I found myself falling through a blog hole over at Kristine Katheryn Rusch’s blog yesterday, going back and reading earlier posts she kept referencing. Along the way, I discovered a three-paragraph section that was immediately snagged for my thesis:
Then there were the series that I had to abandon because of the changes in publishing. In the 1980s and early 1990s, book publishers loved series. More than that, they loved poaching series from another publisher. Publisher A couldn’t make your series work? Publisher B was happy to snatch up the next book—mid-series—and prove to Publisher A how stupid their marketing department was.
But with the collapse of the distribution system in the late 1990s, the consolidation of publishing houses, and the layoff of countless employees, suddenly this poaching practice stopped. A series wasn’t doing as well as it could for Publisher A? Well, then no other publisher would touch it. A series was doing passably well for Publisher A? Then no other publisher would want it mid-book, because they’d have to grow the series—and that wasn’t a guaranteed bestseller.
I had one series die in that mess, but I saw the warning signs on the wall, so I wrapped up as quickly as I could. I sold three other series in that time period, and they continued for years—into the new century, when a new problem struck with two of those series: they weren’t growing fast enough.
The Business Rusch: Popcorn Kittens. Kristine Kathryn Rusch (2011)
There’s a lot writing about the shift towards series as a publishing strategy in light of technological change, but this is the first that’s really shown the movement back-and-forth.
The interesting thing here is not necessarily what I’ve discovered, but how I discovered it: I stumbled over this section through a process that was at least partly procrastination rather than productive work. Which is something that I’ve been thinking about ever since I put up the post about bookstores on Monday–the internet is great at delivering things we want, but not so good at the serendipitous find.
There is a great pleasure in browsing bookstores, just as there used to be great pleasure in browsing DVD racks and music stores. You don’t always find the thing you’re looking for, but you’ll occasionally trip over something unexpected at exactly the right time.
