Tom Clancy has a new book out this week, but I won't be buying it. That wasn't always the case.
The first Tom Clancy book I ever read was his first published novel, Hunt for Red October. It was a great book. The story was good. The writing was fast-paced and crisp. The technical details were so well researched that some folks wondered if Clancy had access to classified information.
I was so impressed that I bought Clancy's next book as soon as it came out, breaking my usual rule not to buy any book until it comes out in paperback. Red Storm Rising wasn't as good as Clancy's first novel, but it was still a good read.
For a while I bought the novels one after the other. They all featured Jack Ryan, the doubt-free hero of Hunt for Red October. But the novels seemed to be going downhill.
The plot twists got more and more outlandish until they would have been enough to make Charles Dickens blush. I began to wonder about some of the technical details. The writing slowed down and the page count went up, up, up.
I really missed the great storytelling and technical detail of Hunt for Red October. That's what I was looking for. I wasn't finding it, so I quit reading Clancy's books.
Then one day I was in an airport between planes when I noticed Clancy's name on a smaller book. "Wow," I thought, "this might be good." I paid for the book, ran for my flight, and settled in for a good read. But after going only a few pages, I knew something was wrong.
The plot was lame. The writing wasn't bad, but it wasn't good, either. And the technical details didn't seem accurate. I quit reading and stared down at the book on my lap. "Clancy must be losing it," I thought. Then I looked at the cover again.
Clancy's name was there all right. But it was above the title and nothing on the cover or the title page indicated that he'd actually written the book. He hadn't. How could that happen?
I figure that Clancy was sitting out on his deck one day trying to figure out how to squeeze another couple of million out of his book writing. Suddenly he had a brainstorm.
"By golly," he must have said, leaping to his feet, "I don't have to write everything myself. Ford doesn't make his own cars. Oscar Meyer doesn't make his own sausages. Why, I can dream up book ideas and then get some other folks to do the actual writing."
And as he wished it, so it became. The Op-Center series is an example.
The Op-Center series idea was dreamed up by Clancy and Steve Pieczenik. Pieczenik co-authors the books with writer Jeff Rovin. Clancy owns a 25 percent stake in the series. There are two other series as well: Power Plays and Net Force.
The publishers love it. After all, a book with Tom Clancy's name on the cover is as close to a sure thing as you can get in publishing. And publishers need as many sure things as they can get.
After World War II, Americans started moving to the suburbs and shopping at malls. The bookstores that appeared in those malls had to make money despite high mall rents.
At the same time the rich book lovers who'd owned the publishing companies began selling them off to entertainment conglomerates who wanted increasing profits to drive increasing share prices. The Keepers of the Publishing Flame and their seat-of-the-pants methods gave way to the MBAs and their profit calculations.
The MBAs started borrowing techniques from other industries, selling books like they were lasagna or lawn furniture. Blockbuster books and blockbuster authors were part of their answer to building profit and keeping shareholders, if not readers, happy.
Tom Clancy is one of a handful of authors who account for a staggering percentage of the last decade's best sellers. And he's just about the best there is at working the system. He's not limiting himself to books, either.
Just like with Op-Center and its siblings, Clancy comes up with the ideas for video games. He also sets some pretty strict rules for developers to follow. He owns part of the company, Red Storm Entertainment, that produces games like Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, and Rainbow Six. So what's next for Tom Clancy?
I'm betting that it's self-publishing on a scale so vast it rivals the building plans of the Pharos. Tom Clancy doesn't really need a traditional publisher.
He has enough money. He sees his core competency as plotting. He can simply continue to develop plots and concepts for all kinds of products and outsource the editing and printing and marketing of his books and the development and marketing of other products.
I'm betting that's what he'll do and if I'm right it will blaze a trail that other blockbuster authors will follow. But Clancy is going to have to watch one thing. He's going have to make sure that the quality of all those books and other products is really good, maybe as good as Hunt for Red October almost twenty years ago.
That's just good, basic business. Clancy might have a great strategy, but he if can't keep developing products that deliver value it won't work very well. We'll all be waiting to see how this story comes out.
