From today's article in The Guardian,(where NBA means Net Book Agreement and nothing to do with basketball, for our American cousins)

But surely the NBA was a constraint on free trade that meant we had to pay artificially inflated prices for books? One reason for the NBA's existence given by the Restrictive Practices Court, when it analysed the agreement in 1962 was that it enabled publishers to subsidise the printing of the works of important but less popular authors by using money from bestsellers. Today, the worry is that the demise of the NBA has meant there is no new generation of British literary talent to follow the likes of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan.

"There's been a slow bonfire of literary authors in the last 18 months," says Hamilton. "Publishers are sending out to pasture established literary novelists because they realise they aren't going to be sold by the chains. The complaint now from publishers is that most of their quality books hardly get a look in at all. In the past, sales for many literary novels were never very high, but now publishers are cutting down on their lists in desperation."

Hamilton cites the example of the crime novelist Ian Rankin: "Rankin was selling nothing at all for the first few novels he wrote, but publishers knew he would take off and so they kept with him. The opportunity isn't there to do that any more because sales are so low that you lose too much money initially, even if you make money later. That old, very successful business model doesn't make sense any more. Thanks to the prevailing way in which books are sold there would be no new Rankin."

Like I said...

Only - I would draw your attention to this notion of a bonfire of 'literary authors'. Actually, I reckon we stand more chance of seeing another Ian Rankin than we do another Martin Amis.

Genre readers (and agents, and editors) are more dedicated, more loyal and more inclined to still be looking for new authors, with their choices not so driven by discounts, because they're not so prevalent on our shelves - that's crime, SF&F and to some extent, romance. And we in SF&F have the convention circuit which is an invaluable resource unparalled in other genres.

So all of you fantasy fans out there - buying and reading books and organising events - are doing just as much as we writerly types to keep our genre vibrant and healthy. Thanks, one and all.

Oh, and if anyone's really interested in the full judgement on the NBA, from the Restrictive Practices Court in 1962, I happen to have a copy of it, thanks to the good offices of slovobooks. It's called 'Books are Different' and makes for fascinating reading.