Career Tip for Book Publishers

If you want to get a feel for books while you're still in college, getting a job at a chain bookstore is relatively easy, especially if you are willing to work odd hours. People who work in bookstores have been called "intellectual minimum wage slaves," yet the experience you get at the point of sale is beneficial in gaining a perspective on the entire book-marketing process and, ultimately, may lead to store management, book sales for a publisher, or sales representative. A sales rep is employed by a publishing company to sell its books in a given territory.

Book Clubs

There are 175 adult book clubs and 25 juvenile clubs listed in the most recent LMP. Book clubs account for more than 4 percent of publishers' net book sales.



The range of book clubs is truly eclectic. Some examples:

Performing Arts Book Club Professional Chef Book Guild

There is a large club called the Get Rich Book Club, which claims 135,000 members and even publishes a monthly magazine.

Book club selections are marketed to the public and special groups directly by mail. Usually the publisher makes a book's printing plates available to the club, which then prints its own edition. Club members receive the books at a discount. The publisher receives approximately 10 percent of the club's price for each book printed. The author usually receives 50 percent of the publisher's net revenues from club sales. The prestige of being a club selection can significantly help a book's sales in bookstores.

Most book clubs are owned by book publishing conglomerates. Bertelsmann AG Publishers (which owns Doubleday, Dell, and Bantam) also owns the Literary Guild and many other clubs. Time Warner has owned the Book-of-the-Month Club since 1977. However, there seems to be no question regarding objectivity of clubs in their book selection process. Such selections are made on the basis of quality and commercial viability, not on whether the books come from the club's parent publisher.

The giant in the book club field is the Book-of-the-Month Club, known in the trade as BOMC. Launched in 1926, the club grew enormously in the post-World War II years. Recently its membership topped the three million mark. The average member is in his or her early 40s. Sixty percent of the members are women. Geographically, membership reflects the general population of the United States.

• Astronomy Book Club
  
  
• Catholic Book Club
  
  
• Judaica Book Club
  
  
• Aviators Guild Dance Book
  
  
• Club Mystery Guild
  

Each year, BOMC sends out about twenty-five million books. Unlike its chief competitor, the Literary Guild, which changes the books to fit its standardized format, BOMC reproduces the publisher's edition in the same size and format as the publisher.

An example of BOMC's clout in the book publishing business is its 1984 choice of the novel ...And Ladies of the Club by eighty-six-year- old Helen Hooven Santmyer as a main selection. As a result, the 1,176- page first novel zoomed onto the national best-seller charts. The club's choice in this case was no doubt based on the instincts of its editors and the unique quality of the book itself.

Mass Distribution

Mass-market distribution refers primarily to the mass-market paperback. Although the largest number of these books are reprints of fiction and nonfiction hardcover books, many are originals today, especially genre books in the horror, science fiction, romance, mystery, and western categories.

In the mass market, all books are sold on consignment (books shipped to a dealer that may be returned for full credit). This system results in a great deal of waste. Hundreds of new titles are published each month. The racks in most retail outlets can handle only fifteen or twenty titles and usually only the best-sellers prevail. Covers are stripped from the unsold copies and returned to the wholesalers. Compounding the problem is the lack of a market for these returns. Half of all books shipped to wholesalers remain unsold.

Yet mass-market paperbacks still maintain an impressive share of the entire book market, with annual sales well over $1 billion. The mass-market paperback publishers-Dell, Warner, Pocket Books, Penguin, and Bantam-have succeeded in this precarious field.

Subscription Sales and Direct Mail

We have all seen ads in magazines and received direct-mail soli-citations for series such as Time-Life Books and Reader's Digest Condensed Books. These "continuity" series and others in this category are big business in book publishing. They account for almost $700 million in their publishers' net sales.

Time-Life Books is the largest direct-mail book publisher, shipping twenty-five million volumes a year worldwide. Time-Life Books test- markets about twenty series ideas per year, but publishes only a small fraction of the total. Its best-selling series is Home Repair and Improvement, followed closely by The Old West and Mysteries of the Unknown.

Since their existence depends on huge sales, subscription and direct-mail books are carefully researched and designed so that they will enjoy wide consumer appeal.