A Study in Scarlett

An editor in a prominent New York publishing house told me a little story recently about a wonderful book that she will not be publishing. She had failed to sell her firm on the potential of the book, but oddly neither its literary merit nor its commercial promise were in question. The book was clearly a standout, one of a kind.

Alas, that was just the trouble with it. “We’re not interested in one-of-a-kind books,” the head of the house said, closing the books on that particular book. It wasn’t enough, he said, that the book would sell. It had to be the father of other books that would continue to sell.

What is the opposite of a one-of-a-kind book? Well, obviously a two-, three-, four- or more-of-a-kind book; or, if you will, a book with sequel potential. “Gone With the Wind,” first published in 1936, has been until now a one-of-a-kind book, the ultimately mysterious Margaret Mitchell’s ultimately inexplicable only book. But now “Gone With the Wind,” which has sold 25 million copies and is still in print, has become a two-of-a-kind book. “Scarlett,” its sequel, by Alexandra Ripley, has just appeared and is reviewed today on Page 2.

Sequels can be fun simply because the familiar can be fun. Every Super Bowl is a sequel to every preceding Super Bowl, to a point well past the average fan’s ability to read Roman numerals. Every Christmas is the ghost of every Christmas past. The late Louis L’Amour and the late Georges Simenon wrote novel after novel, whose appeal, as year followed year, was quite obviously not their novelty. The millions of readers who loved those books loved them not because each was so different but because each was so enjoyably the same.

So it might have been for “Gone With the Wind,” which clearly could have gone on forever like a Civil War soap opera had Mitchell been L’Amour or Simenon. But she wasn’t. Her out-of-nowhere success gave rise to literally hundreds of novels, all written to the same formula: beleaguered woman + headstrong man + big old house. But those books were imitations, not sequels: Neither Mitchell herself, who took badly to fame, nor the heirs to her copyright chose to exploit her matchless sequel-potential.

Now they have, and no surprise, for if sequels are fun for the reader, they are much more fun for the publisher. Georges Simenon was once described to me by a Harcourt Brace Jovanovich executive as “instant backlist.” Backlist is the term publishers apply to books published long ago but still in print and still selling steadily to a substantial, if not huge, audience. Simenon could produce, every year, an Inspector Maigret novel that would sell at just that happy, predictable rate--and that would do so without much in the way of advertising or promotion. Not technically sequels, the books in Simenon’s long-running series were sequels in their bottom-line predictability. They were the antithesis of the one-of-a-kind book, and HBJ (not to single any one publisher out) would cheerfully have traded a herd of unicorns, each unique, for one more cash cow like Georges. The question now is whether just such a trade-off may have become imaginable.

The commercial logic of the sequel and the quasi-sequel may be a little clearer if presented via a comparison to the entertainment industry, whose fabulous costs of origination are known to all. Friend, you are a theatrical producer’s dream come true if you have attended “The Phantom of the Opera” 12 times instead of attending 12 plays one time each, thus requiring the poor producer to incur the costs of mounting 11 extra productions just to keep you coming.

Book publishing has always seemed to be different. The lower initial costs of each book have meant that though the L’Amours and Simenons were always welcome, new books without their kind of sequel-potential have had a relatively easy time making it into distribution. The origination costs of even the most expensive book are tiny in comparison with those of a low-budget movie, and as a result book publishing, year in and year out, has continued to bubble with small publishers, tiny publishers, and ultra-tiny self-publishers who make it--maybe not big, but they do make it--with that one book that “grows legs” and dances off with a market no one knew was just aching to be asked. The sums that change hands may be small, but very many of these books are true commercial ventures. They aren’t subsidized. They pay their way.

Sustained small-scale book publishing may be another matter; yet it does seem that the relatively low front-end costs of book publishing have made the book-publishing segment of our cultural economy an unrecognized bulwark against simplification, amnesia and impoverishment in the culture as a whole. This is by no means to say that books are always “more serious” than other cultural products, much less “more uplifting” or some such claptrap. Books represent variety at the lower as well as at the upper extreme, and it is variety we are talking about.

