This Crazy Writing Life: Requiescat in pace—In Memory Of The Mass-Market Paperback
By Steven Womack
Jim Milliot and Sophia Stewart’s December 12th article in Publisher’s Weekly isn’t actually an article.
It’s an obituary.
ReaderLink—the largest distributor of books to non-trade channel booksellers in North America—just announced that they would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks at the end of 2025. The mass-market paperback—once the single most popular reading format in the world—has been dying for over a quarter-century. ReaderLink’s decision is, to fall back on a perfectly valid cliché, the final nail in the coffin.
An eighty-six-year long ride is over.
The mass-market paperback had its roots in the Great Depression, when a huge demographic could barely afford food and rent, let alone luxuries like books. Publishers would do anything to sell more books, so in 1935 a British publisher named Allen Lane created Penguin Books in the U.K. and with it, the universal format (4.25” x 6.87”) that could be mass produced cheaply and distributed across a wide variety of markets and outlets. The first American paperback book publisher—Pocket Books—released its first book, Wuthering Heights, in 1939.
Not only were mass-market paperbacks affordable, they weren’t limited to sales in bookstores. In time, newsstands, drug stores, grocery stores, gift shops, airports, Big Box stores like Walmart, gas stations—anywhere you could put a cheap wire rack—became outlets.
The mass-market paperback also created what became known in publishing as the “midlist,” which enabled authors who probably wouldn’t make it in hardcover to gain an audience and earn a living. Several generations of writers thrived and became famous thanks to the mass-market paperback. Louis L’Amour wrote more than 130 books in his long career; all but four of them were mass-market paperbacks. Someone once told me that John D. MacDonald calculated the size of his advances for the Travis McGee novels on the first print run of his mass-market paperback.
Is that a true story? Who knows, but it’s a great story.
Mass-market paperbacks also outsold the hell out of hardcovers. In the PW article, Milliot and Stewart cited the figures for Jacqueline Susann’s 1966 blockbuster hit, Valley of the Dolls. Upon its release, Susann’s potboiler sold 300,000 hardcovers that year, which is certainly nothing to be ashamed of.
Then Bantam released the paperback in 1967 and it sold 4,000,000 copies in the first week. It went on to double that number in its first year. The mass-market paperback lifted the fortunes of publishers beyond the Big Five. The mass-market paperback played a huge role in making independent powerhouse Kensington Publishing as successful as it’s been. Milliot and Stewart cited Kensington CEO Steve Zacharius’s statement that the mass-market paperback was the foundation of Kensington’s success. Kensington’s best-selling author of all time is Fern Michaels; the bulk of her 42 million sales were mass-market paperbacks.
All genres benefited from the format, especially the most popular commercial genres like romance, mystery and crime fiction, and science fiction. In my own career, the mass-market paperback made me a nice living for nearly a decade. My first three book deals with St. Martin’s Press were hardcover and the sales were never that impressive. But once I launched my Music City Murders series, featuring private detective Harry James Denton, with Ballantine Books, my mass-market numbers built what career I had. I published six books in that series and every one of them was either nominated or won a major mystery award (including both an Edgar and Shamus Award). It all worked beautifully…
Until it didn’t anymore.
What happened?
I can only relate a personal experience here. In 1996, I signed a two-book contract with Ballantine Books (I had only taken single contracts before because, candidly, the money was pretty terrible and I didn’t want to get locked in). I’d been nominated for an Edgar twice, won it once, and had also been multiply nominated for the Shamus and short-listed for the Anthony. My editor at Ballantine said if I’d take a two-book deal, he'd move me into lead title and the second book in the contract would go hard/soft.
I took the offer. The first book in the deal was Murder Manual, published in 1998. After several Shamus nominations, I was thrilled to finally win one with that book. I began working on the second book in the deal when suddenly my editor seemed to go into an extended period of radio silence.
Finally, I reached out to him and told him how excited I was to finally see Harry James Denton in hardcover. When would I see a cover comp?
Long, awkward, silence…
“About that, Steve,” he said. “We’ve done an extensive audit on the sales of Murder Manual, and we thought the numbers were going to be impressive. Then, out of nowhere, we started getting a ton of returns. Your sell-through ultimately was so low we’ve cancelled the hardcover.”
