People Buy Books, Publishing Is Thriving, and Substack Will Never Replace Books
A Publisher's Response to the Viral Post, "No One Reads Books"
I wanted to write about something else this week, but I’ve found myself engaged in a game of Whac-a-Mole with the viral post titled “No One Buys Books” whose author excitedly shared in Notes that she had “hit a nerve.” Well, yes, honey—with a title like that . . .
I’ve read a lot of good counter-coverage, so if you care about books and book publishing, read Kathleen Schmidt (Please Stop Bashing Book Publishing), Lincoln Michel (Yes, People Do Buy Books), and Jane Friedman (IMHO: About That Article on How “No One Buys Books”)
Herein I unpack what’s wrong with the post (which I’ll refer to as “the viral post”) from my vantage point as a publisher and someone who’s been in book publishing for 24 years, and why I’m so irked that people are sharing it all over the place as if it’s gospel. If you disagree with me and loved the viral post, I welcome comments. And/or, please share and dialogue.
The viral post claims that “no one buys books,” yet publishing is a multibillion-dollar industry.
The viral post’s title was designed to get clicks. It worked. Welcome to the modern attention economy. But to suggest that no one buys books ignores some basic math and facts. The graph below shows revenues and titles published from 2013-2023. The downward-heading blue line is revenue while the upward-heading orange line is number of titles published. It shows that book publishing is a $30 billion-dollar industry that published over 3.5 million titles last year. Some of the books whose data informs this chart were bought by publishers for $1 million and some are self-published; some of books that informed this chart sold in the hundreds of thousands and some sold under 100. This is the nature of the business. These numbers aren’t exactly worth celebrating. Too many books are being published and revenue isn’t outpacing the sheer volume of titles published, but one thing the graph decidedly proves is that people are indeed buying books. To the tune of literally billions of dollars.
The viral post is premised on showing us how fucked up book publishing is by walking us through expert testimony from the 2-year-old DOJ/Penguin Random House trial, but it misses some crucial context.
The reason that 2022 trial focused so much on high-level “unicorn” authors getting $250K+ advances, which are qualified as the Big Five’s “anticipated bestsellers,” was because it was an antitrust case, meaning the DOJ was trying to prove that authors would suffer (ie, lose income) if Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster were to merge. The experts who were called to testify attempted to explain book publishing to a truly mystified DOJ. Why was the DOJ mystified? Because book publishing *at this level* doesn’t make a lot of sense. Publishers make massive bets (called advances) for projects that may or may not earn out said advances. I agree that the advances the Big Five pays are sometimes mind-boggling and flat-out stupid. I was an acquiring editor for years, and there were books we wanted for all kinds of reasons—for cachet, because we wanted to cultivate an author, because our end goal was always to keep building our list, and that required taking chances. For the higher-level authors, you are bidding against other houses, and the entire process is designed to jack up the advance for the author. So yes, the system is broken, but to use this single antitrust case as a justification for why people don’t buy books or to suggest that publishers don’t do anything for their authors is as mind-boggling as the advance problem itself.
The viral post failed to consider a little thing called rights.
Publishers earn a butt-load of money from rights. When a publisher pays a million dollars for a book, it’s not typically for North American rights. They anticipate earning money on foreign rights and other subsidiary rights. Publishers make money all sorts of ways, and the profits work to pay off the author advances and earn publishers money. We’re talking about things like book-to-film rights; audiobook rights; translation rights; merchandising. Book publishing is lucrative beyond its most famous product: the book.
The author of viral post was outraged when she wrote: “Publishing houses pay millions of dollars for a book that sells only 300,000 copies???”
Again, I agree that million-dollar advances largely don’t make sense. But in this context, Madeline Mcintosh, former CEO for Penguin Random House US, said, “If I look at the top 10 percent of books . . . that 10 percent level gets you to about 300,000 copies sold in that year. And if you told me I’m definitely going to sell 300,000 copies in a year, I would spend many millions of dollars to get that book.” What about this is outrageous? Please look at the chart below and the books’ corresponding sales. The 25th book on the list earned $597,139. A book in the $300,000 range is guaranteed to be in the Top 100 books, or as Mcintosh said, the top 10 percent of books. A book like that is likely to earn out well over $1 million, and to have incalculable rights potential. The advance problem perpetuates a kind of frenzied spending behavior at these top levels, and oftentimes it doesn’t work out, but when it does work out, those big sellers are the books that allow the publisher to continue to fund the non-unicorns. The Big Five have put themselves in this position, it’s true, but you gotta pay to play. The reality is that the amount any of this matters to the average author who wants to get published some day is zero. These are the astronauts of author world. Unicorns. Call them what you will. They are not you and me.
The viral post’s author doesn’t understand Kindle Unlimited, or that there is already a place where you can read all the books you want, not just for $9.99 a month, but for free!