Unfortunately, one man’s bulwark against cultural simplification is another man’s obstacle to rationalization. “Publishing is different,” proudly eccentric editors and publishers used to like to boast; “Imagine a General Motors producing not five or six but five or six hundred new models each year!” The rejoinder, of course, is: “No, let’s reverse that and imagine, instead, a publishing house launching not five or six hundred but just five or six new titles each year--and selling the same aggregate number of copies.”

“It can’t be done!” the veterans cry. True, but it can be dreamed, and in dreams begin irresponsibilities. As a shrinkage on the ratio of 500 to 5, it surely cannot be done; but to some still-to-be-determined degree, it can be attempted. The attempt will live in a host of individual decisions and alternate strategies.

Not encouraging the one-of-a-kind book is mere reactive rationalization. Proactive rationalization might entail locking in, even at high initial cost, long-term rights to a few top-selling authors and then investing enough to turn their personal names or key titles into brand names. Is all the work in every best seller the work of the author alone? Maybe not, but once the “line” is established, does it matter? The premise of “Scarlett” is that it does not. When the initial, 50-year- copyright expired in 1986, Alexandra Ripley’s sequel was commissioned partly so that the heirs could lock up the rights to the “Gone With the Wind” characters for another 25 years, the term of the copyright renewal. Between now and 2016, there will be time for the penning of many a further adventure, and Ripley herself has predicted further sequels by other writers. If assistants or ghosts eventually do some of the work, the product may continue to sell, just as a smartly edited newspaper continues to sell despite a changing staff of writers. (Rumors circulate that Ripley has been very aggressively edited.)

What counts most is weaning the print-entertainment market away from its economically irrational taste for novelty. The rationalization of book publishing requires encouraging readers to behave like “Rocky Horror Show” freaks, not like Book-of-the-Month Club members. Call it the strategy of more bucks for the bang.

Because a taste for knowledge is by definition not a taste for more of the same, the pressure toward rationalization in book publishing becomes a pressure away from information and toward entertainment, as it already so visibly is in television. In book publishing, the analogous development would be the victory of entertainment and “service” publishing (how to prepare your income tax return, how to care for your cat) within the bookstores, and the removal of serious nonfiction publishing to mail order and the university presses. In other words, homogenize the entertainment market, segment and micro-manage the information market.

But just as the decline of the network news has been seen as the loss of a kind of public space, so it could be for the broader and less carefully policed space occupied by those nonfiction books that are aimed not at any professional’s fellow professionals but at some man or woman’s fellow citizens and fellow human beings. We may see, in other words, a slow sorting-out process in American culture: What is offered for everybody will be entertainment and entertainment only, and then only at a level that excludes nobody; what is offered as knowledge, by contrast, will be offered, usually not for everybody but rather for professionals who will “consume” it as (and mostly at) work.

Entertainment will grow simpler and simpler, rationalized into fewer and fewer forms to reduce origination costs; everything, in effect, will be some kind of sequel. Information, by contrast, will grow more and more complex, rationalized in the opposite direction, into more and more sub-markets.

Only a genetic pessimist, I suspect, could conjure up such a depressing scenario from the publication of an innocent sequel to one of America’s best-loved books. A more optimistic, if still somewhat wintry, reaction might begin with the assertion that American culture is not yet, despite the hype, a world culture. We Americans may be, in the fine phrase of Neil Postman, “amusing ourselves to death,” but will the Japanese and the Germans follow us over that precipice? Perhaps not, and even at home, rationality may rebel against an excess of rationalization. A decline is not a collapse, after all. Perhaps, like Scarlett O’Hara, we should just worry about all that tomorrow and hope that such a tomorrow never comes. Still, with all due respect to Scarlett and to “Scarlett,” I find it impossible not to think about at least some of it today.