He explained to me that through the late 90s, there were roughly 1100 companies across the country that were independent distributors; that is, they were small, often family-owned companies that served a specific local market. Most books were sold through those companies.
In the last few years, though, there had been a wave of acquisitions (with Nashville’s own Ingram Books being one of the most active at gobbling up smaller companies), changes in tax laws, and especially bankruptcies, which decimated that market. And while companies were either being acquired or working their way through bankruptcy courts, hundreds of thousands of mass-market paperbacks sat gathering dust, cheap paper fading to yellow, in hundreds of warehouses across the country.
When the companies were acquired or released from bankruptcy, hundreds of thousands of mass-market paperbacks—their covers ripped off and sent back to the publisher as returns—were shredded and pulped.
Milliot and Stewart backed up what my editor told me over twenty-five years ago. They quoted a study done by the Book Industry Study Group that revealed mass market sales in 1996 fell 3.3% from the previous year. The downward slope continued through the early 2000s, through the introduction of the eBook in 2006, until 2011, when eBook sales and mass market sales were roughly equal. Unfortunately, that parity of numbers disguised the fact that mass-market paperback sales were down by $500 million that year, while eBook sales had grown by $1 billion.
To deploy another effective cliché, it was death by a thousand cuts.
And now it’s dead. They’ll surely be a few mass-market paperbacks around for a few more years, but as a cultural force in society, as a huge segment of the publishing industry, it’s over.
The mass-market paperback democratized literature in America; it turned us into a nation of readers. When America went to war in December 1941, publishers stepped up with special format mass-market paperbacks in what were known as the “Armed Services Edition.” I have several of those in my collection, including Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent and several GI paperbacks my uncle carried across Europe and through the Battle of the Bulge. These old treasures are frail now, their cheap, high-acid content paper yellowed and brittle, their bindings cracked and flaking.
But they were carried by hundreds of thousands of soldiers through a world war and all those GIs found escape and comfort in them. And hopefully, they developed a love of reading that they carried with them through the rest of their lives.
It’s sad to see the mass-market paperback sunset. But as I’ve learned the hard way over many orbits around the sun, all good things must come to an end.
***
Another valuable life lesson is that when one door closes, another opens. Over the next few months, we’re going to go on an adventure together by way of this column.
I have a writing partner in New York City, Wayne McDaniel. He’s a fabulous screenwriter, novelist, documentarian, with an MFA in Film from Columbia University, as well as a helluva great guy. In 2014, we published a novel called Resurrection Bay.
Several years after that, we wrote a novel together called Pearson Place. This project is literally one of the best books I’ve ever been involved in. I’ll have more to say on the book itself next month.
Wayne and I have spent the last few years trying to find a publisher for this novel. We gave it everything we had. We set up a Query Tracker account and queried dozens of agents. Zilch. Nada. As many of you know, getting trad publishing’s attention these days is harder than ever.
Finally, through a connection (which is really how almost everything is done in publishing), we got an editor at a medium-sized-but-prestigious-publisher to take a look at the manuscript.
We were gobsmacked and thrilled when she loved the book. Literally, that’s what she told us. She loved the freakin’ thing. As in many corporate entities, though, all decisions are made by consensus and there was one person on the acquisitions committee who had problems with the book and vetoed it.
Then this editor did something I have literally never seen before in my forty years in publishing; she said if Wayne and I would do a rewrite and address the issues her colleague had, she’d take the book back and try again.
Without hesitation, we did a rewrite.
The editor loved what we did and took it back to committee. Six months and more went by and finally she called us, nearly in tears, and said her colleague wouldn’t budge. We were all heartbroken, but I think she took it harder than we did.
So Wayne and I decided to go a different route. We’re going to serialize the book on Substack. We’ve broken the book out into individual Substack posts/chapters and are writing supplemental material to go with it and just learning how this is done.
It’s a revolutionary way to get books out there, digitized and delivered via the Internet. Nothing like this has ever been done before.
Oh, wait. There was that Dickens fellow who did it with David Copperfield, The Pickwick Papers, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood—among others—over 160 years ago. I guess everything old is new again.
Thanks for playing along. See you next month.
