We are having a good week. The December 2nd New York Times bestseller list has Terry Goodkind’s Confessor in the #2 fiction spot. Our Halo: Contact Harvest by Joseph Staten is #5 on the trade paperback bestseller list, and then something I don’t believe has happened before at Tor—matching elevens—our movie tie-in editions of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend are in the #11 position on both the mass market and the trade bestseller lists.

Trade paper has never done better for us. It’s been growing steadily for years and it’s certainly nice to see two of our books on nationally respected trade paperback bestseller lists in any one week, but I am worried about mass market. So much of mass market is impulse and impulse is so important to the creation of new readers. The person buying a book from a wire revolving rack in a drugstore as he waits for a prescription, the person who buys a book from an attractive in-line display in a supermarket, in a shop in the hotel lobby, or at a newsstand in an airport or a train station is not necessarily a committed and regular reader. But numerous surveys have shown that if you please them often enough in impulse situations a meaningful number will be converted. These impulse sales are an important part of our outreach and we need to be sure there is a selection which will tempt that consumer. Nielsen surveys have shown science fiction and fantasy as high as 12.4% of fiction sales. If no science fiction is displayed a significant number of potential customers may not be tempted, the same is true of many other categories and in each case new readers will be lost.

Consolidation in the wholesale market has meant the closing of over 80% of our local, independent wholesalers over the last ten years. This has resulted in the loss of countless years of driver salesman experience. Most of the accounts they serviced used UPC scanning which showed only that a book had been sold at a given price. It did not record title or author and therefore did not provide title information by retailer which would allow a national wholesaler to make an informed delivery. The EAN scanning, coming into use, will provide such title information. But since the numbers we get will be based on these relatively uninformed distributions, corrections will take time—and where a category has not been distributed, we are back to square one. There is also the question of in-store service since the wholesalers who remain were forced by the large retailers to give up much of the margin which paid for that service.

The bookstore does a good job with the committed reader, but if we are going to grow the reading base we must reach out. It’s an important problem for those who care about an informed public, a reading public. This is a time of particular difficulty for our merchandise sales group; they deal with it on a daily basis and deserve recognition and support. These problems can be solved but it will take time, creativity, and a lot of work.

While we can’t recreate the past, we need to work with our accounts to make sure the mass market format is supported so we can reach every interested reader.

Tom Doherty is the President and Publisher of Tor Books