’ proclivity for going where the revolutions were (a story that requires some research for another blog post some day) took them to Poland, where Solidarity was leading the change which ultimately swept across the Soviet-dominated countries. Marek Edelman, by then a prominent cardiologist, was a key player in Solidarity. He and my parents connected.

As I understood it from Dad, Edelman regretted that he had ever taken Elsa from her Polish Catholic family. He had done that to honor the commitment he had made to her father, and then he relinquished her to the Bund’s equally well-intentioned and equally ill-fated desire to find her a better life in America. He felt pain similar to my grandfather’s. He had tried to save this girl, but the demons within her played cruel tricks with those intentions.

There are few of us left to remember Elsa: my Uncle Sock’s widow; my sisters; and my cousins in Sock’s family. What we’re left with is the lesson that great tragedy can come from the best of intentions, and the fact that some victims of Hitler died two decades after he did, my aunt and my grandfather being among them.

Share this post

Leonard Shatzkin was trained in printing. He left City College of NY a semester short of a degree in the social sciences to go to Carnegie Tech for three years to get a BS in Printing, which he received in 1941. His first job was as production manager at House Beautiful magazine when he and his college bride, Eleanor Oshry (who was, I suspect, at least part of the reason he abandoned the CCNY degree for three more years of undergraduate school in the first place!) moved to New York after graduation.

But Len shortly had to leave the House Beautiful job because of World War II. Rather than military service, he found a spot as a research scientist on The Manhattan Project (another story for another blog post). After the war, he landed a spot as production manager at The Viking Press and his career in book publishing had begun.

I don’t know the specific suggestions or ideas that led to this, but after a couple of years at Viking, proprietor Harold Guinzberg told Len to find a job at a bigger publishing house. “You have lots of big ideas,” Guinzberg told him. “I’m not interested in big ideas; I just want to publish the books that interest me. You should find a place that is more compatible with your ambition.” So, in 1951, when a former professor of Len’s from Carnegie Tech named Charles Pitkin offered Len a job at Doubleday, he took it.

Doubleday had its own printing plant in Garden City, Long Island. At first, Len’s main responsibilities had to do with running the plant. It was unusual, perhaps unheard of, for production managers to move into the senior executive ranks at a book publishing house, but Len found the way.

There was a committee at Doubleday that determined the first printing quantities for all new books. Len was on that committee, whose key members were, of course, the representatives of the sales department who, it was assumed, would be the first to know how many books were needed. In his first year on this committee, Len lived with the frustration of the sales department’s refusal to make timely decisions about printings.

The consequences of this were severe. These were the days before computers (of course) which meant that when 12 new books were scheduled to ship on March 20, invoices had to be prepared in advance to meet the shipments as they left the plant. If one of the 12 books didn’t make it, a paperwork nightmare was created. So all 12 books had to make it. If time was tight, and with late decisions on printings, time was just about always tight, each “first printing” effectively had to become two printings. First the plant would produce the number of books needed to fulfill all the prepared invoice shipments and then, after all those were done, they all went back on press to complete all the “first” printings.

Sometime in 1953, Len got permission to hire a mathematician: a young Polish immigrant named George Blagowidow. Len set George to work doing a regression analysis of the orders received from the sales force and, using techniques that are pretty much the same as what the networks use to predict election returns from key precincts, was able to predict the total advance sale from a small sampling of orders. (It is necessary to mention here that, while there were multi-outlet department store “chains” all over the country, there were almost no large national buys equivalent to what Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders would place today.)

When George’s work was well in hand, Len was prepared for the next meeting of the first printing committee. The sales management opined that, on a number of books, they did not have sufficient data to make a printing decision. Then Len handed them a sealed envelope. “In here are the numbers for what will be the total of advance orders for all these books,” he told them. “You can open it now or you can open it later, but don’t tell me there isn’t enough information to know what to print. There is.”

As a result of that stunt, Len was appointed to a newly-created position, Director of Research.

His next big assignment was probably partly a result of his having undermined the credibility of the sales management. Doubleday had two sales forces: 13 reps covered the trade and 10 sold “Garden City Books”, which was a promotional line Doubleday had in those days (like Outlet Book Company was in relation to Crown until that independent publisher was sold to Random House in the 1980s.) The company was going to wind down the Garden City imprint and combine the sales forces. They knew they needed to get rid of some reps, but a) they didn’t know how many and b) they didn’t trust the sales management to cut the force sufficiently. So they handed the question to Shatzkin — and his cohort Blagowidow — to determine the new configuration.

Len and George set out to scientifically determine what a sales rep contributed to sales. They did that by calculating the discretionary income by territory (I did this exercise under my Dad’s supervision about 20 years later, using the county-by-county data provided by Sales Management Magazine). That gave them an index of how much they should be expecting in sales from each territory. Then they calculated how many accounts there should be (theoretically) in each territory, and compared that to what the rep covered. Then they looked at the sales they got from accounts where the reps called and compared them to sales from accounts where the rep did not call.

Their conclusion was that, indeed, Doubleday did not need 23 reps, they needed thirty-five! (At that time, the 13 reps in the Doubleday sales force might already have been the largest sales force fielded by any publisher.) The new large sales force led to other innovations, including the creation of the Dolphin Books imprint, which I covered in a prior post.

Of course, field sales forces peaked in size some years ago and have been shrinking since. (And although it would drive Dad crazy, I’m sure his analytical techniques would support a field force reduction. Most likely, though, using his techiques would also create territories that are configured differently than they are in most houses.) But Random House copied the Doubleday practice and today’s publishing “old timers” remember the days in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s when Random House and Doubleday had the largest and most powerful field sales organizations, which gave them an edge over everybody else.

