Publishing During a Pandemic
The effects of COVID-19 on the business of books.
FOR most of the past decade, indie publisher Graywolf Press has been on a roll. One of its authors, Anna Burns, from Northern Ireland, won the 2018 Man Booker Prize for her novel Milkman. Before that the nonprofit press in Minneapolis had breakout hits with Leslie Jamison’s 2014 essay collection The Empathy Exams and Maggie Nelson’s 2016 genre-bending memoir The Argonauts. Many of the press’s poetry titles, like Claudia Rankine’s 2014 Citizen: An American Lyric and Layli Long Soldier’s 2017 Whereas, have also sold well. Then COVID-19 hit.
Fearing a prolonged slump in the wake of the pandemic, Graywolf’s publisher, Fiona McCrae, is planning for a 60 to 70 percent plunge in print sales over the coming year, along with a 50 percent drop in e-book sales. McCrae says she and her staff will “go hell-for-leather” to beat those gloomy projections, and thanks to Graywolf’s extended run of success, along with a federal small-business grant, she anticipates no layoffs or drastic cutbacks in its publication schedule. Still, she is preparing for the worst.
“When this is over, the mood is going to be different,” she says. “It’s going to be a different world. People are going to have lost their jobs, lost family members, lost friends. There’s going to be a downturn in discretionary spending just because people are not going to be buoyant, and that’s before factoring in that certain bookstores may not make it. There’s a cascading effect to this thing, and I don’t see how it doesn’t last quite a long time.”
This spring, editors and agents around the United States struggled to put on a brave face about the expected fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, noting that the book business has weathered countless previous economic and technological challenges that doomsayers predicted would sink the industry. Even at the height of the pandemic, industry veterans said, e-book and audiobook sales remained robust, and shoppers were flocking to the book aisles at big-box stores like Costco and Target, which remained open through shelter-in-place orders that shuttered most retail bookstores.
Indeed, sales figures for the early weeks of the pandemic give some reason for optimism. After a strong winter, book
sales were down only 2.2 percent for the year through the end of April 2020, compared to a similar period the year before, according to NPD BookScan, which tracks approximately 85 percent of trade print books sold in the United States. For the month of April 2020, total print sales were down 6.5 percent, compared to April 2019, but adult fiction was down only 0.6 percent in April compared to the year before.
At many of the so-called Big Five corporate publishing houses, strong sales early in the year and a surge in digital purchases may have softened the impact of the shutdowns in midMarch. In the first quarter of the year, which ended March 31, HarperCollins was down only 2.1 percent from the same period in 2019, while Simon & Schuster was down 3.7 percent and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was down 6.1 percent, according to company reports. Lagardère, the parent company of Hachette Book Group, was down only 0.8 percent in the first quarter compared to the year before.
Privately, though, industry veterans say they wouldn’t be surprised to see layoffs and cutbacks in author advances, especially if the economic downturn is long and deep. In April, Macmillan Publishers, a Big Five publishing house whose imprints include Henry Holt, Flatiron Books, Picador, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, laid off an unspecified number of employees and instituted a hiring freeze and temporary salary reductions. In late March, Scholastic Books announced a number of cost-cutting measures at its warehouses and distribution centers, including furloughs, shortened workweeks, and voluntary unpaid leave. Meanwhile Skyhorse Publishing laid off 30 percent of its workforce.
If more publishers follow suit in the coming months, it would, unfortunately, be in line with historical trends. In the five years after the last economic downturn, triggered by the 2008 fiscal crisis, the publishing industry shed about 17.5 percent of its workforce, according to figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Not everyone is predicting doom and gloom though. At Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, part of the publishing conglomerate Penguin Random House, vice president and executive editor Jenny Jackson says she has heard no rumors of layoffs and remains cautiously optimistic that the company’s overall corporate health and its deep library of classic titles will stave off major cutbacks.
“We have a lot of bucket-list reads, books that people always meant to read, and we are seeing in the marketplace a lot of readers turning to our backlists,” Jackson says. “I think a lot of people think, you know, ‘I’ve never read the big Russian novels. This seems like a good time.’ So we’re seeing an unexpected benefit there, and that helps float us along.”
Like nearly all of her colleagues in publishing, Jackson has worked from
home during the lockdown, holding daily videoconferences to discuss submissions and nudge existing titles toward publication. “We’re trying as much as possible to stay on our typical schedule, so we have Webex meetings almost every day,” says Jackson. “We have editorial meetings. We have a weekly marketing meeting. We have book jacket meetings with our designers. They send us images so we can look at them on our phones while we talk about them through our computer screens.”
Submissions continue to roll in, she says, albeit at slightly depressed levels, and the various imprints, including Knopf, Anchor Books, Vintage Books, Doubleday, and others, have continued to acquire and launch new books. In mid-April, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group held a meeting to discuss the spring 2021 season via videoconference, with a dozen editors introducing their latest acquisitions to nearly one hundred fifty sales and marketing staffers, all tuning in from home. “It was a full list,” she says. “We didn’t pull anything because of the pandemic. These are books that the authors would have been either done with or almost done with before the crisis, so we had it all ready to go.”
