The Three Percent Problem. Chad W. Post
Switching over to bookstores, it’s worth pointing out that, unlike other parts of the world, America doesn’t have a fixed price policy. Stores can discount books however they’d like, which has resulted in a fiercely competitive market where Amazon.com undercuts brick-and-mortar stores, Costco sells books as a loss-leader, and traditional independents stores have a hell of a time staying in business. Although Amazon claims that they survive on a “long tail” model (i.e., the idea that single copy sales for an infinite amount of books is far greater than a huge amount of sales for a small amount of titles), most stores operate on the same principle as the big publishers: you make your money by selling a ton of copies of a few select titles. That’s what drives Barnes & Noble and their huge stacks of books, and is the reason why one additional percentage point discount (chains frequently get a 46% volume discount whereas independents get 45%) can lead to enormous profits.
Paul Slovak, the publisher of Viking Penguin, once mentioned that he believed that at any moment in time everyone in the country is reading the same twelve books. Obviously he’s exaggerating—a bit—but it sure seems that way. The books on display at a chain store in New York City are almost identical to the ones on display in Denver, or in Peoria. To explain why that’s the case is actually a bit more complicated than it might first appear.
What it comes down to is which books the big presses have decided to really push. It’s almost like a horse race—you need a winner to keep betting, you have a bunch of horses in your stable, and you put all your cash on the ones you think will “break-thru.” These are the books that the houses advertise all over the country, that they push hard to media outlets, and for which they decide to do extensive author tours. They also use a lot of co-op money to promote these books. Co-op money is cash that a publisher gives to a bookstore to display and promote its books. For example, the front tables at the chain stores are paid for, as are the end caps, as are other special displays.
With these books on display, and heavily discounted, throughout the country, and online, with big, trustworthy publishers spending lots of time and money promoting these particular titles, it’s no surprise that these become the books that everyone is reading.
Stage Two:
Translations, Economic Censorship, and Independent Presses
So where do translations fit into this? Well, basically they don’t. The famous translator Esther Allen once turned me on to the term “economic censorship” to help explain the financial reasons for why big publishers shy away from doing books in translation.
First off, in deciding to do a translation, a publisher is assuming the cost of paying a translator in addition to all normal expenses.
The current going rate for a translation is $125/1000 words, so, for a 70,000 word novel, a translator should get paid $8,750. That’s not a huge amount—especially compared to Dewey’s $1.25 million—and frequently at least part of this is offset by grants from foreign governments. But on a profit and loss statement, it is an additional cost that doesn’t exist for books originally written in English.
Still, that doesn’t explain why big publishers shy away from translations. They have the money to spend, and if they thought a book would sell hundreds of thousands of copies, $10,000 is really just pocket change. But how many translations sell hundreds of thousands of copies? Answer: almost none. Over the past week, in early November 2008, articles have appeared in both the New York Times Book Review and the Wall Street Journal pointing out just how few translations make the best seller lists. In fact, Roberto Bolaño—currently the hottest author in translation, considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time, and the one foreign author everyone seems to be talking about—has yet to crack the Times Best Seller list.
To be quite frank, with the exception of certain breakouts like Bolaño, Per Petterson, and Carlos Ruiz Zafon (whose books aren’t of the same caliber as the first two), literary fiction in translation sells poorly in the States. I’ve heard that even Saramago was selling in the low thousands (or high hundreds) before winning the Nobel Prize. It’s in no way unusual for a literary translation to sell in the 2,000-copy range. And publishers who sell 4-5,000 copies of a translation feel like they did an excellent job.
Dismal sales figures, along with the additional cost of translation helps make foreign books unappealing to corporate publishers. Sure, you can get the rights on a dime (most advances for literary translations are under $10,000), and you have an almost unlimited number of authors to choose from (rarely do foreign books go to auction), but if you’re only spending a few thousand dollars, your sales and marketing department isn’t going to do much to help this book find its audience. They have to spend their time and energy on the million-dollar advance books—the ones that really matter.
Sales, marketing, and publicity departments at big presses generally treat literary translations as redheaded stepchildren that they have to live with, but really don’t love. Advance sales to bookstores are paltry, not much effort goes into getting coverage for these books, and as a result, sales are wretched, the publisher loses $15-$20,000 on the book, and, in a world where profits have to keep increasing year in and out, the desire to publish more works in translation is quashed. Going back to the horse race metaphor, sure, occasionally a Bolaño comes along and a publisher can cash in, but most translated titles are like a horse with a bum leg. It’s much more profitable to get world rights to a mediocre American author and sell rights to a couple dozen countries. Now that’s a horse that can “win” in a major, global way.
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Obviously there’s more that goes into the resistance of commercial publishers to translations—such as the fact that most editors are monolingual, that without investing a lot of time in international literature it’s hard to know which titles and authors are the most important, that there aren’t as many agents for international works as for American and British writers, that only select editors attend the Frankfurt book fair (it’s all about selling, not buying)—but it all adds up to a situation in which America is “too isolated, too insular,” where we “don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” which is how Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, recently categorized it.
Prejudices, financial losses, and bum legs aside, a number of translations are published in the U.S. every year. In January 2008, I started keeping track of all original translations of fiction and poetry published or released in America for the year. (In part because nobody else was. Bowker—the company that keeps track of all statistics about American publishing eliminated “translation” as a category years ago.) I didn’t count children’s books, or graphic novels, or retranslations of classics, or paperback versions of previously published titles. Instead, I focused on works of adult fiction and poetry that had never before been published in English.
According to my records, all of 340 translations were published in 2008. Of those translations, 269 are works of fiction, 71 of poetry. More relevant to this presentation, the six big houses—Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, HarperCollins, Random House, and Simon & Schuster—and all their various subsidiaries, published a total of 69 works in translation, or 20% of the total. Most of these 69 books are from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (10), Penguin (9), FSG (9), Knopf (8), and HarperCollins (6), five of the one hundred and thirty presses and imprints that published a translation this year.
In the same way that poetry has fallen to the shoulders of the independent press, approx. 80% of all works of literary translation are now being published by independent, nonprofit, and university presses, which generally don’t operate on the “big advance-big return” model described above.
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There are a few key differences between the commercial houses and the independents that are worth pointing out aside from the discrepancy in the number of employees and the amount of money each publisher tends to have.
Independents rarely do their own distribution. The lion’s share is distributed by a handful of companies: Independent Publishers Group, Consortium, Publishers Group West, and Perseus. And to complicate things (more on this in a minute), Consortium and PGW are both owned