Local indie bookstores play a crucial role for new authors. I was turned down by local publishers, so I self-published my first novel. A local independent bookstore let me stock some copies and allowed me to hold a reading. I read an excerpt, played some music. The result was my book was a summer best seller at their stores. One of the clerks told me I had more people there than some signed authors do. This success wouldn't have happened without the help of this independent bookstore.
Just loafing around college in the mid-70s I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Catch 22, Sometimes a Great Notion, A Clockwork Orange, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance...and multiple books by Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Walker Percy. All these were powerful influences on the culture at large, contemporary writers writing about contemporary issues and concerns. You would go to parties and people will talk about books as much as they did music. I feel sorry for those who missed it. Nothing like that exists now.
I've been working in the small independent book business since the late '70s with Fiction Collective/FC2, Douglas Messerli's Sun and Moon Press (first publisher of Paul Auster's fiction), and John O'Brien's Dalkey Archive Press. FC2 still exists. It celebrated its 50th birthday two years ago. It's books are still wonderful and still challenging (Joanna Ruocco, Aimee Parkison, Sarah Blackman, and Ray Levy). Dalkey Archive is with Deep Vellum Press in Texas now. And there is still Graywolf, Coffee House, and a few others that got their start mostly in the late '70s. The problem is visibility. The big five presses generate interest through advance notice on NetGalley, but small presses can't afford it. How this will ever get better is beyond me. One bright spot is Melville House Publisher. It is doing political, social, cultural, and art books in a brave and unique way. Check their list. Buy some books.
I read books like Jude the Obscure, Sense and Sensibility, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Anna Karenina while walking to work (no car) as a young adult in the late 90s. It didn't seem an odd thing to do, at the time.
Yeah people act like, if you tell them you read, you're a effing wizard! With these amazing powers to scroll your eyes back and forth and up and down these tomes of knowledge and not immediately jettison yourself to the nearest screen to look at -- like they do.
My husband belongs to a local writers’ (!) group and I went with him once to a small get together. Someone asked me if I write too, and I said, no, I read, mostly classics, with people from all over the world on Substack, and we discuss them. They looked at me like I was from outer space.
Almost all men. Interestingly, most of my most recent favorite books have been men. There is something wildly broken when a white man can't get a fiction book published.
Here's a perfect example of the corporatization you're talking about:
When I was a senior editor at Avon Books, we were bought by HarperCollins in 1999. The first change they made was to give us a new p&l to use. It was exactly like our old p&l with one thing added: a $20,000 skim for Harper from every book, regardless of sales projections. It was pointed out to Harper that we were primarily a mass market publisher (they wanted us for our romances), and mass market worked because each month our list was set up like a baseball organization. You'd have 1-2 super lead titles and 3 general leads (the major league team), then genre leads (AAA), then increasingly smaller books in each genre (for example, Mystery 1, Mystery 2 and Mystery 3, your low minors). Ideally, you'd build an author from a genre title to a genre lead to an overall lead. The best part of the system was that a book could save your month from any position; the leads might tank, but some book from Columbus would come up and sell 100K+ copies (looking at you, TV tie-in edition of CHRISTY). Charging each book $20K, like a mobster taking his cut out of a pot in an illegal poker game, would make it financially impossible to publish most of these books, most of which we didn't pay anywhere near $20K for. I don't think Harper cared.
Soon I didn't either. Their second act was to lay me off. And now mass market publishing is basically dead.
Self-publishing is also where the readers can find not just the stories that publishers won't publish, but whole *genres* that publishers won't publish (especially now in the context of publishers pulling back on LGBTQ stories).
PLEASE write your queer stories, your Weird stories, your hopepunk & solarpunk stories, your stories of a better world & our broken one, of healing & liberation. And if you can't find publishers for your radical stories (or want to get them out faster and with more control), please consider self-publishing. I really want to encourage folks to self-pub in these repressive times.
For anyone wanting to support indie bookstores (which are growing btw), Bookshop.org sends a portion of sales to the indie bookstore of your choice. Libro.fm is the same for audiobooks.
