Publishing Memories
I just watched a little special on PBS about Erma Bombeck. I had completely forgotten about her and I used to read her newspaper column, regularly.
When I left Chicago in 1975, returning to my home planet of Fort Worth, Texas, I went to work for Trinity News Company in Fort Worth, the local book and magazine wholesaler. TNC also owned more than 30 bookstores. I was assistant buyer overall, and did a lot of the real buying for the bookstores.
Every time a new Bombeck book came out it went on the Trinity News Best Seller list. This is an important distinction, the Trinity list was for the mass market stores, the chains—grocery, drug, and convenience, the big boys, and Erma was usually number one. We made that decision.
In those days—and today, for that matter—you couldn’t wait for a book to come out and see how it sold—you had to decide three months in advance—when you pre-bought the books—I was in the position of determining the best sellers. And Erma was reliably number one. I still remember that her paperback publisher was Fawcett books and we kept all of her titles in stock for the bookstores, all of the time.
We also did redistributions of her backlist titles to the mass market accounts. They were always guaranteed to sell well.
I don’t suppose I was the typical Bombeck reader. She wrote about being a housewife and a mother, of which I was neither, not even the right sex. But she wrote well. She was funny. And she also wrote movingly about equal rights for women, which in those days, was still not a sure thing—yeah right, like it is today!
Watching the 30 minute Bombeck special made me a little teary-eyed. I’m emotional anyway, but Erma brought back many, many memories. And I realized I was not tearing up because I missed Erma, but because that time in my life is gone and it will never come back. It was a good time in that it was a simpler time. The population was smaller, societal stresses, I think, were less—at least for white, middle class Americans—and the book business was simpler, too.
In those days before video games and cable TV, a best seller could be reliably depended upon to sell multiple millions of copies. The publishers were often individuals or families like the Pine family that owned Popular Library. The publishing houses were without the strain of having to not only make a profit, but to make a big profit.
Book publishers could take a chance in their mid-list on new authors. Promising writers could be brought along. Today, if the first book bombs it is bye-bye writer.
I could take a chance with my best seller list. Every month I could put at least one stretch, one “Wouldn’t it be nice if this title hit it big,” on my list. My proudest best seller moment concerned the book Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
Being an SF fan, I had bought and read the book in hard cover and knew it was a terrific book with everything necessary to make it a success in the mass market. Then the National Sales Manager for Fawcett Books came around to our agency and showed me the great foil cover on the book (Foil was something new in those days, and this cover was all foil.). I made it a best seller. In fact, the sales manager called into the home office and told them, and they resolicited nation-wide and I think—Lucifer’s Hammer sold over 2 million copies in its initial run.
Today everything is run off of the national lists like the New York Times, and it doesn’t matter if your audience is men, women, or prosimians, the list remains the same.
So, thank you Erma, thank you for the good times reading what you wrote and thank you for the memories of those days that you invoked.
