In the glory days, publishers could expect to earn a good portion of the advance they paid to the author back on serial rights deals (selling an extract to a newspaper or magazine). I happen to know of at least one tabloid serial rights deal where the publishers recovered over half the total advance they paid the author. Lucky publishers made a huge portion of their investment in the book back before a single copy hit the shelves. This made for happy finance directors, happy publicity directors (as it generated ‘buzz’) and happy sales directors. But in the last 5 years or so, print journalism has really suffered. Even before the recession, circulation figures were dropping off (do you remember the rumours that the Observer was shutting up shop?) and even Murdoch is still grappling with how to compete online with the phenomenally vast BBC website. Budgets were cut and serialization deals nearly disappeared.
Serialization today falls in to two main categories – the lovely literary teasers and the exposés . Literary teasers are few and far between – there are only a handful of publications willing to blow their budget in something so uncommercial. Thankfully we still have the Guardian Books Supplement and the TLS. In a short extract the writer draws the reader masterfully into the heart of their work to the point where the reader is ordering the book on Amazon as soon as they put the newspaper down.
The other type of ‘exposé’ serial is perfect for a tabloid readership. Whether it’s juicy snippets from a political memoir or a footballer ‘revealing all’ the content is so harmonious with the rest of the paper’s pages, the marriage is obvious. So is it so surprising that the Daily Express Senior Feature Writer, Jane Warren, is in the Bookseller today decrying to the publishing world she is “actively looking to bid for first [serial] rights”? Unsurprisingly she is interested in celebrity biography and autobiography. But, she’s also looking for history titles! Having dug a little deeper, I’ve found that the average age of a Daily Express reader is 59 so that may explain that one. With a daily readership of over 1.6 million publishers will once again have access to the homes and leisure time of the middle-market masses.
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