HERE IS A STORY ALL AUTHORS WILL RELATE TO:

Waiting for It

By RACHEL DONADIO writing in the Sunday Book Review, New York Times.
Published: February 3, 2008

For writers, few steps in the publishing process are as strange as the state of suspended animation between submitting a manuscript and seeing the book appear in stores. The sudden change in cabin pressure from writing to waiting can be jarring — and can last a very long time. “It comes as a huge shock when it happens the first time,” said the Irish writer Colm Toibin, whose first novel, “The South,” appeared in 1990, a year and a half after he turned it in. “It was all slow and strange.”

Illustration by Adam Palmer

Technology may be speeding up the news cycle, but in publishing, things actually seem to be slowing down. Although publishers can turn an electronic file into a printed book in a matter of weeks — as they often do for hot political titles, name-brand authors or embargoed celebrity biographies likely to be leaked to the press — they usually take a year before releasing a book. Why so long? In a word, marketing.
“It’s not the technology that’s the problem; it’s the humans that are the problem,” said Jonathan Karp, the publisher of Twelve, which releases one title a month.
The three-martini lunch and the primacy of the Book-of-the-Month Club may be things of the past, but publishing still relies on a time-honored, time-consuming sales strategy: word of mouth.
“It’s not only buzz, it’s a product introduction — but with nothing like the advertising or marketing budget that a piece of soap would have,” said David Rosenthal, the publisher of Simon & Schuster. With the Internet and blogs, word of mouth travels more quickly today, but there’s a glut of information. To help a book break through the static, publishers have to plan months in advance.

“We live in an impatient society and have a throwaway Kleenex culture, so it takes time to get over the noise barrier,” said Nan Talese, the publisher of Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. With an established author whose work is known and sales patterns reliable, “less time is necessary,” Talese said, citing her authors Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood and Peter Ackroyd.
Karp added, “If it’s a book by someone who people aren’t familiar with, on a subject that people don’t necessarily need to have, it will take nine months to a year for people to figure it out.”
As soon as a literary agent has sold a publisher a book, and even before it’s edited, copy-edited, proofread and indexed, the publicity wheels start turning. While writers bite their nails, the book editor tries to persuade the in-house sales representatives to get excited about the book, the sales representatives try to persuade retail buyers to get excited, and the retail buyers decide how many copies to buy and whether to feature the book in a prominent front-of-the-store display, for which publishers pay dearly. In the meantime, the publisher’s publicity department tries to persuade magazine editors and television producers to feature the book or its author around the publication date, often giving elaborate lunches and parties months in advance to drum up interest.

Chain stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders generally buy books at least six months before the publication date and know about particular titles even farther in advance. Much to the anxiety of midlist writers clamoring for attention, chain stores determine how many copies of a title to buy based on the expected media attention and the author’s previous sales record. Which is why publishers say it’s easier to sell an untested but often hyped first-time author than a second or a third novel. “It’s one of the anomalies of our business that you have to reinvent the wheel with every title, virtually,” said Laurence Kirshbaum, a literary agent and former chairman of the Time Warner Book Group.
Although digitization has made the printing and typesetting process much faster, distribution still takes time, especially in a country as big as America. (In Britain, with its smaller size and more insular literary culture, things move faster.) But once a book hits the market, the product has to move. “For all the weeks and months that go into the gestation of the book, we’re up against the so-called lettuce test once we get into the stores,” Kirshbaum said. “If we don’t get sales fast, the book wilts.”

Some stores like Target and Wal-Mart reserve room in advance for mass-market paperbacks by authors like Janet Evanovich or Nora Roberts. If an author is late with a deadline and misses the target publication date, the stores won’t have room on the shelf, since they’re expecting next month’s crop of projected best sellers. “Unless you have a major author, you probably have to wait another four to six months to publish that book,” said Matthew Shear, the publisher of St. Martin’s Press, which puts out Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum mysteries.
Like movie studios jockeying over opening dates to score huge first-weekend box office numbers, publishers often change publication dates to avoid competition for reader attention and marketing buzz. The publishers of Stephen King, John Grisham and James Patterson don’t want their books appearing at the same time, since all three hope to make No. 1 on the best-seller list.
Last year, Little, Brown & Company moved up the publication date of “Her Way,” a biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Don Van Natta Jr., a New York Times reporter, and Jeff Gerth, a former Times reporter, so it would appear around the same time as “A Woman in Charge,” by Carl Bernstein, published by Knopf. The Bernstein book sold more copies, though perhaps not as many as it would have without a rival book on the market. “You’re competing for retail space, you’re competing for bandwidth, you’re competing for column inches,” said Paul Bogaards, the director of publicity at Knopf. “Both books wind up suffering because readers have to make a choice.”

The same thing happened last year when two books on sushi — “The Sushi Economy,” by Sasha Issenberg (Gotham), and “The Zen of Fish,” by Trevor Corson (HarperCollins) — appeared nearly simultaneously. “You never want to get in a horse race with another book on the same subject,” said William Shinker, the president and publisher of Gotham.
Real-world events — the 9/11 attacks, the death of the pope, Hurricane Katrina — can either distract from books or provide a hook. This year, publishers are scheduling a range of titles to coincide with the Beijing Olympics, including “The Last Days of Old Beijing,” by Michael Meyer (Walker), about the destruction of old neighborhoods to make way for the Olympics, and “Wolf Totem” (Penguin Press), a novel by Jiang Rong that just won the Man Asia Literary Prize.
The presidential election in November should help move political books, but other titles may suffer. Nan Graham, the editor in chief of Scribner, said she was releasing very little fiction from July to January. “I’m never publishing a novel in the fall of an election year,” she said. “I feel bad about every single person whose novel I published in the fall of ’04 because they absolutely got no attention or no sales.” Other publishers worry that in election season it’s hard to get coverage for nonpolitical titles in book pages and on radio and television, especially “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report,” which have become central to publishers’ publicity strategies.

Whether it’s Comedy Central or the Internet, the same media that can call attention to a book are also drawing attention away from readers. So word of mouth is still the name of the game. “If you’re trying to explain this to someone from Mars or the Harvard Business School, they’d kind of scratch their head and say, ‘There must be a better way,’” Kirshbaum, the former Time Warner Book Group chairman, said. “But so far neither Martians nor H.B.S.-ers have solved this riddle.”
Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.