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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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’ . . .
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?
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for an excellent post. The publishing industry seems far less concerned about the prose and far more concerned about the "platform." The author may spell cat with a "K," but if he/she is a "known commodity" and has a zillion followers on various sites, the book will sell. With all the celebrities (e.g., athletes, entertainers, politicians, "big-name" reporters/news anchors/ syndicated columnists, et al.) selling safely, why should publishers give a damn about promoting literature and discovering talented new authors?
Old film / record moguls had a gambler’s conviction about what the “people” would like. Years ago a friend who’d just had a No 1 record was in the studio with their band all night. Still high from the thrill of it, he called his A&R guy at his label. “Did you get the track??? What did ya think?”
Guy said “I don’t know, I’m the only one who’s heard it”. And so it went all too often.
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.
And sadly I don't think any authors like those you mentioned exist today
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?"
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'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.
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!
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.
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.
Give examples...
Thank you for an excellent post. The publishing industry seems far less concerned about the prose and far more concerned about the "platform." The author may spell cat with a "K," but if he/she is a "known commodity" and has a zillion followers on various sites, the book will sell. With all the celebrities (e.g., athletes, entertainers, politicians, "big-name" reporters/news anchors/ syndicated columnists, et al.) selling safely, why should publishers give a damn about promoting literature and discovering talented new authors?
The NY publishing world has been a depressing place for decades. That is why I won't touch it. I don't want to be depressed.
Old film / record moguls had a gambler’s conviction about what the “people” would like. Years ago a friend who’d just had a No 1 record was in the studio with their band all night. Still high from the thrill of it, he called his A&R guy at his label. “Did you get the track??? What did ya think?”
Guy said “I don’t know, I’m the only one who’s heard it”. And so it went all too often.