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Dependable Losers. The major houses produce titles in the hundreds; their bosses can scarcely remember the authors' names, let alone find time to read their books. McGraw-Hill turned out 662 last year, Doubleday & Co. 650, Harper & Row 633, Prentice-Hall 449, Holt, Rinehart & Winston 345 and Random House 421. They all print text-and reference books, as well as children's books, which are dependable moneymakers. Their profitable textbook and paperback operations enable them to gamble on adult trade books—which as a rule lose money. Random House President Robert Bernstein estimates that 60% of adult trade books end up in the red, another 36% break even, and only 4% turn a decent profit.
Finding that 4% is like betting on a two-year-old maiden race. Two publishers turned down the manuscript of a Gilmanton, N.H., housewife named Grace Metalious before Publisher Julian Messner gambled $1,500 on it in 1950.
Total sales to date: 10 million copies, an alltime record for U.S. fiction. In 1945, a Random House editor read A Lion Is in the Streets, by Adria Langley. He rejected it, reporting that "40 pages of this magnolia-laden junk was all I could stand." Lion, published later by Whittlesey House, sold 250,000 copies. A more recent example is the history of Attorney Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment, a shotgun attack on the Warren Commission. "We commissioned him to write it," says Publisher Barney Rosset of Grove Press, which is known chiefly for its back list of classic and not-so-classic pornography. "But he kept stalling, so I finally said, 'If you don't deliver it on time, don't deliver it at all.' " Lane did not deliver. He took his book to the New American Library, which rejected it as uncommercial. It was finally published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, has been on the bestseller lists for 14 weeks.
Slow Route. Bestsellers are about as rare as the publisher's ability to pick them. Most trade books still get printed in runs of 5,000 copies or under, sell a few thousand copies over a period of three months, and then quietly die. The surplus is remaindered—sent back to the publisher, who is lucky to get 300 a copy from the remainder bookstores, which deal in such wrong guesses. Multiplied many times over, this is the true picture of the adult book business which, except for the appearance of the paperback, has not changed its ways appreciably in 50 years.
The process of bringing a book to market is still singularly old-fashioned and slow. Ten months, and often more, elapse before the accepted manuscript arrives, printed and bound, on the bookstore shelf. Delays menace every step of the route; there is no quick way, for instance, to edit a lengthy manuscript and to check and recheck the galley proofs for printer's errors. A book must wait its turn at hard-pressed printing plants, like Kingsport Press in Tennessee, one of the largest in the U.S. The sheer bulk of books retards their progress; jobbers have only so much storage, and can be poky about emptying their warehouses to make room for new consignments. To meet some topical demand, however, a paperback