Books, Merch, and Audio oh my

Is the self-publishing industry growing or shrinking?

Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!

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A fellow author recently brought up a question that is interesting, since I have not seen anyone ask it before: “Is the self-publishing industry growing or shrinking?”

The general belief is that it is obviously growing, even if it has tapered off from the stratospheric growth rates we saw between 2010 and 2020. Yet, there are rumors of ebook sales and readership in general dropping off. There are so many new authors publishing books every day that it seems like everything will crash under its own weight here soon, and that’s before factoring in AI.

Are we all doomed??!?!?

Before we panic, it might be worthwhile to look past the hype and actually figure out whether the self-publishing industry is growing or shrinking. At least, that was my plan.

As I considered how we might be able to determine which is the case, though, I realized that it is the wrong question…or, at least, that version of the question is immaterial. 

The question "is the self-publishing industry growing or shrinking?" is less important than HOW it is CHANGING.

If, in 1905, you were to ask if the "self-transportation industry" was growing or shrinking, I think we would all agree that it was growing like bonkers, a rate of acceleration that continued throughout the century. However, that was not much of a solace to buggy whip makers, carriage manufacturers, or horse traders. Some carriage manufacturers pivoted to producing carriages for automobiles or just become automobile manufacturers, if they had the capital, but many sub-industries were decimated along the way.

As I wrote in a recent blog post, horses went from being necessities to being luxury goods for hobbyists/investors/rich people. (You could argue that it was good for horses to not have to live miserable lives as work animals, but also, many died along the way.) Here we are in 2024 and the transportation industry overall is still expanding and growing with planes, high speed trains, and (still!) automobiles. 

It’s also a human tendency to believe that our current status is the acme position, and that the future will look a lot like the present. Working in I.T. throughout the 1990s, I often heard the refrain that computers were reaching the end point of speed, miniaturization, and complexity. Surely we would not be able to do much better than Windows 3.1 on an IBM PS/2!!!! My father, a pilot of propellor airplanes in WWII, told me of a time when everyone knew that even jet engines would not be able to go faster than the speed of sound. “Tricorders” were science fiction, and now everyone checks their heart-rate using their phone. 

Currently, publishing and self-publishing in particular are still in the midst of a sea change that began with the maturation of the internet in the 1990s. Self-publishing is a part of that and so is AI, they are not independent pivots we can measure separately (and that’s a whole other separate post). The rate of change is increasing as well, so it's damn near impossible to get a big-picture view of what might be ahead. 

If you look at hardback book sales, you might conclude the industry is on the razor's edge of collapse, which is blatantly not the case. But what are you really looking at, anyway? Reports from publishers and book seller organizations. These days that is a pretty limited pool, and anyone who is trying to track sales also has to deal with platforms which don't want to share much data at all (aka 'zon and Apple), much less tracking across self-publishing sales, author-direct sales, crowd sourced sales (kickstarter, etc.), subscriptions, and in-person sales.  

Any way you look at it, we are simply missing tons of data, and we are the equivalent of a transportation specialist in 1905 counting steam-powered train routes and horse population-per-capita along with the number of automobiles passing outside our window. It's not accurate, and it's not predictive.

Instead of obsessing over expansion vs. retraction, which we can’t accurately measure and even then are measuring elements of the industry that are already out of date, it is much more useful to look at the changes we can see:

• Audio is ascendant, and any author who does not have multiple audio versions of their work available (digital narration, author narration, professional voice actor narration, audio books, book podcasts) will be sidelined by readers, in much the same way authors who refused to let their books be sold as "ebooks" simply don't exist anymore except on cranky personal blogs (ironically).

• Multi-platform presence is also ascendant. While KU will continue to its chokehold for a long while (as long as 'zon can bleed it out), readers today want access on their own terms, which means works need to be available in multiple formats: online serialization, ebooks, paperback books, special edition hardback books, audio (books and "podcasts"), and more. Older readers love audio; younger readers love print books; superfans love jazzed up limited special editions with all the ribbons and illustrations. Ya' gotta get 'em where they live.

• AI is a factor, love it or hate it. AI will allow some readers to create customized stories, even movies, of what they want to see/read. However, most readers are consumers, not creators. They want to be handed the experience. As LLMs get more sophisticated, some authors will be cranking out a book a week, or a book a day. Many readers won't care; some will, and will demand "human created" work which I imagine will become an upsell. The bottom line is that we're not even sure how AI will affect everything at this point, only that it will. Do you think that our imaginary transportation specialist in 1905, watching a Ford Model A racing down the street at 15 MPH, really grasped what a future of interstate highways filled with SUVs cruising at 75 MPH would look like?

• Virtual reality: If an author creates a virtual world based on their work, and charges people to "visit" it as a VR experience, is that a sale? A sale of what? Is that even "publishing" anymore? (it is, but that's more about semantics than reality imho.) What about if an author uses an avatar to read their work, combining audio and video experiences? (Don't know about you but I would pay money to step into a virtual den with a fireplace where a facsimile of my favorite actor just sits there and reads my favorite book to me while I kick my feet up on a virtual ottoman. Heaven!)

• Merchandise: many authors are boosting income by selling merch based on their work. Again, is this part of the publishing industry? Trad publishers have done this for a long time, so I'd argue that it is. Fans love merch, esp. limited edition merch, and demand is only going to increase from here on out. And not just tote bags or posters; makeup, jewelry, board games, video games, music, fine art prints, even furniture can be branded.

• Special events are also in demand, whether “reader cons” or “author meet ups” or whatever you want to call them. It’s less about having a booth at a con and more about creating experiences for readers to participate in.

• Apps are something I have not seen yet but expect to see more of as the app stores are forced to open up. Readers can buy the author's own app which will connect them to their entire back catalog and deliver them access to ongoing serialized stories with no middleman at all. The author owns the app and controls distribution. The limitations on apps are still major hurdles — money for development, IP rights to the content, and prudish app store content restrictions — but things are changing.

Michael Evans, the CEO of Ream, talks a lot about authors "building their own Disney World" aka owning the means of production — from print to digital to audio to video to VR to AI — in the same way Disney and other publishers/producers have done for decades. That is something that is only now possible for self-published authors, and is already changing the entire landscape of possibilities. 

To me, that translates to "the self-publishing industry is growing like bonkers" even if by trad metrics and scholastic book sales, things look grim.

So, that's my screed! Thoughts?