Jim Baen's Universe

Notes From the Buffer Zone

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The New Golden Age

Written by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I was born in 1960, seven months before John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address that “a torch has been passed to a new generation.” The new generation he spoke of was my parents’ generation, the group that Tom Brokaw called the Greatest Generation for their service in World War II. Kennedy was the first president elected from that generation, just like Barack Obama is the first president elected from mine.

The 1960s and 70s seem like the very distant past now. When some History Channel documentary talks about that time period, it shows grainy footage—sometimes in color, sometimes in black and white—of women wearing dresses with wide knee-length skirts and men in skinny black suits with even skinner black ties. The cars were big, the houses small. Suburbia was on the rise; cities were considered dangerous—so much so that when we traveled from Northern Wisconsin to see my brother in Indiana, my father drove out of his way to avoid Chicago.

But that period in book publishing—from about 1962 to the mid-1990s was remarkably stable. The distribution system wars (yes, they were wars) had ended. The paperback established a solid foothold among middle and working class readers. The effects of the GI Bill had caused reading to boom among the newly college educated. That new group of college-educated readers were older war veterans, who then passed the love of reading onto their children who had become known as the Baby Boomers.

Children’s books, as a category, grew, as did Young Adult books. Both categories were still hounded by the 1920s view of children’s publishing, which was that books had to be good and educational for the child, but the success of books like Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and Judy Blume’s books (Forever in particular) changed much of that as well.

The pulp magazines had died in the distribution wars of the 1950s, and the fiction magazines that hung on did so at smaller numbers than they had had before. Experiments to raise circulation often failed. As late as 1990, we at Pulphouse Publishing were told by Those In The Know that we couldn’t publish a full-size fiction magazine because Analog had tried it in the early 1960s and it had failed.

A lot of conventional wisdom dated from that relatively stable period. When I was a kid, it was still possible to read every science fiction book published in a year, so everyone had the same working knowledge of the same field. Romance was limited to Harlequin and Mills & Boon, which published either nurse romances or Barbara Cartland novels (all of which I read when spending summers with my aunt and uncle—although those books had been banished to the front porch because they weren’t “good enough” to sit on the shelf with the hardcovers).

The bestsellers were consensus books, chosen often by the myriad of reviewers working in the mainstream part of the field. In those days, The New York Times Book Review had a lot more cachet than it does now. My father, a die-hard reader, subscribed to three different review publications so that he would know what to buy each week. In addition, he joined the Book of the Month club to get his reading fix cheaper.

Books were ordered by guess and by golly. No one had computerized sales tracking. Local knowledge became essential. Books that sold well in Alabama might not sell well at all in California. Distribution companies were regional. An author could be a bestseller in Poughkeepsie and completely unknown in Dallas.

As the Baby Boomers grew up and had their own children, they bought more children’s books. More and more people read. Publishing lamented its annual 3-4% growth, which it maintained year in and year out. While most industries have double-digit growth years, many of them also have double-digit loss years. Publishing continued to expand—so much so that by the time I published my first novel in 1991, it was no longer possible to read every single novel published in the science fiction genre, let alone the mystery genre or the romance genre, which had expanded well past Harlequin and Mills & Boon to become the largest publishing category.

Publishing was entering a period of change in the 1990s, only we didn’t realize it. The rise of the mall stores—Waldenbooks and B. Dalton Booksellers—pushed some independents out of business. Then the superstores actively worked to drive independents out of their neighborhoods. Due to a series of circumstances too complicated to explain here, the book distribution network went from hundreds of regional companies to a handful of national ones (all in the space of about two years). Suddenly, to be a bestseller, a book had to sell well in both Poughkeepsie and Dallas. The independent bookstores and the regional distributors had disappeared, so no one kept track of what was doing well in Iowa, as opposed to what was doing well in New York.

Because publishing had been stable for so long, the people who ran the business expected these changes to become the new status quo. What they didn’t realize was that the bigger changes were still to come.

When I came into publishing fiction in the late 1980s and early 1990s, everyone lamented the changes. The short fiction magazines hadn’t upped their pay rates since the 1950s, so adjusting for inflation, writers had taken a serious pay decrease. The field had come down to only a few short fiction magazines, and those were considered dinosaurs by Those In The Know. In fact, I had many conversations as I became editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction about the imminent demise of the short fiction markets—which was, I thought, a looming tragedy, since I believed then (and do now) that science fiction’s heart lies in short fiction.

And as for the books, the short shelf life and the impossibility of sustaining a backlist (thanks to the small mall stores and the decline of the independents) caused many writers to implode. Their careers went away. Some rebounded by changing their names or changing genres. But those of us who started publishing