I'm just here to ask you to do some introspection about your choice to throw mostly authors who are women and people of color into your little collage without considering that they already face an uphill battle in the publishing industry when it comes to legitimacy, sales, and reviews when you could have highlighted, say, how ten white dudes all write books that sound identical AND look identical instead. While you're at it, perhaps ask yourself why you decided to play into stereotypes about women reading silly, inconsequential books when, again, you could have talked about your own demographic instead.
Interesting; many people say exactly the opposite, that women and people of color are the only ones getting published these days. What uphill battles do women and people of color have in the publishing industry?
The only people who say that are people who are textbook examples of "when you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression." Because they've heard of like two POC authors, they flip out and insist that instead of the likelihood that their own book is just not interesting or well written, they're being rejected because they're poor little oppressed white men. That doesn't make it true. You've seen those stats about how when women speak something like 20% of the time, men perceive them as speaking 80% of the time? It's that same phenomenon; white people have to tolerate hearing about like three people of color and they act like we're taking over the world and coming to destroy them.
POC are still far less likely to be published and still face "sorry, we already have one Asian book this year so we're good"-type rejections. The hashtag #publishingpaidme revealed that POC receive vastly lower advances for their books, even when the authors are award winners and bestsellers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PublishingPaidMe). A debut white author is more likely to receive a six-figure advance than a brown author with ten solid book sales and multiple awards. CCBC at the University of Wisconsin does a count of all children's and YA books published in the US and Canada each year and their numbers reveal that books about POC characters still only make up at most about 15% of what's published, depending on how you run the numbers and when you remove animal and other non-human characters (https://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/literature-resources/ccbc-diversity-statistics/). The Ripped Bodice runs similar numbers on romance published and it is still overwhelmingly white (https://www.therippedbodice.com/state-racial-diversity-romance-publishing-report). Lee & Low in conjunction with Boston University have done multiple studies on staffing at publishing houses and review journals and it's still overwhelmingly white (over 70%) and the C-suite is overwhelmingly male (https://www.leeandlow.com/about/diversity-baseline-survey/dbs3/). PEN America also released a report covering a number of issues in publishing, such as the "we have one minority story this year and you're all the same, so we're good" and "let's promote this one author of color this year and then never support them again so they never sell another book." (https://pen.org/report/reading-between-the-lines/)
Publishers also do not support their POC authors. At a memorable ALA annual conference in 2013, I was hanging out with some author friends and we learned that HarperCollins was having a party and had invited every single one of their white authors at the conference and not a single one of their authors of color. In my years helping to organize the Tucson Festival of Books (second largest book festival in the country), we would regularly request a diverse list of authors and then be told "oh sorry, we asked but they're unavailable, but how about this group of white people?" I'd go and ask my friends personally why they couldn't attend our festival and they'd say "I have no idea what you're talking about; nobody has contact me about doing an event."
I did my PhD dissertation on the publishing industry AND I work in it. Before that I worked adjacent to it, so I've seen it from outside and inside. The white male supremacists commenting here are full of shit.
I'm convinced you didn't read the post. It can be said that ALL new writing is constrained by the safe choices made by publishing companies that prioritize returns, which means that ALL writers (including women and poc!) are prevented from publishing potentially impactful and significant works if they're unable to convince the publisher that they'll be profitable. As for the collage, it's really easy if you try: the author is pointing out that because they're designed to optimize sales they're formulaic and safe, and almost indistinguishable from one another at a glance. Whether the works are written by women or poc is not a factor because that's not what the author is calling attention to. It's a short post, you should definitely read it.
Sarah, I agree with this. While I have my beefs with all the colors and fonts on book covers today, these novels were a poor choice to illustrate the essay. Such a Fun Age was long listed for the Booker Prize, and The Vanishing Half was long listed for the National Book Award— hardly rewards for formulaic plots. Dear Edward was one of the most original and moving novels I’ve read in years.
I like Ted, but his arguments are often reductive to the point of sloppiness. This is a good example that you pointed out. His observation about all books looking the same is far more a reflection of how books are marketed, something that authors don’t control and bears little reflection on what they wrote. To be fair, you can’t blame the marketing department as they are doing what works to sell books and will move on to something else when the gaudy colors and big sloppy fonts stop working.