Today is when the Big Six publishers need a Director of Research. There are more decisions to be made today that require research, quantification, and analysis than what Doubleday faced in the 1950s. What Len Shatzkin did in that position more than 50 years ago anticipated the MBA-rich IT and corporate staffs that exist today.

Share this post

Elisabeth Sifton has a long and thoughtful piece in the current issue of The Nation. I disagree with the fundamental premise — that the woes of the book business are primarily due to bad decisions or judgments by the leaders of the business rather than large forces that are changing the ground on which the book business walks. Nonetheless, there’s a lot to like in the piece and some interesting history in it as well.

I was reminded of a story my Dad used to tell by these words from Sifton:

“Publishers and writers have for centuries conspired and fought over words, sentences, chapters, fonts, illustrations, paper, trim size, binding materials, jacket design…G.B. Shaw insisted on a specific typeface…Edmund Wilson on an unusual trim size…”

In the 1950s, Len Shatzkin was in charge of manufacturing for Doubleday before he got a much larger brief as “Director of Research” (and how that happened is a story I have promised to tell and someday I will.) Doubleday owned its own presses in its Garden City plant. Each printing press works with an optimum size paper (a sheet size with two dimensions if sheet-fed; a roll width if a web press) and that optimum paper size delivers an optimum trim size. By optimum, I mean the trim size that puts all the paper into the book, not trimming off and wasting some of it. For example, the trim sizes that worked best with the sheetfed presses I was familiar with early in my career were 5-1/2 x 8-1/4 and 6-1/8 x 9-1/4. If you used a size that was slightly smaller than that in any dimensions, you just cut off paper and threw it away.  But if you wanted a trim size larger in either dimension, you couldn’t print 64 pages on one side of a sheet, so you would throw away even more paper and would increase your costs of folding and binding at the same time.

Being a very practical man and one who hated waste long before any green movement pointed it out to him, Len set about to standardize trim sizes at Doubleday to deliver only the most efficient sizes. Those efforts in the early 1950s constituted the first time trim size standardization was attempted in the trade publishing business (although it had already been done for rack-sized mass-market paperbacks.)

One of Doubleday’s top authors — Len told me it was Eudora Welty; my Mom told me after Dad died that it was somebody else, but I can’t remember who she said it was and now she’s also not available to be asked — had, her editor pointed out, always had her books of a particular size, which was about 1/8 of an inch larger in one dimension than the maximum the sheets could efficiently deliver. The editor insisted that it would be simply impossible to live with a change in the trim with such an established and successful author. Publishing then being not so dissimilar from publishing now, the editor (presumably also speaking for the illustrious author) carried the day.

Now you’re going to find out why my incredibly smart, charming. and accomplished father might not always have been the most popular person in any company he worked for.

A few months later, Dad invited the editor in question up to his office. The new Welty (or whoever…) book had just been printed and Len put two copies on his desk, one on each of the corners facing his guest, the editor. The editor was excited to see his important author’s new oeuvre delivered and he picked up one of the copies. Of course, he quickly noticed that there were two copies.

“Take a look at both of them,” Dad said.

So the editor did. He opened each of them. He flipped through the pages of each. He looked at them together and said, “is there anything different about them?”

“Yes,” Len said. “This one is the one I wanted to manufacture, but you told me the size would be unacceptable. And this one is the size you insisted on, which we have delivered at an extra cost to the company of X cents per copy.”

It became considerably more difficult after that for editors to persuade management to deviate from the standard trim sizes.

One frequent topic of Len’s derision was publishers printing for margin rather than strictly for need. He was very fond of making this point: “It isn’t the unit cost of the copies you print that matters; it is the unit cost of the copies you sell.” The point is: avoid printing books you won’t sell. So don’t print for margin, print for need.

At one point in the early 1990s, I happened on the information that there had been paper rationing right after World War II when Dad was production manager at Viking. “Boy, that must have made them smarter about what they printed,” I said to him. “I’m thinking how painful it would be that you couldn’t reprint Book A because you had overprinted Book B and you didn’t have any more paper to allocate.”

“Oh, they were smarter then,” Len said. “But that’s not why.”

“Then why?”

“When I was a young man at Viking, it was Harold Guinzberg’s company. The money to print things was his money. If he spent money in September to print books he didn’t need until next June, he might not have the cash to take his family to Florida in the winter. The money wasn’t theoretical, like it is in these big corporations with MBAs making the decisions. It was real.”

I saw this effect a few years later when I was consulting at Sterling just before they were bought by Barnes & Noble. Like Harold Guinzberg, Sterling’s principal owner, Lincoln Boehm, made the printing decisions and took home about half the cash profits at the end of every year. Lincoln also made extremely conservative printing decisions, perhaps aiming for a year’s supply, but being rigorous in not printing more at any time than he was pretty sure he could sell in the foreseeable future.  During Boehm’s tenure, Sterling did second printings of virtually every book they published — more than 90% of them — and hardly ever had a significant quantity to remainder. 

More publishers would be more prosperous if they had a greater respect for the value of cash and were less zealous about pursuing illusory margin that is purchased by tying up their dollars and escalating risk. Since we are in a time when de-leveraging is occurring throughout the economy, these truths are likely to be rediscovered even without the advantages of owner-management.

I’ve got three BEA appearances coming right up. “Stay Ahead of the Shift”, a speech about publishing’s future at 11 on Thursday. “XML for Editors”, a panel with Brian O’Leary and Laura Dawson at 3 on Thursday. And “Digital Debuts Tool Time” with BookOven, Smashwords, Cooler Reader, and Filedby at 9:30 on Friday morning.

Share this post