Word: paperbacks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...nuclear weapons have made war obsolete and world government imperative. Astonishingly, some 40 new books on nuclear issues are scheduled to be published before the end of this year; Pocket Books is rushing into bookstores with 100,000 copies of Nuclear War: What's in It for You ?, a paperback primer on the subject, written by Roger Molander, founder of Ground Zero, a nuclear-education group...
...cutbacks are just beginning. Says Louis Wolfe, president of Bantam, the largest U.S. paperback house: "We're paying more attention to what we pay up front and with good reason. We can't afford a lot of money for what might be a big book and then find out it isn't. We have to have a bottom-line profit, and we can no longer afford to keep some of the hard-cover publishing houses going." Shatzkin is less sanguine: "There will definitely be failures among the original trade publishers...
...book business. Some major corporations that backed publishing in the '60s and '70s, hoping for a big score, are pulling out. RCA sold Random House; CBS jettisoned Fawcett Books; textbook giant Scott, Foresman abandoned William Morrow. And the film studios, whose pictures often earned outsize profits for paperback tie-in editions, are equally cautious. A seven-figure property like Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife has yet to make it to the screen. Currently, the odds are against its ever getting to a sound stage. Says Willie Hunt, vice president of production at United Artists...
Still, the publishing business has endured crises before. The paperback revolution of the '50s was perceived as a threat to hardback publishing; so were television, outlandish contracts, school and library closings, and federal cutbacks. The business survived them all. And today it is moving, however slowly, toward a new reality-although the latest paper chase sounds like a fairy tale: the Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear deal. The term was coined to describe Tom Robbins' 1980 intermountain fantasy, Still Life with Woodpecker. The book was published simultaneously in a $12.95 hardcover (Papa) and a $6.95 quality paperback...
Those egos will have to shrink, along with authors' incomes, as paperback houses become a greater force in publishing. More and more often now, they depend on generic categories-romances (25% to 30% of all fiction sold), mysteries, historical sagas and scifi. According to Sociologist Walter Powell, co-author of Books, the Culture and Commerce of Publishing: "Fiction may no longer be part of the mass market. It looks very dismal for people who want to make a living writing novels...