This comment is spot on - the stereotype about women reading silly, inconsequential books is more than off set by the prevalence of male fantasy - military adventure novels dating back to Tom Clancy and his countless imitators. It’s gotten to the point that you can almost safely assume you’re reading literature based on the absence of automatic weapons, and super-secret elite warriors.
As you well know, this is true of music as well. The big labels only want a few big stars, who generally make good money, while all the rest make pennies. Corporate business (and private equity) is now all about wealth extraction. "Content," and those that produce it, are just something that is necessary to the process, and even those are quickly being replaced by much-lower-cost AI. It's going to get worse before it gets better, if it ever does.
You mentioned the Wasserman meeting with publisher being the start of the book publishing downfall. Can you share a date when you think the music/record industry turned on itself?
Just curious.
Speaking of newspapers writing indie book reviews...
Sad news in Pittsburgh this week, too. No, not the Steelers!
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is ceasing publication May 3 of this year. Pittsburgh has a population of 300K but the metropolitan area is 2.4M. I cannot imagine a city of that size being without a newspaper.
Today the major phone carriers went down Verizon, T Mobile and AT&T. I drove to Verizon as I thought it was our phones acting up after a software update, but the lot there was jammed.
Could barely get in. Then, I found out about the outage. People are concerned about communicating with one another, and being in the loop news-wise. I hope anyway. I hope they weren't all there because the could not access TikTok or Facebook or other social media platforms.
Maybe start an online book-club, Ted. Suggest a book a month. I read a good fictional novel this past summer. The Raindrop Crossing: A Storm Is Coming by Kristopher Hull. He is also a musician playing classical music all over NYC by PUSHING his piano around the city. He said he can push it 50 miles, but one step stops him. Here is a link to his website, https://https://www.pianisterrant.com/ He created Pianist Errant after reading Don Quixote and of his being a wandering knight, the Knight Errant.
This is happening in many industries where publishers have grown so large that the only projects that move the needle revenue wise are giant productions that take no creative risks. For example, AAA video games have gone the same way, where huge publishers publish games that cost $100s of millions to produce because that’s the scale they need to deliver meaningful revenue, but those games end up being bloated slopware and then Clair Obscur (created for $10mm by a small indie team) is the breakout hit of the year.
Consolidation is the culprit. And it didn't just happen in publishing. A generation or two ago, healthy industries had many players. Now, each industry is dominated by two, three or four huge behemoths. Airlines, auto manufacturers, retailers, meat packers, appliance manufacturers, etc.
And why? Because 70% of the money in circulation has been printed in the past 20 years. That money needed to go somewhere and Wall Street, always looking to make a fortune without producing anything, steered the money to the multinational corporations. Not for expansion or R&D, but for financial engineering purposes, namely, mergers and acquisitions. Corporations, instead of growing through innovation, grew by swallowing each other up. So instead of Chrysler, Fiat, Jeep, Maserati, Opel, Peugeot, and Dodge, you have Stellantis, the single owner of them all. People ask why the cars today all use the same color pallet. Now you know.
Without innovation, we're trapped in the movie "Groundhog Day". Instead of everyday being new, we get recycled stuff from yesterday, over and over again, only from by bigger distributors. Ted mentions a conversation from 1995. Well, think about a Law & Order episode from back then. Lenny Briscoe, Ray Curtis, Jack McCoy and Claire Kincaid. Picture your current self being transported back into those episodes, a visitor from 30 years into the future. Would you really look that much out of place? Now think of someone from 1975 transported back to 1945. Would you say the same thing?
I suspect those covers look the way they do because they’re meant to serve primarily as eye-catching thumbnails online, such as when browsing Amazon. The colors and large type, and lack of any concrete imagery, stand out when shrunk down. As someone who grew up on sci-fi/fantasy mass-market paperbacks in the ‘70s, I miss those wonderful covers by Michael Whelan, Jeff Jones, Frazetta, etc. They’ve been replaced by typography.
I agree with this analysis 100%. The other thing that TG doesn’t mention but that plays a big role is the politicization of the publishing process. Too many of the gatekeepers at the different publishing houses are women who push a kind of feminist groupthink that turns off male readers and writers. Just sayin’ . . .
