With this post, I'm launching a series of musings on what I'd change about the book publishing industry if given a magic wand. The first thing?

No Roadblocks to Publishing in New Categories

This one is somewhat difficult to explain, but important to understand when it comes to a publisher's ability to innovate or try new things. First, it requires an overview of how books are sold to chain bookstores.

How Publishers Sell Books to Chain Bookstores

1. A publisher's sales staff (or its distributor) calls directly on buyers for Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc. These meetings happen regularly throughout the year.
2. Chain bookstore buyers are divided into categories. For example, there is one buyer for fiction at Barnes & Noble, Sessalee Hensley. She decides how many copies Barnes & Noble will buy of any particular fiction title. (To understand this fully, I highly recommend reading "This Buyer of Fiction Has Real Clout" in the Wall Street Journal.)
3. Publishers' salespeople meet with one buyer at a time (that is, salespeople don't have an audience with all the buyers at once).
4. To meet with a buyer, a publisher needs to be releasing a certain number of titles each season to merit the sit-down. This number is around 4-6 titles.
5. If this threshold is not met, then the publisher is forced to do a "drop off," where sales materials are dropped off in the buyer's mailbox. As you might imagine, this is a terrible way to sell a book; it often results in very low buys or passes (when a store decides not to stock a book at all). The situation becomes even more challenging when a publisher does not have an established relationship with a particular buyer or does not have a reputation in the category.

I hope you see where this is going.

If an editor wants to acquire a fabulous book in a category that the publisher isn't yet known for (or doesn't have a buyer relationship for), then the project has almost no chance of getting off the ground. The sales team is not interested in what becomes, in many cases, mission impossible.

The editor has two choices:

1. Build a new program around a category that has 4-6 titles per season associated with it.
   
2. Stick to the established categories.

Even if salespeople said "yes" to off-category projects, and took on the challenge, it wouldn't necessarily be doing the editor (or author) a favor. It could ultimately lead to an orphaned book that has poor placement in stores and little marketing/promotion support from the publisher.

This is a problem somewhat peculiar to my publishing house (F+W), since we're a special-interest company that doesn't really publish books for a general audience (unless you count our Adams division, but don't ask me to explain why some divisions of F+W can publish in any category and others can't). At large New York houses, they publish in nearly every category in the bookstore, so it becomes a non-issue.