The idea posited here was this: “Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want?” Well, this exists—and it’s called a library. About Kindle Unlimited, however, did you know that in order to be part of Kindle Unlimited an author must agree to make their ebook exclusive to Amazon? Yeah . . . If you want to piss off a publisher, suggest they make their books available exclusively to Amazon. My press makes our books available to 127 e-retail partners, and we have strong sales across platforms like Kobo, Google Books, Nook, and elsewhere. Exclusivity to Amazon as the future for readers who want to get their books read—well, yes, this future has already arrived and it’s called self-publishing, and those books are not selling nearly as well as traditionally published or hybrid published books.
On ignoring indie publishing
I’m an independent publisher, specifically a hybrid publisher, and the viral post talks about how authors are “getting more independent.” Getting? For years and years the traditional industry has been shutting authors out for all kinds of reasons. I left traditional publishing for this very reason, and it’s the subject of my 2017 TEDx talk. Authors have changed the entire landscape of book publishing with their awesome indie spirit, and so have book publishers. The indie space is alive and thriving. This very weekend I’m at the Independent Book Publishers Association’s Publishing University where some 400 indie book publishing people are celebrating books, figuring things out, being in community with one another. We are reinventing business models, disrupting traditional publishing, and, oh yeah, selling a lot of books. I took a quick peek at our numbers this morning to see how She Writes Press is doing. We’ve grossed $345,018 so far this year, about $1 million last year. That’s only a fraction of what the Big Five would spend on a unicorn, but it’s a number we’re happy with, and it means that our authors are selling books—and readers are reading them. Our top ten books last week all sold over 500 copies each. These are different kinds of numbers from the Big Five, but publishing is not an industry of polar opposites. It’s not $1 million dollar advances with hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales and self-published books selling less than 100 copies and nothing in between. We, the indie publishers, are the in-between! Yoo-hoo, we are here—and we are crushing it.
Another publishing house bites the dust?
This was another frustrating claim from the viral post that just needs to be corrected because the suggestion here is that S&S bit the dust after Penguin Random House was not allowed to buy it. That’s not what happened. S&S is alive and well, some might say thriving. They’re certainly on an acquisitions tear on the distribution side, and I’m one of the lucky beneficiaries. The DOJ rejected PRH and allowed S&S to be purchased by KKR, a private equity firm. If anyone thinks this isn’t the most ironic thing ever, consider the facts. The DOJ rushed in to “save” book publishing from monopolizing (even though there still would have been three other big publishers) and didn’t bat an eye at allowing S&S to be purchased by the kind of corporation notorious for draining a company’s resources, cutting jobs, extracting profits, and selling as fast as it can for a profit. But anyhoo . . . For the moment it seems that KKR is not doing that to S&S and I’m holding out hope. Regardless of what happens here, S&S is doing really well, maybe thanks to the Britney Spears memoir. And I’m a happy distribution publisher client who thinks their team is amazing.
The problem with Substack as a replacement for publishing a book
This one is a killer and rounds out the end of the litany of issues I have with the viral post. Book publishing isn’t going anywhere. Book publishing is critical to our culture. Books spread information and knowledge, and the best books are well-edited, fact-checked when necessary, and are the culmination of authors’ work with input from others. I won’t go on a rant about all the things that publishers do for their authors because Kathleen Schmidt already wrote that post (Please Stop Bashing Book Publishing). But becoming a published author is not the same as having a popular Substack or a big social media following, which is why most content creators and thought leaders aspire to do both. We can shoot off our random thoughts on various topics on any given day in our Substacks and socials, but books, if held to the standards they should be, are so much deeper and more impactful than that. They change lives. They open readers to new worlds. They provide escape. They make us better and more empathetic and smarter human beings. And their importance to the author and its readers rise above the thought of the day. Books can also be bought and shared and lent and rented. Substack is wonderful, I love it. But I also loved HuffPost for the many years it was around and I was posting and getting a lot attention for my work. When HuffPost stopped allowing guest contributors to post, that was it, fun times over. But my books live on. I still get royalty statements for my books that are five and nine and ten years old. Translation = people are reading my books.
The book industry deserves some critiquing. Not everyone has an awesome publishing journey. Some authors are disgruntled and disenchanted. But book publishing is not one thing, and you have to get inside of it before you knock it down too hard. You also can come back at it from another angle if you were frustrated by an experience you had. To be scared off of book publishing by claims that publishers don’t do anything for their authors, or that books don’t sell, is to deny yourself the beauty and pride and connection of becoming an author in the world.
I am so proud to be an indie publisher and an indie author of six books. I’m proud of the work I did for 13 years in traditional publishing. In all sectors of this business, people are working their tails off for their authors. That many books don’t sell well is a symptom of an industry that doesn’t know what to do with the absolute firehose of books that get published every year, and a fallout from trying to adhere fifty-year-old business practices to the modern age. But if you’re an author, or want to be an author, by God, people, be an equal partner. Check your expectations. Learn the industry. Hire your own publicist. Build up your team to empower and support them to support you. If you go into publishing with the predecided notion that publishing sucks, it will for sure suck for you, and maybe people won’t buy your book.
Brooke, Your posts are so informative and thoughtful. Thank you.
Thank you, dear Brooke! You made each point so well. I am proud to be published by you and the team at She Writes Press!