[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by holymadness

fjtorres: Thank you for those figures. Do you happen to know more about why there was a massive explosion in published titles after 1950? I guess what I want to know is: how did American publishing transition from a relatively small (and perhaps more curated) industry to a mass market free-for-all? I also think that your observations about numbers need to be paired with those above them about taste-making. In an embarrassment of riches, promotion is king.

As I said, I strongly suspect it was paperback originals.
Check this:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/12247...americans-read

Toward the end of the 1940s, with so many new entrants in the booming paperback business, magazine and comic book publisher Fawcett Publications gave the industry a new idea to mock: paperback originals. Up to that point, paperback publishers had limited themselves to reprinting hardcover titles or publishing quick, timely original nonfiction such as the wartime bestseller What’s That Plane, a guide to identifying American and Japanese aircraft.

Fawcett was saddled with a distribution agreement that prevented it from publishing and distributing its own reprints of hardcover titles. Seeking to exploit a loophole, editor in chief Ralph Daigh announced that Fawcett would begin publishing original fiction in paperback form beginning in February 1950.

“Successful authors are not interested in original publishing at 25 cents,” Freeman Lewis, executive vice-president of Pocket Books said. Hardcover publisher Doubleday’s LeBaron R. Barker claimed that the concept could “undermine the whole structure of publishing.” Hardcover publishers, of course, had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. They were still receiving 50 percent of the royalties by selling reprint rights.

Fawcett silenced the skeptics by selling more than nine million copies within six months. Authors did the math, and writers of genre fiction—thrillers, Westerns, and romance especially—jumped at the opportunity to write paperback originals. Still, “serious” literary writers insisted on staying in the hardcover market for the prestige, and critics in turn declined to review paperback originals. Clearly, the stigma was still there.

Boldface mine.

Start with that.
Add in the baby boom generation (1946+) coming of age for genre reading (~14 for SF) and 1960 is (yet again) a watershed year.

Note, btw, that there was (effectively) no market for SF novels prior to 1950 other that serialization in the magazines. Other genres had abundant outlets in the pulps.

Which brings up the point that there has *always* been a market for popular fiction outside the traditional publishing establishment. Starting with the penny dreadfuls and the pulps there is a long tradition of what Huxley and co would dismiss as vulgar fiction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_magazine

The first "pulp" was Frank Munsey's revamped Argosy Magazine of 1896, about 135,000 words (192 pages) per issue on pulp paper with untrimmed edges and no illustrations, not even on the cover. While the steam-powered printing press had been in widespread use for some time, enabling the boom in dime novels, prior to Munsey, no one had combined cheap printing, cheap paper and cheap authors in a package that provided affordable entertainment to working-class people. In six years Argosy went from a few thousand copies per month to over half a million.[1]

Street & Smith were next on the market. A dime novel and boys' weekly publisher, they saw Argosy's success, and in 1903 launched The Popular Magazine, billed as the "biggest magazine in the world" by virtue of being two pages longer than Argosy. Due to differences in page layout, the magazine had substantially less text than Argosy. The Popular Magazine introduced color covers to pulp publishing. The magazine began to take off when, in 1905, the publishers acquired the rights to serialize Ayesha, by H. Rider Haggard, a sequel to his popular novel She. Haggard's Lost World genre influenced several key pulp writers, including Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Talbot Mundy and Abraham Merritt.[2] In 1907, the cover price rose to 15 cents and 30 pages were added to each issue; along with establishing a stable of authors for each magazine, this change proved successful and circulation began to approach that of Argosy. Street and Smith's next innovation was the introduction of specialized genre pulps, each magazine focusing on a genre such as detective stories, romance, etc.[3]

At their peak of popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, the most successful pulps could sell up to one million copies per issue.

The pulp format declined from rising expenses, but even more due to the heavy competition from comic books, television, and the paperback novel. In a more affluent post-war America, the price gap compared to slick magazines was far less significant. In the 1950s, men's adventure magazines began to replace the pulp.

The collapse of the pulp industry changed the landscape of publishing because pulps were the single largest sales outlet for short stories. Combined with the decrease in slick magazine fiction markets, writers attempting to support themselves by creating fiction switched to novels and book-length anthologies of shorter pieces.

What the paperback originals revolution did was replace the economics (and limited shelf-life) of magazines that the pulps followed with the economics of books, allowing for longer shelf-life. It also replaced the work-for-hire model of many (most?) of the pulps for the book industry's licensed freelance content acquisition model.

To a large extent what happened in 1950-60 and is happening again *now* is a technology-driven change in distribution model, with a parallel change in economic model, that redefines exactly what a book is. Once upon a time it was a hardcover cultural item. Two paradigm shifts later, we are seeing ebooks redefine what a book is.

And as usually happens, the prevailing orthodoxy runs two paradigms behind reality.