Still, widespread bookstore closures and canceled book tours pushed many editors and agents to delay publication dates for their authors’ books. Publishers had already avoided launching books this fall, fearing the presidential election would drown out any nonpolitical book, and now many titles scheduled for this spring and summer are being pushed back to next year, creating a potential backlog at a time when consumers may be short on cash to buy books.
Concerns about layoffs have also made some agents wary of submitting to editors whose jobs might be in jeopardy. This spring, while the lockdowns were still in place, agent Nicole Aragi of Aragi, Inc., says she thought twice about sending “Nobody Gets Out Alive,” a debut collection of stories by Leigh Newman, out on submission.
“I’d sort of decided, yes, I was going with it—it’s a really strong collection— but then people started to get fired,” says Aragi, whose clients include Colson Whitehead, Edwidge Danticat, and Junot Díaz. “There was one person on my submission list who was let go, and I paused, thinking, ‘This is a dangerous time to submit something. I don’t want to send it out and find myself either with a book that’s about to be orphaned, or someone vetoing it because they know they’re going to cut the poor editor.’ I’m trying to weigh how ruthless publishers are going to be in this time with people who have worked for them for a very long time.”
But even if publishing houses hold the line on layoffs and the reopening of the U.S. economy proceeds relatively smoothly, the COVID-19 crisis could have profound ramifications for
the book business, especially on small presses and those that specialize in literary fiction and poetry, industry experts say.
In many ways literary novels and poetry collections are small-batch artisanal products—think of a locally brewed IPA as opposed to a can of Budweiser—that rely on social networks and hand-selling for much of their sales. Take away independent booksellers putting books in customers’ hands and the vast ecosystem of poetry readings, literary festivals, and author tours, and book sales suffer.
Take, for instance, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference, held this year in early March, shortly before the first wave of mandated shutdowns. When Copper Canyon Press decided to pull out of the conference because of the virus, it cost the Port Townsend, Washington–based poetry press $30,000 in expected sales, says editor in chief Michael Wiegers. Copper Canyon is hardly alone. According to Mary Gannon, executive director of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, pulling out of AWP cost many of the small presses in her organization 20 or 30 percent of their sales for the month of March from the loss of in-person sales from that one event.
Multiply that across the dozens of conferences and festivals that have been canceled or moved online, and add countless other in-person book events threatened by the public’s concerns over large gatherings, and it quickly becomes clear why Wiegers fears his press could lose 70 percent of its sales over the next year. But like McCrae at Graywolf, Wiegers anticipates no layoffs among Copper Canyon’s eleven-member staff, though he says he is pulling back slightly on future acquisitions.
“Next year I’ve already looked at our list and I’m trimming the number of books we’re going to do, mainly through delays, by saying we’re going to push these books back into the following year,” he says. “So already I know that out of a list of twenty books, we’re delaying at least three of them.”
When the lockdown orders began, poets at Copper Canyon, like authors at many other presses, quickly moved their live events online, using videoconferencing platforms to take their work directly into their readers’ living rooms. The early reviews on this shift are mixed. Authors and publishers alike report that attendance at digital events is larger than typical live events, in part because they draw viewers from around the world, not just those who might be able to make an evening at a local bookstore. But publishers remain unsure whether people watching at home are buying books, which is the economic raison d’être for the events. Video events also don’t draw readers into bookstores, which rely on the added traffic and sales that live events offer.
Paul Lisicky, whose memoir Later: My Life at the Edge of the World was published by Graywolf in mid-March, had to call off his entire book tour, a total of twenty-two live events scheduled through May. But by the end of April, he had taken part in seventeen digital events, many of them more widely attended than he would have expected if the events had been in-person. In the beginning, Lisicky says, the meetings were on Zoom, but he soon transitioned to the platform Crowdcast, which can be programmed to feature a button on viewers’ screens that allows them to buy a book. Other publishers say they’re experimenting with requiring viewers to buy a book in advance or donate a small fee to the hosting bookstore before joining a video event.
For now, digital readings serve as emergency replacements for canceled in-person events, but Lisicky sees a future for the form even after the pandemic recedes. “I’m fascinated by human ingenuity,” he says. “I believe that there will be live events when we can have them, but I also believe that the livestream event offers writers more opportunities to be present to audiences. I think about all the bookstores in remote areas that could never host a major writer because of the lack of proximity to a major airport, so I think there’s something exciting about the possibility of these new opportunities.”
Wiegers, for his part, wonders how an extended interruption of traditional literary gatherings might affect the work of a generation of younger poets who have built loyal followings predicated on live performance. A decade ago, he says, there were only one or two booking agencies, or speakers bureaus, as they’re sometimes known, specializing in poetry, and now there are a dozen or more. “There’s a whole industry that has built up around the social presence of poets, around readings, around festivals and conferences,” he says. “So much of the poetry world has centered around performance, has centered around the stage as a shoehorn to the page, and that’s being changed. So I’m wondering how poets will craft their work recognizing that the live audience they’re used to is going to be changing.”
