It is four years since Covid and eight years since I have had staff helping me serve consulting clients. My insight into the commercial world of book publishing is no longer informed by daily contact with people making their living in it. In fact, a big chunk of my “professional” activity these days is helping authors decide how to bring their book to market, with “through a regular publisher with an advance-against-royalties deal” being among the least likely of the possible options.
More has changed in the past eight years than any like period in my prior 50 years of experience. You don’t have to be an insider to know that there were 500,000 titles in English available in 1990 and that more than 20 million are available from Ingram (thanks to print-on-demand) today. And that everything that was ever made available remains on sale through “normal channels” (which is “online”, not “in store”) forever. It doesn’t take a math genius to reckon that a pretty stable total book purchasing and readership constituency will result in dramatic reductions in sales per title.
I have had two opportunities lately to validate my observations, and the sense of drastic change has been confirmed by both.
One source of insight is a new book, “The Untold Story of Books”, by Michael Castleman. (I was gifted an advance reading copy that tells me the book will be published on July 2, 2024.) Castleman sees three “eras” of book publishing: Gutenberg hand-style presses (1450-1870), industrial printing (1870-2000), and digital publishing (since 2000.) An interpretation of his telling of the story would be that authors steered book publishing until the early 1900s, publishers were in control for most of the 20th century, and that digital technology has once again decentralized the commercial decisions and efforts so that publishers’ power has been diminishing for the past two decades.
The power of publishers did arrive with industrial printing, but what really drove it was the control of distribution. As bookstores proliferated in the 20th century and became the place where most consumers got most of their books, only publishers with sales forces and fulfillment operations could compete in the marketplace. (Before that, authors often “hired” the printers.) The ability to push out thousands of copies of books (on a sale-and-return basis, of course) was uniquely the publishers’, and that meant they decided what went into the marketplace.
One insight that I picked up from Castleman, which had never been spelled out to me before, explains why publishing was centered in New York and why publishers took a “seasonal” approach to introducing books into the market. It all goes back to the Erie Canal. Before the Erie Canal, publishers were distributed among Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The canal enabled NYC publishers to reach stores in the interior of the country with books on boats, by far the most efficient way to ship these heavy objects.
But the canal froze in the winter. So publishers learned to ship a whole bunch of new books before the freeze (the “Fall list”) and another bunch of new books after the freeze (the “Spring list”). Catalogs reflecting that organization also became standard. The Erie Canal opened in 1825 and only now, 200 years later, might we see the end of “seasons” as an organizing structure for the industry on the horizon. That qualifies as lasting impact.
The second opportunity to test my observations against reality arose when I was invited to a meeting of half-a-dozen publishing veterans who have, in various morphed forms, been discussing our business over lunch in a group called Book Table which goes back to the 1940s! The six other attendees at the lunch I joined were all just a wee bit younger than I am, in their 60s and early 70s. They included a magazine publisher, three book publishers of indies or imprints inside majors, and two agents. The tidbits I picked up from that meeting confirmed how much things have changed in the past decade.
1. One agent has two clients who are successful self-publishers (there are subsidiary rights and foreign rights to occupy an agent.) Two things stood out about them. One is that they both published exclusively with Amazon, without the complement (which I would have thought would be “standard”) of also working through Ingram. The other thing was that they both started working their genres (and they publish exclusively genre fiction) in 2008 or so, before the rush of self-publishers in genres had saturated the market. So they established their brands in their genre marketplace when the competition was still minimal. The agent reports that both of these authors don’t believe they’d be successful starting to do this today.
2. Publishers can’t succeed in these saturated genre marketplaces. Fortunately, a new genre can come along. One that has arisen is “romantasy” (think romance plus fantasy). Because it is new but it has the characteristic of genre fiction that devotees read a LOT of books and LOVE repeat authors, this is working for publishers. But this state of affairs won’t last forever; the romantasy title count and established author base will also reach saturation with time.
3. Publishers used to routinely achieve advance sales for new books in the thousands. The chains in those bygone years amounted to a signficant chunk of those sales. Now publishers celebrate an order from Barnes & Noble (the only really significant chain remaining) of 100 to 200 copies. And that’s far less than 1 copy per store in the chain!
4. It is, indeed, almost impossible to get a significant advance from a publisher unless sales are assured either by a highly branded author or an author platform of some kind that has significant promise for marketing and sales.
The world we’re now in is one where making money on new books — as an author or a publisher — is staggeringly difficult. Big publishers can still make big money because the truth that “everything ever published is always available” is a double-edged sword. Publishers with tens of thousands of titles on their backlist can make money selling quantities which wouldn’t have been worth printing last century when they were published. Across tens of thousands of titles, even sales in the hundreds per year add up to a lot. With ebooks and AI-generated audiobooks and the global reach of digital marketing, a lot of additional sales can be booked on titles that would have stopped printing and reverted to authors in the old days.
Of course, books have sustained themselves as “commercially viable” long after most of the newspapers and magazines of our youth have ceased to exist. Authors have a hard time making money because they’re competing with everything ever written, but the same is true for singers and songwriters and for the talent that makes TV and movies. The good news is that people still read lots of books and that anybody who has the content and wants to deliver it into the marketplace as a book can do so at a highly manageable cost. The bad news is that new careers delivering the creative works in a structured and predictable ecosystem that values experience and a network of professional contacts are vanishing before they begin.