I'll keep bringing up the Lindy effect. Books that have been around >20 years and that come across word of mouth from your IRL or virtual sources(some obviously worth paying attention more than others). From a 71 y.o.
The "home run" mandate doesn't sort with publishing history. As your story suggests, a surprising percentage of evergreen books were turned down by 30, 50, even 125 publishers (as in the case of ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE). Publishers who rely on home runs readily admit that they don't have a clue as to which books will sell. But it gets worse. They don't even TEST manuscripts with readers before making their decision, despite the high stakes they've created for themselves. They behave much like Dick Rowe of Decca Records, who turned down The Beatles just before they hit it big. "Guitar bands are on the way out," he insisted. Never mind their actual talent or the passion of their fans.
The most obvious problem is that women gatekeepers in publishing have almost completely stopped male writers from even being considered. No new white males are being considered. History proves they are the best writers. Men don't want to read the trashy slop out there now. We thankfully have many hundreds of excellent books to choose from among white male writers of the past (sorry, not sorry). The Gomez woman in the comments below has it completely backwards. Laughable and pathetic. Just another industry that has been destroyed by DEI.
Incidentally I just took a look at the current NY Times bestseller lists and men are well represented, including holding 11 of the top 15 on the hardcover nonfiction list. At least 7 of the slots on the fiction list are held by men, depending how you count books with a man and a women listed as co-authors.
What would you consider an acceptable percentage of books written by men to be? 100%?
I don't know what NYT bestseller list you are quoting, but on today's list only 4 men are represented in the NYT Top 15 fiction, and in non-fiction, 10 of 15 were men. But nearly all of the writers in both categories have been around a long time, such as John Grisham, and in non-fiction it's lefty news readers like Andrew Sorkin and senators and former presidents' wives and Epstein victims.
Quit pretending like there hasn't been discrimination against new straight white men in publishing since the 1990s. What's the correct percentage you ask? In America, it should be at least 30% straight white males published every year (it's been close 0% each year for decades), and if history is any guide, that minority 30% white males would dominate the top of the best seller lists. But, we have no young or new white male fiction writers, so our culture sucks and we have Cluster B women and their male cucks like you living in a feminist fantasy world where it's OK to try to run over a federal officer and then whine, "Why did you use real bullets?"
White male writers being suppressed ranks at about 99,999 on a list of the top 100,000 things I’m worried about right now. We have ICE goons murdering innocent citizens in the streets of Minneapolis and our President and Vice-President blatantly lying about it, and you’re talking about DEI ruining things? Bro, the white male backlash is ascendant now, haven’t you noticed?
Why not? The person I responded to is claiming that straight white men are being oppressed and I was claiming in response that we are in the middle of a straight white male backlash against the gains made by other groups. It’s political whether you like it or not.
Or do you believe that writing and other arts exist in a hermetically sealed vacuum that has nothing to do with the wider world around them?
This article is exactly why I’ve given up on the traditional route of publishing my poetry.
Why would I continue to be to be rejected by magazines with no readership only to then have my book be rejected by publishers unwilling to “invest” in anything unproven.
Thank you so much for this post. It expresses everything I observe and feel about the industry right now. One of the things I love most about Paris (where I am currently living) is that there are a couple of independent bookstores on every block. I have never seen so many bookstores anywhere. No chains, just tons and tons of every kind of bookstore. It helps that the country will not allow Amazon to undersell bookstores. Prices are fixed and cannot be lowered online. So there is no advantage to Amazon and thus people go to actual stores. It helps.
Local indie bookstores play a crucial role for new authors. I was turned down by local publishers, so I self-published my first novel. A local independent bookstore let me stock some copies and allowed me to hold a reading. I read an excerpt, played some music. The result was my book was a summer best seller at their stores. One of the clerks told me I had more people there than some signed authors do. This success wouldn't have happened without the help of this independent bookstore.
I love this story. Thank you for sharing it.
You're welcome. There's always room for hope, especially when one acts.
Just loafing around college in the mid-70s I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Catch 22, Sometimes a Great Notion, A Clockwork Orange, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance...and multiple books by Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Walker Percy. All these were powerful influences on the culture at large, contemporary writers writing about contemporary issues and concerns. You would go to parties and people will talk about books as much as they did music. I feel sorry for those who missed it. Nothing like that exists now.
