Could someone who knows more than me please share why this matters at all from a competition standpoint? If quality content is written, it can be self published online for essentially free. Sure, it might be harder to get a sizable advance, but why does that matter so long as there is a cheap, non-censored method of getting writings out into the ether?
I worked in publishing for a short while on the tech side of things and had this same question. It turns out print is very similar to other forms of media, in that it's power law distributed, possibly even more extreme than video or audio. The VAST majority of books written never sell any appreciable number of copies. And a few books/authors sell millions. So there is intense competition to become the PR and distribution machine for those winners (or manufacturer winners based on guesses of what might be trendy/popular).
You can self publish only up to a certain point. If your book is truly popular, or you want it to become so, or you want to make real money, there is no way to "self print" millions of copies and distribute them, feature them on Amazon, etc. That's literally why the publishing company exists. "Sharing ideas" is completely orthogonal to the point of large publishers.
Relevant to this suit, large conglomerates like PRH actually operate as many independent publishing houses (most of which have been acquired over time). They each have their own brands and editorial staff and want to show good results. This leads to intra-company bidding for the same books, which is obviously good for authors but bad for the company. So this merger would just make that effect more extreme. Probably the DOJ scrutiny is warranted here.
Yeah as the other commenter notes, book discovery is a difficult problem that hasn't shared in the gains made in algorithmic recommendation for other forms of media. If you think about it makes a lot of sense...literature has high cost of consumption (in terms of time spent), preferences are incredibly subjective, non-transitive to a degree not seen in music/film/tv. Your best way is the "old fashioned" approach of becoming familiar with reviewers and others who share your taste.
In terms of boosting already existing authors who you enjoy, unfortunately sales are still king. Buying a bunch of copies of their book within 18 months of it's release (including in ebook or audiobook format!) is basically the strongest signal that you can send to get them additional visibility and promotion. Some publishers take softer metrics (like social media engagement, tour/signing turnout, etc) into account, but again, mostly as a proxy for what sales might look like.
One of the issues is reputational. Trad pub sees itself as a cultural linchpin - the gate-iest of a gatekeepers, a setter of major trends.
From one POV this is nonsense. Trad pub throws a lot of books at the wall and a few of them stick.
But from another it does so selectively. In fiction the big advances go to established or potential personalities - not so much to outstanding authors, but to authors who are known to sell well.
For new authors that means trad pub looks for individuals who will appeal to a target demographic. (For new contemporary fiction that usually - but not exclusively - means aspirational, college-educated, female.)
Which being the case, even limited PR is better than no PR. And the big pubs can do effective PR in a way that solo self-pubbed authors can't, by setting up reviews/interviews in the mainstream press.
An interview or a review typically costs nothing, but can be a huge driver of sales. The author needs to be reasonably interesting, at least a little photogenic, and have some kind of personal story the demographic can identify with and maybe admire. (Not usually the same story as the one in the book.)
So it matters who does this, because it's not just about the money. It's really about a monopoly on gatekeeping cultural status.
The money takes second place.
Which is why publishing is simultaneously almost comically amateurish but also throws big sums around. The amateurishness is a remnant of the days when there were tens of medium sized publishers run by amateurs and enthusiasts who would often publish books just because they liked them.
The industry is much more of a corporate monoculture now. But clearly it's still better to hang on to some remnants of choice and diversity - even if the choice is between a handful of monoliths, each of which still has a unique culture of sorts, instead of tens of smaller houses.
Thanks for the perspective. While I was in the industry, being on the tech side felt like it insulated me from a lot of the drama of the editorial world. I would share your sentiments about money being secondary for them, you would meet people that had been in "assistant editorial" style roles for decades! All waiting for the chance to be in charge and have the cultural cache that came along with gatekeeping/creating trends.
At that level, definitely not in it for the money. At the C level though I got the sense that there was supreme respect for the cultural role of publishers - but it was a narrow second to business concerns, and they would make that tradeoff if necessary.
In the Anglosphere, my very indirect connection is that there was/is a very New York/London-centric web of connections/lunches. And I have to admit that even my modest connection to publishing a book in the tech world led from a dinner at a North American tech event followed by a coffee meeting in London with an acquisitions editor.
