This is really, really sad. If the peak years of the MMP was indeed the 60s through the 90s, that's of course right in my wheelhouse, having been born in the early 70s, and developed a reading addiction in the 80s as a teenager. I consumed dump truck loads of mass market paperbacks. I still prefer to buy them, honestly. And I still have tons of them. And despite the fact that they were designed to be "disposible", I have tons and tons of copies of books that were published over 40 years ago and which are still in pretty good shape other than a bit of yellowing. I have tons of fantasy books in mmp, some science fiction, tie-in fiction like D&D, Star Wars and even Aliens and Predator fiction that I still hold on to, and I even have a pretty nice collection of late 70s and early 80s published Choose Your Own Adventure books (which I need to get back to reading and reviewing after only getting through #11 earlier. I skipped #12 because I got rid of my copy years ago and haven't been interested in reacquiring that particular title, but I've been meaning to do #13 for at least two years now.) I've had a love affair with mass market paperbacks that goes back to nearly the beginning of my memory, or at least nearly the beginning of my ability to read "real" books.
However, I think that there's more to the story than Publishers Weekly can admit or even recognize. Like most other mediums of entertainment, books, and particularly mass market paperbacks, have been subject to the "corporate enslopification" plague. I have a lot of mass market paperbacks. I still buy them somewhat regularly. But I can't remember the last time I bought something that was "new." The closest thing is that at some point between five and ten years ago, I bought reprints of Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy in mass market paperback. I mostly buy on the used market, and mostly stuff that was published decades ago. There is extremely little being published today that I have any interest in, and even if something actually good were to come out, I'd be too wary to buy it, most likely, having been burned by publishers pushing diverse voices, or women's voices, or romance novels in fantasy or science fiction drag, etc.
Corporate mergers and strategies have also completely decimated the midlist of authors. Other than bestsellers, it's not worth it to publish smaller but profitable midlist authors anymore. The same thing happened to movies and TV; everything has to be a blockbuster, and more modestly budgeted and modestly profitable midlist movies hardly get made anymore. And if they do, they're woke anyway. Similar things happened to the music industry first, but of course, they found new distribution channels via Spotify, YouTube, etc. Curiously, sales of physical media for movies and music are rising, although for music, it's often vinyl. In fact, someone said recently (and I can't verify that it's true) that over 50% of people who buy vinyl don't even have a turntable. They're not necessarily buying it to listen to. Which to me is crazy. Vinyl becomes collectible merch rather than a source of actual music. So crazy.
RPGs and video games, on the other hand, have had a significant shift towards crowdfunding, indie-publishing, and bespoke products. Books had a migration, to some degree, to ebooks and audiobooks, although that's a dubious end state. I'm not sure what the entertainment industries can do to get themselves back on track, but bringing and end to corporate enslopification and giving customers what they actually want has to be at the heart of it. I wonder if we'd be talking about the death of the mass market paperback if we hadn't seen sales drop year over year for decades due to declining quality, and a huge fallout from the years of woke content driving customers away for years, if not literally for good. The failure of all of the entertainment industries is multifaceted. "Go woke, go broke" is part of it, but can't explain everything that's happening. Corporate slop is a huge part of it, but not the whole story. Ultimately, creators of quality entertainment products find a way to connect to an audience. Maybe the RPG industry is the harbinger, and stuff like ShadowDark which isn't exactly my cup of tea, but which I can recognize as a very legitimate hit, and the model of a bespoke, crowd-sourced product. It may not have the numbers of D&D, but it makes some pretty decent bank and has a pretty decent internet presence. And maybe that's what people should hope for rather than "the NYT Bestseller list."
No comments:
Post a Comment