I've been working in the small independent book business since the late '70s with Fiction Collective/FC2, Douglas Messerli's Sun and Moon Press (first publisher of Paul Auster's fiction), and John O'Brien's Dalkey Archive Press. FC2 still exists. It celebrated its 50th birthday two years ago. It's books are still wonderful and still challenging (Joanna Ruocco, Aimee Parkison, Sarah Blackman, and Ray Levy). Dalkey Archive is with Deep Vellum Press in Texas now. And there is still Graywolf, Coffee House, and a few others that got their start mostly in the late '70s. The problem is visibility. The big five presses generate interest through advance notice on NetGalley, but small presses can't afford it. How this will ever get better is beyond me. One bright spot is Melville House Publisher. It is doing political, social, cultural, and art books in a brave and unique way. Check their list. Buy some books.
And sadly I don't think any authors like those you mentioned exist today
Perhaps there are, but they can’t get published. Shame.
I read books like Jude the Obscure, Sense and Sensibility, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Anna Karenina while walking to work (no car) as a young adult in the late 90s. It didn't seem an odd thing to do, at the time.
Yeah people act like, if you tell them you read, you're a effing wizard! With these amazing powers to scroll your eyes back and forth and up and down these tomes of knowledge and not immediately jettison yourself to the nearest screen to look at -- like they do.
My husband belongs to a local writers’ (!) group and I went with him once to a small get together. Someone asked me if I write too, and I said, no, I read, mostly classics, with people from all over the world on Substack, and we discuss them. They looked at me like I was from outer space.
You're a treasure Donna!
Thank you!
Almost all men. Interestingly, most of my most recent favorite books have been men. There is something wildly broken when a white man can't get a fiction book published.
Here's a perfect example of the corporatization you're talking about:
When I was a senior editor at Avon Books, we were bought by HarperCollins in 1999. The first change they made was to give us a new p&l to use. It was exactly like our old p&l with one thing added: a $20,000 skim for Harper from every book, regardless of sales projections. It was pointed out to Harper that we were primarily a mass market publisher (they wanted us for our romances), and mass market worked because each month our list was set up like a baseball organization. You'd have 1-2 super lead titles and 3 general leads (the major league team), then genre leads (AAA), then increasingly smaller books in each genre (for example, Mystery 1, Mystery 2 and Mystery 3, your low minors). Ideally, you'd build an author from a genre title to a genre lead to an overall lead. The best part of the system was that a book could save your month from any position; the leads might tank, but some book from Columbus would come up and sell 100K+ copies (looking at you, TV tie-in edition of CHRISTY). Charging each book $20K, like a mobster taking his cut out of a pot in an illegal poker game, would make it financially impossible to publish most of these books, most of which we didn't pay anywhere near $20K for. I don't think Harper cared.
Soon I didn't either. Their second act was to lay me off. And now mass market publishing is basically dead.
I've made a career out of self-publishing—15 yrs, 2 pennames, audiobooks, foreign rights, etc.
The midlist author is now a self-published author.
Self-publishing is also where the readers can find not just the stories that publishers won't publish, but whole *genres* that publishers won't publish (especially now in the context of publishers pulling back on LGBTQ stories).
PLEASE write your queer stories, your Weird stories, your hopepunk & solarpunk stories, your stories of a better world & our broken one, of healing & liberation. And if you can't find publishers for your radical stories (or want to get them out faster and with more control), please consider self-publishing. I really want to encourage folks to self-pub in these repressive times.
Your stories don't do any good in a drawer.
For anyone wanting to support indie bookstores (which are growing btw), Bookshop.org sends a portion of sales to the indie bookstore of your choice. Libro.fm is the same for audiobooks.
I'm just here to ask you to do some introspection about your choice to throw mostly authors who are women and people of color into your little collage without considering that they already face an uphill battle in the publishing industry when it comes to legitimacy, sales, and reviews when you could have highlighted, say, how ten white dudes all write books that sound identical AND look identical instead. While you're at it, perhaps ask yourself why you decided to play into stereotypes about women reading silly, inconsequential books when, again, you could have talked about your own demographic instead.