At that level, definitely not in it for the money. At the C level though I got the sense that there was supreme respect for the cultural role of publishers - but it was a narrow second to business concerns, and they would make that tradeoff if necessary.
The "cultural role" is drummed up in order to get people to work on below-subsistence salaries.
It's probably more about ego than money for the high-level people. Since people are cheap (because "passion") they can have large teams under them without their organizations having to pay the typical costs of large teams.
The truth about it, though, is that the culture is too balkanized for any of this stuff to make sense. Very few people go out of their way to read or find the best books; for good or for bad, they've all self-segregated into warring
genres and subgenres--and the so-called "literary" crowd who insist their genre is not a genre are often the worst in this regard. The balkanization is probably why no one knows how to market books anymore; people really understand a small slice of the total readership and, in any case, the lines are always changing.
I don't think I agree with the framing that the situation is some kind of scheme by executives to underpay people. All jobs have compensation, status, quality of life, "passion" components, etc. If someone wants to take a job that is higher status and that they're passionate about in exchange for lower direct compensation, who's to say that's not that person's preference?
Now, is it unfair that the compensation component is so low that people who don't have other means of income effectively can't take the job? Personally, I don't think so. I would love to research butterflies 24/7 and if I was independently wealthy perhaps would, but I completely understand that demand for butterfly research doesn't generate enough funding to make it possible to do that and lead the life I live now.
FWIW, from my limited experience leadership were all perfectly lovely people, extremely passionate about publishing as well, who in some cases had worked all of these "drummed up" jobs themselves on their way up the ladder.
>The "cultural role" is drummed up in order to get people to work on below-subsistence salaries.
The stereotype in NYC of publishing is of it attracting young, well-educated daughters of families who can subsidize New York living beyond the low salaries.
The worry is that a merger would reduce upfront payments to authors because there is less competition (among other things). Authors like upfront payments as it reduces the risk for them. However, it is unclear if this would reduce payments as the market is pretty fractured.
"but why does that matter so long as there is a cheap, non-censored method of getting writings out into the ether?"
Many authors are not technical, and for them, dealing with formatting, uploading it to services, and all that "tech" stuff is immensely hard (especially if they have an FT job and a family).
And, to create a great book requires a great editor most of the time. That isn't cheap, especially if they are going deep into your story. Traditional publishing is still a huge stamp of quality that helps sell books, gets the author exposure, and gets you in physical bookstores.
Plus, if you are a new author, you write book(s) while doing something FT. That is hard; if payments go down, you could lose entire generations of authors as they don't have the time or money to devote to writing. We probably already are losing generations of authors given how rough the market is with the changes over the last 20 years.
>And, to create a great book requires a great editor most of the time.
How many publishers actually provide serious story development support to authors starting out? Never done fiction but development editing in my non-fiction case was mostly in molding to house style. Even all the changes I made in v2 were essentially all of my own doing.
Fiction side here: this is actually a question in flux. It used to be that you could expect serious developmental edits from an editor and also your agent on top of multiple copy editing rounds. However the recent cuts in labor has limited how much editors can read or acquire, which then affects how many books agents can represent and then forcibly raises the bar for the quality of submitted manuscripts. It’s like the post doc problem (where phd graduates are pressured to take more and more extreme measures to be qualified for a professorship position and therefore do significant work for exceptionally little or no gain).
Ya, from my conversations with authors not often, but an author will often pay out of contracts. But, if you are on book 3 of a well-selling series at Tor I bet you do (I don't know just guessing).
Did you get any help from an editor or was that out of pocket?
I didn't need--or at least didn't think I needed--any serious outside structural editing. They did do "developmental" (but minor) and copyediting. I write a lot and knew the topic pretty well. I had work colleagues read over for tech review as appropriate. I have been paid out a little above advance but we're talking very small numbers for someone on a decent tech salary. The benefit was 90% reputational.
The one experience I have with going through (a respected technical) publisher is that, relative to self-publishing, the primary benefit was that a lot of people took it as a bit of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval with respect to book signings, reputational enhancement, etc. But the advance was pretty trivial and the editorial/marketing support was very limited.
It also imposed a lot of restrictions on pricing, length, and free distribution.