The suspension of live book events is also hurting booksellers, many of whom depend on author appearances to drive sales and traffic into their stores. For the moment, the fate of brick-and-mortar bookstores in the pandemic era remains unclear. In March bookstores across the country shut their doors along with most other storefront businesses, furloughing staff and preventing shoppers from browsing their shelves. As the closures stretched on, many stores ramped up their online sales and initiated curbside pickup or home delivery programs, but these sales, welcome as they are, won’t keep bookstores alive forever, says Jamie Fiocco, owner of Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and president of the American Booksellers Association.
“Our costs have gone way up because we’ve had to purchase packing materials and labels and postage and pay the delivery person,” says Fiocco, who has had to furlough eight of her fourteen employees. “It’s effectively cutting our publisher discounts in half, so it’s a pretty significant cost. Will that be offset by losing a little over half our staff and having a lower payroll? I don’t know. It’s enough to meet payroll and pay basic bills, but it’s not a sustainable model.”
Fiocco remains hopeful that if the federal government can get muchneeded funding to small businesses like hers, and if booksellers do a good job of maintaining cleaning and social distancing regimens, bookstore closures can be kept to a minimum. “Right now we literally have to lock the door,” she says. “On a nice day, we’ll prop the door open, and people will want to come in and we have to explain what’s going on in the world and that they can’t just walk in.”
But as book-industry consultant Mike Shatzkin points out, for most people, books are a discretionary purchase, one that even the hardiest readers may not believe is worth the risk of infection. “When the most sober governors decide to open things up again, people are going to be nervous,” says Shatzkin, coauthor, with Robert Paris Riger, of The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2019). “You can buy your eggs and milk online and have them delivered, but it’s a little more concerning, and that’s the kind of thing you brave the retail store for. You’ll stand six feet away from the person in front of you, etcetera—but a book? Really? If you’re the least bit nervous about being in an enclosed space with somebody who might infect you, a book is not what you’re going to go shopping for in a retail store.”
The push of literary culture and bookselling to online platforms, if it lasts more than a few months, could also bring about deeper structural changes to the publishing industry itself. Amazon already dominates bookselling, accounting for half of all print book sales and an even larger percentage of e-book sales, and a prolonged economic chill brought about by the pandemic could drive its market share even higher at the expense of brickand-mortar bookstores—a trend that threatens not just indie booksellers, but possibly the reach and relevance of traditional publishing houses.
Authors and their agents have for years been quietly taking on more of the editing and publicity work that publishers used to do before their workforce shrunk in the last recession. If the pandemic takes a lasting bite out of sales at brick-and-mortar bookstores, where corporate publishers hold sway, and pushes more business to Amazon, where self-published authors compete on a more even playing field, it could provide additional reasons for authors to resist sharing their earnings with traditional publishing houses.
“The power of big publishing is in the retail stores,” says Shatzkin, the book-industry consultant. “If the sales are at Amazon and the marketing is mostly social network marketing, then the distinction between what an author can do and what a publisher can do gets pretty fuzzy. What a publisher can do that an author alone cannot do is put books in stores and libraries on a speculative basis—that is, before there’s a market—and reach the public through the most powerful media that are available for book promotion.”
Privately some publishing veterans concede Shatzkin’s point, though they see enduring value in corporate publishing’s marketing and publicity muscle, along with the importance of author advances, which keep writers solvent between projects. “We are the bank for writers,” notes one veteran editor at a Big Five house, who asked to remain anonymous. “You can’t lose sight of that. Writers need money. They need financial support, and these advances that we pay, which are significant, that’s a big piece of the puzzle.”
But a reversal of the recent renaissance of indie bookshops, especially if it erodes the power of traditional publishers, would be bad news for writers of literary fiction, says agent Nicole Aragi. “Amazon does very well with authors once they’re established, and they do very well with books that fit in certain genres, but they’re not creating a book,” she says. “They’re not making it. I represent books that do need that to some extent. So I need a publisher that does marketing and that does all the outreach and tries to come up with all the innovative ways to publicize a writer. Now that’s happening less and less in corporate publishing anyway, and it’s likely to be accelerated in the future, so it leaves us all in a bit of a dilemma.”
Whatever the long-term economic and social impact of the pandemic, books have inherent advantages over many other cultural activities. Unlike movies and the performing arts, books don’t require people to gather in large, potentially infectious groups, and unlike print newspapers and magazines, literary culture has survived successive waves of technological innovation relatively unscathed. The publishing industry has also weathered a century’s worth of economic downturns, starting with the Great Depression and carrying through to the 2008 fiscal crisis.
“Books have been around for hundreds of years,” says one industry veteran. “They’re the best way to tell stories. People will always read. I think that’s the good news. The vehicles for how it happens have always been evolving and changing, and the business itself has evolved and changed dramatically, but the fundamentals of it, reading long narratives, that’s been with us for hundreds of years and I don’t see that going away.”