The collage is what one sees upon entering the book store. No way around it. I see the same “collage” in book stores.
Interesting; many people say exactly the opposite, that women and people of color are the only ones getting published these days. What uphill battles do women and people of color have in the publishing industry?
The only people who say that are people who are textbook examples of "when you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression." Because they've heard of like two POC authors, they flip out and insist that instead of the likelihood that their own book is just not interesting or well written, they're being rejected because they're poor little oppressed white men. That doesn't make it true. You've seen those stats about how when women speak something like 20% of the time, men perceive them as speaking 80% of the time? It's that same phenomenon; white people have to tolerate hearing about like three people of color and they act like we're taking over the world and coming to destroy them.
POC are still far less likely to be published and still face "sorry, we already have one Asian book this year so we're good"-type rejections. The hashtag #publishingpaidme revealed that POC receive vastly lower advances for their books, even when the authors are award winners and bestsellers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PublishingPaidMe). A debut white author is more likely to receive a six-figure advance than a brown author with ten solid book sales and multiple awards. CCBC at the University of Wisconsin does a count of all children's and YA books published in the US and Canada each year and their numbers reveal that books about POC characters still only make up at most about 15% of what's published, depending on how you run the numbers and when you remove animal and other non-human characters (https://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/literature-resources/ccbc-diversity-statistics/). The Ripped Bodice runs similar numbers on romance published and it is still overwhelmingly white (https://www.therippedbodice.com/state-racial-diversity-romance-publishing-report). Lee & Low in conjunction with Boston University have done multiple studies on staffing at publishing houses and review journals and it's still overwhelmingly white (over 70%) and the C-suite is overwhelmingly male (https://www.leeandlow.com/about/diversity-baseline-survey/dbs3/). PEN America also released a report covering a number of issues in publishing, such as the "we have one minority story this year and you're all the same, so we're good" and "let's promote this one author of color this year and then never support them again so they never sell another book." (https://pen.org/report/reading-between-the-lines/)
Publishers also do not support their POC authors. At a memorable ALA annual conference in 2013, I was hanging out with some author friends and we learned that HarperCollins was having a party and had invited every single one of their white authors at the conference and not a single one of their authors of color. In my years helping to organize the Tucson Festival of Books (second largest book festival in the country), we would regularly request a diverse list of authors and then be told "oh sorry, we asked but they're unavailable, but how about this group of white people?" I'd go and ask my friends personally why they couldn't attend our festival and they'd say "I have no idea what you're talking about; nobody has contact me about doing an event."
I did my PhD dissertation on the publishing industry AND I work in it. Before that I worked adjacent to it, so I've seen it from outside and inside. The white male supremacists commenting here are full of shit.
You nailed, Sarah. Thanks for taking the time to explain.
I'm convinced you didn't read the post. It can be said that ALL new writing is constrained by the safe choices made by publishing companies that prioritize returns, which means that ALL writers (including women and poc!) are prevented from publishing potentially impactful and significant works if they're unable to convince the publisher that they'll be profitable. As for the collage, it's really easy if you try: the author is pointing out that because they're designed to optimize sales they're formulaic and safe, and almost indistinguishable from one another at a glance. Whether the works are written by women or poc is not a factor because that's not what the author is calling attention to. It's a short post, you should definitely read it.
yeah no I read it. You obviously weren't able to understand my comment, however.
Sarah, I agree with this. While I have my beefs with all the colors and fonts on book covers today, these novels were a poor choice to illustrate the essay. Such a Fun Age was long listed for the Booker Prize, and The Vanishing Half was long listed for the National Book Award— hardly rewards for formulaic plots. Dear Edward was one of the most original and moving novels I’ve read in years.
I like Ted, but his arguments are often reductive to the point of sloppiness. This is a good example that you pointed out. His observation about all books looking the same is far more a reflection of how books are marketed, something that authors don’t control and bears little reflection on what they wrote. To be fair, you can’t blame the marketing department as they are doing what works to sell books and will move on to something else when the gaudy colors and big sloppy fonts stop working.
This comment is spot on - the stereotype about women reading silly, inconsequential books is more than off set by the prevalence of male fantasy - military adventure novels dating back to Tom Clancy and his countless imitators. It’s gotten to the point that you can almost safely assume you’re reading literature based on the absence of automatic weapons, and super-secret elite warriors.