Obviously people do well by publishers but IMO it's hard to make a case that they're the vitally important gatekeepers they once were. YMMV of course.
I started https://shepherd.com about a year ago, so I talk to a ton of authors, and what blows me away is how no publishers do ANY marketing. This is such a weird industry and so weirdly broken.
If you get a huge upfront payment, they will do some marketing, of course, as they need to try to recoup their investment. But if you are not one of the top .01% of authors, they are just spinning a wheel to see if the decapitated chicken hits Yahtzee.
That's what happens when you can get a huge amount of content for cheap. Pay a $1500 advance, do some light editing, publish and sit back and see what happens.
But yeah, marketing is basically you're in the catalog of (in my case) a technical book publisher and maybe you're included as part of some digital subscriptions. But even for more popular works, you're probably mostly not going on book signing tours or having a bunch of review copies sent out. You'll have to hire a PR agency for that and pay any costs out of your own pocket for the most part.
What I've written has been good for me but mostly because I'm not trying to directly make money off it. If I had been naive enough to think I'd be getting meaningful royalty checks that valued my time more than a few dollars an hour I expect I'd be disappointed.
Yep, and how so many publishers want your own platform stats. I know people with large insta followings getting book deals purely because they can market their own books and cost publishers next to nothing, with an almost guaranteed profit. I hope the broken publishing system is destroyed by these same people realising they can do it all themselves - then perhaps the publishers can rise from the ashes and actually add true value.
Yep, and how so many publishers want your own platform stats. I know people with large insta followings getting book deals purely because they can market their own books and cost publishers next to nothing, with an almost guaranteed profit.
Right, and this is basically an admission of their own uselessness. They'll only help you if you can prove you don't need the help. They're rent-seekers at this point.
To be fair, it is a hard problem. In the visual arts, you can tell if someone is talented immediately. With authors, especially in fiction, there's about a 12-hour commitment before one even knows if they know how to begin, carry, and finish a story. Literary agents, who are supposed to be the gatekeepers, are beyond useless at it (although it is worthwhile to get one, if you can, because you need one to be a serious player in traditional publishing).
Trying to publish for money without the marketing, editing, audiobook production, cover designing, and reach in bookstores of a major publishing house (or even an indie publishing house) is a huge hustle. It’s a massive pain in the ass. Sometimes writers want to instead focus on doing the writing. (To be clear: this is changing over time. Major labor cuts when the pandemic began weren’t filled in back even though publishing made money hand over fist during the lockdowns. This means they’re running ghost crews and it’s affecting the quality of all of the above I just listed. It’s becoming less and less attractive to go with large trad publishing vs indies or self.)
You’re conflating two issues here: this lawsuit has nothing to do with whether or not publishing houses are censorship. This lawsuit is about whether or not a merger of this size would cause authors to make less money from publishing traditionally because it would reduce the number of bidders for their work.
> Could someone who knows more than me please share why this matters at all from a competition standpoint? If quality content is written, it can be self published online for essentially free.
Publishers do provide some essential services like editors, and making sure your book looks good, and distribution.
However, much like the music industry, they are unbelievably greedy bastards. And we all know what happened to music industry. There are only four big music corporations in the world that have a stranglehold on ~90% of world music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation
You really don't want that to happen to any media.
> Sure, it might be harder to get a sizable advance
It's not hard at all, that's what crowdfunding is for. It's been quite successful at rewarding free and open content, especially for lower-cost media like books (compared to live action movies or AAA games).
> It's not hard at all, that's what crowdfunding is for.
Crowdfunding is, among other things, a marketing effort. The campaigns which succeed are, in some way or another, adept at marketing themselves. If they’re starting with minimal budget, that means someone with marketing acumen is either personally invested or confident in a return. If they’re not budget constrained… they’re just choosing their investors by buying access to them in a way that’s not traditional but incredibly common now.
In either case, framing the endeavor as “not hard at all” strikes me as neglecting either the kind of specialized talent that goes into marketing, or the kinds of marketing strategies that can manipulate the former neglect.
To be clear I’m coming at this from a perspective where I realized I lack the charisma and social confidence to crowdfund a project I was wildly passionate about. I find marketing mostly distasteful, but I respect it as a particular set of instincts and talents. The notion that it’s “not hard at all” is as outlandish to me as it would be if I told anyone else that uncommon talents which come to me instinctively should be as trivial to them.
