New Publishing Austerity

In this piece on the "new publishing austerity," Motoko Rich does a pretty good job of summing up the carnage in the industry thus far:

Venerable houses including HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Penguin Group, Random House and Simon & Schuster have all announced salary freezes or layoffs, or both. Simon & Schuster canceled its annual holiday party, held for the last few years at Tavern on the Green and scheduled in 2008 for Guastavino’s, a splashy banquet hall in Manhattan. One division of Random House had pizza, beer and wine in a room off the cafeteria for its holiday lunch instead of going out for pricey cocktails. Across the city, editors with Four Seasons taste are being asked to scale back on their lunch tabs.

Random House has postponed its spring sales conference and has yet to choose a location. Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman, said one thing was certain: After holding a meeting in Bermuda last year the company “will not be returning there in 2009.”

Not that I'm an insider, but I doubt that many of the small and indie presses that I've come to know over the years engage in corporate largess of a magnitude anywhere near this. These major houses really have gotten out of touch.

I have to admit that this leaves me baffled:

Ms. Urban said some of the more lavish practices could not be sustained by a slow-growth, low-margin industry that can’t charge luxury prices. “Books can only support a certain retail price,” she said. “It’s not like you have books that can be Manolo Blahniks and books that can be Cole Haan. Books are books. A book by James Patterson costs the same as a book by some poet.”

Since publishing has always been a slow-growth, low-margin industry--in both bad and good economic times--I don't see how anyone ever considered that these "lavish practices" were sustainable.

Comments

[Daniel]

I was tearing the hair from my head when I read this — insanity! And HarperStudio is "only" offering up to $100,000 (!) advances. Woe is them.