R.I.P. M.M.P.B

The Last Days of Paperback Books

The End

The first mass market paperbacks were called “Penny Dreadfuls,” cheap (they were literally made from pulp) and lurid serialized novels published in 19th century England. Each eight to sixteen page installment sold for one penny. The public scooped them up by the millions. The Guardian described them as “the Victorian equivalent of video games.” Among the bestsellers were Sweeney Todd, Robin Hood, and Varney the Vampire.

Modern mass market paperbacks, originally called “pocket books” after the Simon & Schuster imprint, were born in 1939. They sold for twenty-five cents but were scarcely dreadful: The first list boasted The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, Lost Horizon by James Hilton and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Since then mass market paperbacks have dominated the publishing landscape with sales in the incalculable billions.

They are scheduled to die at the end of this year.

Their death notice was recently announced in Publishers Weekly: “Sales of mass market paperbacks have steadily declined in recent years, to the point where they accounted for only about 3% of units sold at retailers that report to Circana BookScan in 2024. The format will take another big blow at the end of 2025, when Readerlink will stop distributing mass market paperbacks to its accounts.” ReaderLink describes itself as “the largest full-service distributor in North America” with six U.S. distribution centers supplying over 100,000 stores. All major publishers are shifting their focus to trade paperback as the format of choice both for originals and reprints. Even paperback publishers that prospered with genre literature like romance and science fiction are pushing their chips onto the larger trim size.

This sad event officially brands me an old-timer. I was an infant when the format was introduced; I made a living writing dozens of them in my freelance career; my agency prospered in the belle époque of genre paperback originals; and I will witness their expiry within the year. The paperback deserves a royal funeral, for it was one of the glorious artifacts of the analog era, but it won’t receive one. It will simply fade into oblivion, and the community of writers that flourished for some three generations will perish with it.

Why?

The reasons for the collapse of mass market paperbacks are complex but can be traced to several fundamental shifts in publishing culture.

· Tissue-thin profit margins. Publication and distribution had become exceedingly cost-ineffective compared to other (and higher priced) print formats like hardcover and trade paperback.

· The gradual disappearance of paperback racks and other displays in drugstores and supermarkets, and the explosive growth of chain bookstores whose bookshelves do not display MMPBs as effectively as trade paperbacks.

· The decline of book departments at big-box stores like Walmart, where paperbacks failed to meet the test of profitability per square foot of display space compared to other consumer goods like deodorant and panty hose.

· The rise of e-books as a preferred reprint format. Because e-books are released simultaneously with hardcover editions, as opposed to mass market paperbacks which are traditionally issued a year or longer after a book’s first edition, e-books have a huge advantage over MMPBs. Plus e-books are cheaper.

The MMPB as a Way of Life

It is not merely the configuration of these books that will vanish but the robust culture they represent. At its zenith in the second half of the twentieth century the market for original westerns, mysteries and thrillers, romance, action-adventure, horror, fantasy and science fiction was insatiable. Genre fiction was a veritable nursery where hungry young writers could earn while they learned, their prolific output (many could turn out four or six books a year) filling a ravenous maw of consumer appetite. Paperback publishers issued hundreds of titles every month, flooding the racks and shelves of train and plane stations, drugstores, candy stores and supermarkets. Writers flocked to genre conventions to meet their editors, colleagues, friends and fans and to attend lavish award ceremonies followed by partying. It was a seller’s market, with agents promoting gifted authors through wild multimillion dollar paperback reprint auctions that catapulted them to the highest echelons of superstardom. It was, in short, a golden age of professional writing.

Yet, despite the soaring commercial success of mass market books, the practitioners of the craft never quite achieved the honor and respect that is commonly accorded to authors of serious literature. I would like to say something about that.

The Culture of Professionalism

When I went into the publishing business after graduating from college, I discovered a literary culture so vastly different from the ones I had studied that I could scarcely find any common ground between them. This world was populated by writers of original paperback genre fiction. Since then, I have become a citizen of that society as a writer, publisher and literary agent. I have come to know and respect, admire and even love this world and its denizens and have had the privilege of attending the birth of works now regarded as masterpieces of their genres.

The lives of professional genre writers differ in many significant ways from those of their more literary brothers and sisters, and indeed from the romantic image so many people have of the way writers are supposed to live. They are, for example, extremely businesslike, or at least extremely concerned with the business of writing. They study the provisions of their publishing contracts carefully and actively consult with their agents, professional organizations or the Authors Guild when negotiating with publishers. They know the market value of their work before they sell it, sometimes within $500 or $1,000, and in fact many of them sell their stories before they write them.

They approach the work at hand in a disciplined and businesslike fashion. Because genre book lines have specific word-length requirements in order to fit them into the publishers' rigid price and marketing structures, writers have to design their manuscripts to meet those lengths and to pace the development and dramatic flow of their books so that all is resolved within the 60.000, 75,000 or 100,000 words required by contract.

This day-to-day grind with its little pleasures, epiphanies, and triumphs may not be as romantic as the Big Bang variety of inspiration we usually associate with art, but it does enable professional writers to get their work done no matter how ill, rotten, depressed, exhausted, or bereft of spirit they may feel on any given day: "You sit down at your desk and turn it on," they will tell you, "and out it comes." Writer's block is therefore seldom a problem for professional authors, and besides, it’s a luxury they cannot afford. These writers know pretty much to the word how much they can produce daily before growing fatigued - two thousand words, twenty manuscript pages, three chapters of work that is consistently good, often good enough to be acceptable in a single draft.

They can therefore predict almost to the day when they will be turning their manuscripts in to their publishers. This is critically important in order for the author to project income flow. It is equally important for the publisher to be able to count on reliable production in order to schedule books far in advance with relative confidence. Because covers and monthly catalogues are produced by paperback publishers before manuscripts are actually in hand and sales people solicit orders months before publication, the failure of an author to deliver a book on schedule is a nightmare that haunts editors. Reliability therefore becomes the prime virtue of professional writers.

Mutual Respect

Furthermore, from the aspect of the writing craft itself, there are many extremely important lessons for literary authors to learn from their genre comrades in arms. Although serious writers tend to reject formula plotting, for instance, they sooner or later realize that if they wish to reach any kind of audience at all, they will have to construct some sort of formula structure for their works. When they do realize it, they have but to pick up a trove of popular literature to discover a treasury of skillfully fashioned works to teach them about creating sympathetic heroes and heroines, daunting conflicts and antagonists, masterful pacing, and the building of dramatic tension to a thrilling climax and a satisfying ending.

And there is more: skill, reliability, attention to the business aspects of the writer's trade, pride and professionalism, a healthy respect for publishers and the vast audiences they represent - these are among the lessons waiting to be learned by those on the other side of the gulf that separates the two worlds. And these are the values and virtues we may be losing with the demise of mass market paperbacks and the alienation of their authors.

It is vital for the writing establishment to realize that literature is far more than a ladder with junk at the bottom and art at the top. Rather, it is an ecosystem in which the esoteric and the popular commingle, fertilize one another, and interdepend. Above all, serious writers stand to discover that they by no means have a monopoly on integrity. And because the integrity of all writers is now in jeopardy, it is incumbent on those of both worlds to talk to one another, listen to one another, read one another and, above all, respect one another.

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This article is adapted and updated from a piece written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field and reprinted in the Winter 1992 issue of the Writers Guild Bulletin. (Thanks Wikipedia for the refresher on penny dreadfuls.)

Richard Curtis's books on publishing are available at Open Road https://openroadmedia.com/search-results/books/Richard%20Curtis