What?
Give examples...
of what? The collage he put together is right there
I can see that...
I wanted to hear about your examples, not simply railing about someone else's examples...
my examples of what?? Your query makes no sense. I was taking issue with a specific thing Gioia did; what are you asking for an example OF?
Okay lets just leave it at that then.
As you well know, this is true of music as well. The big labels only want a few big stars, who generally make good money, while all the rest make pennies. Corporate business (and private equity) is now all about wealth extraction. "Content," and those that produce it, are just something that is necessary to the process, and even those are quickly being replaced by much-lower-cost AI. It's going to get worse before it gets better, if it ever does.
Dear Ted,
You mentioned the Wasserman meeting with publisher being the start of the book publishing downfall. Can you share a date when you think the music/record industry turned on itself?
Just curious.
Speaking of newspapers writing indie book reviews...
Sad news in Pittsburgh this week, too. No, not the Steelers!
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is ceasing publication May 3 of this year. Pittsburgh has a population of 300K but the metropolitan area is 2.4M. I cannot imagine a city of that size being without a newspaper.
Today the major phone carriers went down Verizon, T Mobile and AT&T. I drove to Verizon as I thought it was our phones acting up after a software update, but the lot there was jammed.
Could barely get in. Then, I found out about the outage. People are concerned about communicating with one another, and being in the loop news-wise. I hope anyway. I hope they weren't all there because the could not access TikTok or Facebook or other social media platforms.
Maybe start an online book-club, Ted. Suggest a book a month. I read a good fictional novel this past summer. The Raindrop Crossing: A Storm Is Coming by Kristopher Hull. He is also a musician playing classical music all over NYC by PUSHING his piano around the city. He said he can push it 50 miles, but one step stops him. Here is a link to his website, https://https://www.pianisterrant.com/ He created Pianist Errant after reading Don Quixote and of his being a wandering knight, the Knight Errant.
I'm rambling... have a great day everyone!
Of all things, this just popped up on a feed... Rick Beato and Jim Barber talking about the demise in 1996 of the music business
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1464265954602724
This is happening in many industries where publishers have grown so large that the only projects that move the needle revenue wise are giant productions that take no creative risks. For example, AAA video games have gone the same way, where huge publishers publish games that cost $100s of millions to produce because that’s the scale they need to deliver meaningful revenue, but those games end up being bloated slopware and then Clair Obscur (created for $10mm by a small indie team) is the breakout hit of the year.
look at the bright spot, there are enough unread books, unseen movies, and unlistened to music, to last most of us the rest of our lives...
The back catalogue in all the Arts is indeed the bright spot!
Consolidation is the culprit. And it didn't just happen in publishing. A generation or two ago, healthy industries had many players. Now, each industry is dominated by two, three or four huge behemoths. Airlines, auto manufacturers, retailers, meat packers, appliance manufacturers, etc.
And why? Because 70% of the money in circulation has been printed in the past 20 years. That money needed to go somewhere and Wall Street, always looking to make a fortune without producing anything, steered the money to the multinational corporations. Not for expansion or R&D, but for financial engineering purposes, namely, mergers and acquisitions. Corporations, instead of growing through innovation, grew by swallowing each other up. So instead of Chrysler, Fiat, Jeep, Maserati, Opel, Peugeot, and Dodge, you have Stellantis, the single owner of them all. People ask why the cars today all use the same color pallet. Now you know.
Without innovation, we're trapped in the movie "Groundhog Day". Instead of everyday being new, we get recycled stuff from yesterday, over and over again, only from by bigger distributors. Ted mentions a conversation from 1995. Well, think about a Law & Order episode from back then. Lenny Briscoe, Ray Curtis, Jack McCoy and Claire Kincaid. Picture your current self being transported back into those episodes, a visitor from 30 years into the future. Would you really look that much out of place? Now think of someone from 1975 transported back to 1945. Would you say the same thing?
