The Midlist Crisis
By Mike Swaine
You're waiting for your plane to board and, thinking you might just pick up something to read on the flight, you enter the airport gift shop. Steering around the central counter with its displays of impulse items (you're so often seized by the impulse to buy 25 cents worth of candy or aspirin for six bucks), you arrive at the back wall, where the dozen best-selling paperbacks are arrayed across the top one hundred and eight racks. Below these, one rack per title, are the syndicate-written romance novels and fantasy series and movie novelizations. Blockbusters above, shlock below. And perhaps you are inspired to wonder why it is, exactly, that Tom Clancy's latest thriller requires the entire top tier of racks. Are the clerks really so lazy they can't refill a rack when it empties? Maybe this is someone's way of telling you how much choice you have in reading matter today. You can have Tom Clancy or Tom Clancy or Tom Clancy, or Michael Crichton or Michael Crichton or Michael Crichton, or some dreck cranked out by monkeys.
The airport gift shops are just the vanguard of this phenomenon. Chain bookstores that only stock bestsellers and cheap books are crowding out the small bookstores that carry a broad diversity of midlist books. Small publishers are being bought by big publishing corporations whose stockholders are perfectly happy to maximize profits at the expense of the midlist books.
Midlist books, I should explain, sell reasonably well but never become bestsellers. The midlist is not profitable for the publishers and booksellers, but the midlist is where most professional authors live.
