Who is Making Money in Publishing?
The Limits of Trad Publishing Propaganda and Why You Should Care...
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!
One of my favorite writing coaches and advice gurus is Becca Syme, who has a wonderful phrase that she uses a lot when talking about any idea or trend that is affecting writers: question the premise!
I find myself questioning the premise right now about discussions around what it means to be a successful author, spurred on by the recent essay by Elle Griffin, “No one buys books: everything we learned about the publishing industry from Penguin vs. DoJ.”
The opinions in that piece are not necessarily Griffin’s own, as she is mostly sharing quotes from the lawsuit. Her own conclusion is the rather innocuous, even obvious, comment that “The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities…” She uses the grist of the mill to support her already low opinions about the trad publishing industry, claiming that they work more like venture capitalists than book merchants, which I agree with 100%.
Yet, so much of what she shared from the lawsuit has been taken as gospel about publishing in general, and that is a grave mistake.
So, here is my corollary to Syme’s exhortation to “question the premise”: consider the source.
I started exploring why there was so much gnashing and wailing going on and where it was coming from, but before I got too far into it, Lincoln Michel did it first! In his article “Yes, People Do Buy Books,” he points out that “the overall thrust of Griffin’s article is right: Most people don’t buy many books, sales for most books are lower than many think, and big publishing works on a blockbuster model where a few couple hits—plus perennial backlist sellers—comprise the bulk of sales.”
Yet, he goes on to point out that Americans, at least, buy over a billion books a year. So people are not buying many books, and authors aren’t selling many books, but readers are buying millions and millions of books? Can both statements be true?
Yes. You just need to consider the source.
The source of all that data is Penguin Random House (PRH). As Michel wrote, “I would offer a word of caution. PRH’s legal strategy was to present publishing as an imperiled, dying industry beset on all sides by threats like Amazon.”
But that didn’t slow anyone down, alas. The screams of “the sky already fell and there is no hope for writers anymore!!!!” filled the blogosphere (is there still a blogosphere? I posit that yes, there is, even if we call it by names like “medium” and “substack” and “wordpress”).
On the heels of Michel’s analysis, LitHub posted an interesting essay by Maris Kreizman, “There are too Many Books; Or, Publishing Shouldn’t be About Quantity” talking about similar issues from the perspective of quality and readability rather than economic financial success. She argues, “It’s become too common for books that are acquired by major publishers to be neglected later in the publishing process in favor of titles with more in-house support, or simply because too many other titles in the same season are crashes (titles that are published on an accelerated schedule).”
Kreizman is being critical of trad publishers for not gatekeeping enough by inundating the market because of poor editorial and business decisions, but in doing so ironically supports all the evidence PRH brought up in court to claim that they don’t know how they make money and they don’t actually make very much profit even when they do make money.
When you consider the sources, though, you realize a very important fact: people are buying books, just not the books publishers want them to buy.
Here is my arm chair quarterback analysis: They are throwing millions of dollars at high rollers and not getting a return on the investment, while sales of comparatively cheap by-blows continue apace but not enough to make up for the aforementioned losses.
Most importantly: this is all about traditional publishing, the “big five” and their imprints. It is very important to understand that they have their own ecosystems which do not cross over much with independent authors and small publishers.
I talked in a previous post about how a lot of the numbers for indie and self pub authors and sales are impossible to track (direct sales, crowdsourcing, live events, subscriptions) are simply not being counted outside of self-reporting, which is notoriously inaccurate.
(At this point, I'm not even sure how aggregators (such as Draft2Digital) are accounted for either. Who do they report their sales numbers to? Do they report to any publishing organization at all? I admit I don't know.)
The fact is that many “mid-list” style authors are making decent money. They are not making the millions the big trad publishers do, but they don’t need to. The books the trad publishers shove out the door to help cover losses are the same kinds of books some authors are making a living writing, but publishing themselves. They are not the same thing.
In Seth Godin’s blog post, Books Don’t Sell, he breaks it all down pretty succinctly: “Scarcity made the book publishing world work as a business, and scarcity is gone.”
I know quite a few authors who are making six-figure incomes for writing their books, earning in the modest range between $100,000 and $300,000. Some do rapid release models, some do slow release, and more are doing subscriptions than ever before. They aren't selling their books to Netflix for adaptation, they aren't making millions of dollars, and they aren't pursuing trad publishing deals at all. They sell on the major sites and run kickstarters and create audiobooks and sell merchandise. Very little of their money is counted by “the publishing authorities” but they're making enough to support their families.
A friend of mine recently ran a kickstarter for a special edition collection of her books. Her original goal was $6,120 (NZ $10,000). The campaign closed out at $110,558 (NZ $180,636). Most people have never heard of her or her book series, but she’s done alright for herself.
It doesn't matter that the traditional publishing industry has decided that such people don't exist because they're inconvenient to the story corporations like PRH are trying to tell.
Who gains from trad-pub propaganda claiming that they are poor victims of a harsh,random, and unrelenting industry? Do their numbers really mean anything to you? Do they reflect the experience of other authors like you who are doing what you're doing?
They might, if you are committed to the trad-pub path. That’s valid! But also, they might not if you are open to going your own way.
If you are getting depressed about the information that the traditional publishing industry is putting out, I ask you to question the premise and consider the source.