I suspect those covers look the way they do because they’re meant to serve primarily as eye-catching thumbnails online, such as when browsing Amazon. The colors and large type, and lack of any concrete imagery, stand out when shrunk down. As someone who grew up on sci-fi/fantasy mass-market paperbacks in the ‘70s, I miss those wonderful covers by Michael Whelan, Jeff Jones, Frazetta, etc. They’ve been replaced by typography.
I agree with this analysis 100%. The other thing that TG doesn’t mention but that plays a big role is the politicization of the publishing process. Too many of the gatekeepers at the different publishing houses are women who push a kind of feminist groupthink that turns off male readers and writers. Just sayin’ . . .
A hard take but boy does it have validity. But the question is "do men read today?"
I'll keep bringing up the Lindy effect. Books that have been around >20 years and that come across word of mouth from your IRL or virtual sources(some obviously worth paying attention more than others). From a 71 y.o.
The "home run" mandate doesn't sort with publishing history. As your story suggests, a surprising percentage of evergreen books were turned down by 30, 50, even 125 publishers (as in the case of ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE). Publishers who rely on home runs readily admit that they don't have a clue as to which books will sell. But it gets worse. They don't even TEST manuscripts with readers before making their decision, despite the high stakes they've created for themselves. They behave much like Dick Rowe of Decca Records, who turned down The Beatles just before they hit it big. "Guitar bands are on the way out," he insisted. Never mind their actual talent or the passion of their fans.
The most obvious problem is that women gatekeepers in publishing have almost completely stopped male writers from even being considered. No new white males are being considered. History proves they are the best writers. Men don't want to read the trashy slop out there now. We thankfully have many hundreds of excellent books to choose from among white male writers of the past (sorry, not sorry). The Gomez woman in the comments below has it completely backwards. Laughable and pathetic. Just another industry that has been destroyed by DEI.
Incidentally I just took a look at the current NY Times bestseller lists and men are well represented, including holding 11 of the top 15 on the hardcover nonfiction list. At least 7 of the slots on the fiction list are held by men, depending how you count books with a man and a women listed as co-authors.
What would you consider an acceptable percentage of books written by men to be? 100%?
I don't know what NYT bestseller list you are quoting, but on today's list only 4 men are represented in the NYT Top 15 fiction, and in non-fiction, 10 of 15 were men. But nearly all of the writers in both categories have been around a long time, such as John Grisham, and in non-fiction it's lefty news readers like Andrew Sorkin and senators and former presidents' wives and Epstein victims.
Quit pretending like there hasn't been discrimination against new straight white men in publishing since the 1990s. What's the correct percentage you ask? In America, it should be at least 30% straight white males published every year (it's been close 0% each year for decades), and if history is any guide, that minority 30% white males would dominate the top of the best seller lists. But, we have no young or new white male fiction writers, so our culture sucks and we have Cluster B women and their male cucks like you living in a feminist fantasy world where it's OK to try to run over a federal officer and then whine, "Why did you use real bullets?"
White male writers being suppressed ranks at about 99,999 on a list of the top 100,000 things I’m worried about right now. We have ICE goons murdering innocent citizens in the streets of Minneapolis and our President and Vice-President blatantly lying about it, and you’re talking about DEI ruining things? Bro, the white male backlash is ascendant now, haven’t you noticed?
This isn't the place to talk about those things, sir.
Why not? The person I responded to is claiming that straight white men are being oppressed and I was claiming in response that we are in the middle of a straight white male backlash against the gains made by other groups. It’s political whether you like it or not.
Or do you believe that writing and other arts exist in a hermetically sealed vacuum that has nothing to do with the wider world around them?
Do you really imagine that your politics are important to anyone here?
No more or less important than the politics of the person I was responding to.
This article is exactly why I’ve given up on the traditional route of publishing my poetry.
Why would I continue to be to be rejected by magazines with no readership only to then have my book be rejected by publishers unwilling to “invest” in anything unproven.
Thank you so much for this post. It expresses everything I observe and feel about the industry right now. One of the things I love most about Paris (where I am currently living) is that there are a couple of independent bookstores on every block. I have never seen so many bookstores anywhere. No chains, just tons and tons of every kind of bookstore. It helps that the country will not allow Amazon to undersell bookstores. Prices are fixed and cannot be lowered online. So there is no advantage to Amazon and thus people go to actual stores. It helps.