Crowdfunding only works if you have a preexisting platform. Otherwise, it's just going to embarrass you. It's not zero-risk either, because if you start a Kickstarter and it fails, you can never remove the evidence (and the social anti-proof involved in a failed campaign). For authors--reputation ends up being a big deal because it takes 10+ hours of human effort to tell if a book is any good--this sort of thing can be fatal.
Also, it's much harder to build a platform organically than it used to be. I was semifamous in the 2010s and was literally almost killed for it. (Some people who were high in Y Combinator were on the wrong side of history there, but I digress.) So, I know how these systems actually work and how to exploit them (if one wants to go black hat). The game of getting attention is more competitive these days because there are so many more spammers, bad actors, and general-issue crapflooders. You can buy 10,000 fake Twitter followers for less than a hundred bucks and you probably won't get caught or face any negative consequences; on the other hand, getting from zero to 1000 legitimate followers is really difficult (much harder than it was in 2010).
There's also crowd-sourcing, which can be a viable option for a self-publisher. It seems like, if you have an interesting story to tell, people are willing to give you money to see it come to fruition.
A few interesting pieces of information on the publishing industry, as shared in this trial and article:
On profits:
> PRH’s Dohle said that the top 4 per cent of his books produce 60 per cent of his profit. The best books, he says, are the ones “that you don’t pay a lot for and become runaway bestsellers.” He excuses the fact that so few of his big bets pay by comparing himself to a venture capitalist. The book industry, he says, is “the Silicon Valley of media.”
On marketing:
> The big houses are skeptical about book marketing. One publisher said, “I don’t think marketing money can create a success,” it can only amplify or extend a success. That may be true but the big houses, we also heard, are not really trying. They spend little on marketing: roughly 2 per cent of expected revenue per book. (…) Some agents ask publishers to guarantee how much they will spend on marketing a book before they’ll sign. Most won’t.
On advances:
> about 70 per cent of all the money paid on advances by the Big Five goes to $250,000-plus books. Judge Pan asked if $250,000-plus books comprise 70 per cent of Big Five book sales. The answer was no, not even close.
The cost to bet vs potential payoff seems much higher on the publishing size - any book could be the next Harry Potter but you probably won’t pay Stephen King amounts for it.
Pretty much any theatrical release film is going to be in at least the millions and many/most are in the $10s of millions to create. For a book, probably cut that by three orders of magnitude.
Of course, that also means it's a lot easier to find a publisher than a studio. Or to self-publish vs. create and release your own film (where you won't even have access to theatrical channels for the most part).
Yeah, "development hell" is basically the result of scripts and moving towards actually producing a film is, for the most part, however lengthy and painful, mostly in the cost noise vs. actually shooting a film.
A bit unrelated but who are the best publishers for technical books?
For me personally it seems pragprog.com usually has consistent quality, apress I’ve read good books but they seem a lot more hit or miss. I think Oreilly is also considered to be pretty good?
O'Reilly is typically able to put out a solid book on a given topic. Some of the smaller publishers (Manning, apress, et all) can knock out a great book too, but quality can vary dramatically. Packt is really hit or miss, it seems like they have a book on everything, but the editorial standard isn't as high so some books are harder to get through.
I've taken to buying more self-published books lately, as they're often getting more money to the authors pocket (way more), and I can often refer to the authors other work (blog, videos, trainings, etc.) to get an idea of what I'll be getting from the book.
> to publish anything new, you need social media presence, writing on something that appeals to a mass market, which passes sensitivity readers, and gets past gatekeepers who are essentially redditors
You really don't. I've been working with a new author about to publish recently and he's just a regular bloke and his work doesn't seem to hit any of your criteria. Are you sure your impression is grounded in reality?
Just some experience with publishing business as a writer several years ago, and knowing the people socially.
