In the era of ebooks and chain stores, the publishing industry, like Hollywood, now lives and dies by blockbusters and franchises. Finding the next EL James has become the multi-billion-dollar imperative
Alexandra Pringle was at her office in London’s Bloomsbury neighbourhood in April last year when she got the kind of phone call every book publisher is hoping for these days. Literary agent David Godwin, who for 14 years has shopped Pringle, the top dog at Bloomsbury Publishing, works from prestige authors like historian William Dalrymple and journalist Janine di Giovanni, was offering something outside his usual comfort zone. “He literally said, ‘I’ve got this manuscript, and I don’t know what to think of it,’” Pringle recalls. “‘You might hate it, and that’s fine, but I’m going to send it to you because I think it’s something special.’” This August, Bloomsbury will publish The Bone Season, the first installment in what will eventually be a seven-part series about clairvoyants in a dystopian future struggling against a totalitarian government and its supernatural overlords. The writer: Godwin’s former intern, a previously unpublished 21-year-old Brit named Samantha Shannon. “It’s been very overwhelming,” says Shannon. “It’s a lot of pressure. There’s a lot of expectations.”
She and her fellow scribes of the addictive fantasy-fiction ilk carry the expectations of the entire industry, actually. Incubating franchises is increasingly the only game that matters for major publishers. Bestsellers have been a part of the book business for decades, increasing in their importance since JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series went on to sell more than 450 million copies worldwide. But now, thanks to disruptive changes in technology and consumer appetites, the traditional book business has come to resemble Hollywood’s movie business in its reliance on ‘tent pole’ blockbusters to stay afloat.
To understand the scale of the trend, think about this: Of the total number of copies sold in 2012 of the 400 highest-selling titles, two authors, EL James (Fifty Shades of Grey) and Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games), together accounted for a full 25 percent, according to data tracked by USA Today. Between them, the Fifty Shades of Grey and Hunger Games trilogies claimed all six top slots on the year-end bestseller list. In fact, James’s Fifty Shades may be the most dominant fiction franchise in history, selling 13.4 percent of the copies among the top 400—more than the Harry Potter or Twilight books in their peak years.
The unprecedented success of the Fifty Shades series was the principal factor in a 75 percent jump in profits—to $431 million—at publisher Random House from 2011 to 2012. So immense was the windfall, the company gave each of its employees a $5,000 bonus—laughable on Wall Street but a very big deal in the threadbare world of publishing. Sales are likely to surge again when a promised film version arrives in late 2013, just as the March 2012 release of the first Hunger Games movie pushed those books back up the bestseller lists. “They’re subject to some pretty wild revenue swings,” says Michael Norris, an analyst who covers publishing for Simba Information. “If you publish the right property one year, your numbers are going to be up. Then the following year, in the trough of the bestseller wave, your numbers will be down.”
For writers who can deliver franchises, the potential financial reward is unlike any other in the history of publishing. By Forbes estimates, James raked in $95 million last year, outearning long-standing fiction factories like James Patterson ($91 million) and Stephen King ($20 million), who are also on the Celebrity 100 list this year. Shannon got a mid-six-figure advance for her series, virtually unheard of for a first-time author just out of her teens. If it pans out as her publishers hope, she will make millions (and millions) of dollars more—as will they.
There’s a problem with all this, though. Practised as they’ve become at marketing, amplifying and exploiting their biggest hits, publishers still have to find them in the first place. Much as their business has come to resemble Hollywood (especially in their quest for material that crucially straddles the border between adolescents and adults), there’s one big difference: Tinseltown thrives by adapting proven material like Star Trek, Superman and an endless stream of Marvel comic book characters. New book franchises must be invented in the first place. And without them, major publishers are in major trouble.
While books are still viewed as the romantic last bastion of old-school media consumption, this shift is a direct result of technological disruption, “the ability”, as Michael Pietsch, CEO of Hachette Book Group, puts it, “to connect with more and more readers more instantaneously in more retail environments and in more formats”.
(This story appears in the 26 July, 2013 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)