shattered idealism

Speaking of depressing. One of my tasks at work includes organizing book sales figures. As a result, I am beginning to realize that it is incredibly difficult to sell books.

Well perhaps I should clarify. It is incredibly difficult to sell books if you don’t have the marketing and publicity resources (money, time, I can’t stress time enough) of say a Random House. Not to imply that all books published by Random House get the “Random House” treatment. Another depressing fact.

And it just keeps going. Not only are a lot of books not selling like they should, we (the publishing industry) just keep acquiring and acquiring, so there are more and more books that don’t perform the way they could.

Working at a small house has given me insight into the resource constraints of publishers. I always would side with the author saying it is a shame that publishers don’t do more in terms of marketing/publicity, but to be quite honest, sometimes they are doing all they can, they truly wish they could do more, but other demands pull them in all sorts of directions.

When I hear that self-publishers are selling 10,000 copies on their own, I look at them with renewed admiration. That’s a big deal.

But then I am like, wouldn’t it be nice if publishing companies could have one-two people completed dedicated to the marketing/publicity of one title for a year. Could you imagine? But it just can’t happen.

Part of me is wondering if the industry should just publish less books? But then that isn’t an answer. Alas.