Maybe I'm missing who is challenging the established narratives and taking the risk as an iconoclast. Who is publishing right now whose ideas are challenging? Taibbi? He still compromises himself for access. Hirsi Ali? She still hedges, even though she's probably got more balls than anyone these days. Houellebecq is only tolerated because he's unthreatening to anyone. The Slate Star Codex guy writes like he still needs brunch invites. Substack is great, but it's not the discourse. The examples I'm thinking of stood on their own so well that they kept their subjects honest. Orwell, Mailer, HST, Mencken, Hitchens, Vidal, Hersh. Writers who traded on integrity to their craft so that their subjects were measured against it. Very best of luck to your writer, I hope you can serve his work honestly.
I don't think that's fair; it was clear from the post you challenged that the criticism was about lack of new ideas and commentary especially that countering safe narratives.
The poster responded with plenty of examples which you've dismissed with the unfortunate "goalposts" remark.
> it was clear from the post you challenged that the criticism was about lack of new ideas and commentary especially that countering safe narratives
Not sure what thread you were reading - the one I responded to said it was impossible in general to get anything new published. You can see hundreds (thousands) of new published works every year. They moved the goalposts by then saying that they only consider publishing to mean critical work.
Reread first two sentences of the post that started this thread. They clearly state that books are being published and what goes into getting those books published. This wasn't about what OP "considers publishing to mean", it's what OP considers to be worth being read.
There are tiers of what it means to "get published".
If you want your book to get a decent editor and maybe get a print run in the three or four digits, you don't have to deal with all the faddish bukkake (social media presence, trendy subject matter, performative wokery designed to signal virtue without actually changing anything or challenging capitalism, dodging cancel mobs). You can just write, and you may be able to find an audience organically if you put time and money into it. You probably won't, however, make enough money to write full time.
If your focus is on getting set up to make enough money to write full time, then you do have to worry about all that garbage, because there just aren't many good book deals to go around.
Yes, 'getting published' refers to people with a $0-$10000 advance from a small independent press through to the million dollar deals discussed in the article. And nobody can guarantee that you will sell enough to get past your advance, but being a social media personality is a huge boost. Fantastic reviews and most awards and prizes do not actually indicate good sales. To make a living, you need to get on the best seller lists. What we now call going viral.
I think your assertion is a bit hyperbolic, but for the last 30 years or so I’ve mostly given up reading fiction by living authors. There are tons of good books, and if a dead author is good enough to still be in print it’s sonable signal that the book might be worth reading.
This certainly depends on the genre. There are a number of major genres that do not age well. Older readers can be happy reading the fiction that reflects the world they grew up in, but to new readers reactions can rank between 'quaint' and 'appalling'.
The present reality is that all publishers have been reduced to vanity press, and they don't realize it yet.
In theory, publishers provide a real service, because self-publishing well is expensive (four, five digits easily). In theory, they should be offering access to people who couldn't afford what it costs to self-publish to the expected standard. In practice? The only people who can get in are people who have the connections and financial resources not to need the help. Whoops.
What we're learning about publishing (which we already knew, those of us who've been studying it) is that no one is good at selling books. Most self-publishers aren't, most traditional publishers aren't, and most PR firms are only good at taking and spending your money. We just don't have a good understanding of why individuals buy books (it changes) and there's a lot of evidence, sadly, that book sales are only loosely correlated to the quality of the writing (in the long term, quality matters more, but a book that dies in the short term won't have a long term).
Quote: "self-publishing well is expensive (four, five digits easily)"
This is basically correct, although it depends on the definition of "well". You can get a halfway decent cover for $100-$500, and you can get a halfway decent copy editor for about $500-$1000. Tools like Scrivener can handle all the ebook and paper edition formatting for you, with built-in templates, so that's another $100 or so for the tooling, but you can reuse this for future books. Publishing to Amazon and other places (like Smashwords) is free, and this includes print-on-demand paperback copies as well.
What it does take is a lot of time for learning how to use all the tools and to navigate the many options available for covers, editing, etc.
As far as marketing expenses go, there are no good ways to spend money to sell books. I think you're correct that nobody knows how to do it. If you don't win the lottery and get featured on a celebrity's book club, how is anyone supposed to ever know that you even released a book?
I'd say you can get the mechanics taken care of for the low four-digit figures. Publicity and marketing? The sky is the limit if you don't already have a following. I get a ton of requests for podcasts and interviews related to books. Which I 95% ignore. You probably want to do marketing yourself which is a major undertaking and probably won't work.
