Period.
I know this will trigger a lot of my friends in the indie publishing sphere, and other people who have seen various “exposés” that use bits and pieces, often in questionable context, to make the case that traditional publishing is dying, that some new forces (especially Kindle Unlimited) are in the process of annihilating the “Big Five,” and so on.
Let me start with two bits of cold reality:
1. The Big Five are fine.
2. The supposedly fatal diseases they suffer from are, in fact, nothing at all new and has been the way the business has worked, for good or ill, since at least the 1930s.
I don’t want to beat up on Elle Griffin, an author I don’t know and who, in her article on The Elysian, “No one buys books,” is mostly correct in her reporting, if incorrect in her conclusions, but it’s hard for me to read this article and not respond, so let’s go…
First of all, like the many other articles like it, “No one buys books” is fueled by testimony given in the Random House/Simon & Schuster court case that ended with a judge blocking the merger of these two publishing houses. For a lot of people otherwise unfamiliar with how the publishing business works, this was some scandalous stuff, a description of an unsustainable, lumbering old industry that had lost all its audience, all its profit margin, and all its ability to function.
Elle Griffin begins with this basic takeaway:
I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).
To which my answer is: Yes, I know that, and it’s absolutely nothing new. You can go back, say, a decade at a time and replace all the names and titles in this paragraph and find that nothing has changed at all for as long as anyone can remember. This has always been true, everyone. Always.
And yet these five publishers still account for the overwhelming majority of all books sold in America.
In the section “bestsellers are rare,” there’s some dubious quoting of trial testimony, corrected by Michael Cader at PublishersLunch, in an article you might find behind their paywall called “That Stat Isn’t a Stat.” In it you can read the rest of the exchange about the percentage of books that turn a profit, instead of the attorney’s question being mistaken for testimony.
Cade also provides the real profit figures—at least as real as we’ll ever get, I think.
0.4% or 163 books sold 100,000 copies or more
0.7% or 320 books sold between 50,000-99,999 copies
2.2% or 1,015 books sold between 20,000-49,999 copies
3.4% or 1,572 books sold between 10,000-19,999 copies
5.5% or 2,518 books sold between 5,000-9,999 copies
21.6% or 9,863 books sold between 1,000-4,999 copies
51.4% or 23,419 sold between 12-999 copies
14.7% or 6,701 books sold under 12 copies
In the traditional publishing world it’s highly unlikely you’re going to see any profit at all from a book that sells fewer than 5000 copies. So using that as the cutoff, we see that 87.7% of books published in any given year fail to make a profit.
Is this something new? Some sign of a dying industry? Some death knell for traditional publishing?
No.
I’m no scientician or mathematist but I’m content to round 87.7% up to 90%, which is the profit cutoff I’ve been hearing for the past twenty or thirty years or so.
Publishing is now what it has always been: a painfully low-profit margin enterprise—at least for publishers. This is not a sign of impending collapse. It’s a sign of business as usual.
Are bestsellers rare? Yup.
Have they always been rare? Yup.
Will they continue to be rare? I’m sure they will.
Again, this is how it’s always been.
Always.
Elle Griffin then goes on to expose the shocking fact that “Big advances go to celebrities,” as though that’s an invention of the Britney Spears book and hasn’t always been the case. But it has always been the case. No one is surprised when celebrities or former presidents get the big advances. They need them to pay their ghostwriters, who will cost them somewhere in the low to mid six figures.
A lot of people bought that Britney Spears book, too, by the way.
I’ve already broken down the financial realties between traditional and indie authors (as best I can with Amazon keeping indie sales data a state secret) and what we can expect in terms of advances from the Big Five, so please go back and look at that post. The upshot is that if you’ve been selling hundreds of thousands of books your advances will be higher than if you’re a new, previously unpublished author with no track record. Why is this weird?
And while we’re at it, what other businesses rely on a small number of big hits to pay for the larger number of—not quite “flops,” per se, but less popular releases? Here are a few industries that also operate under that model: movies, videogames, TV, music, fashion, processed foods, software, airlines, tourism, and the stock market.
Please, honestly—pause and think about it.
Why is this either a surprise or some kind of sign of the apocalypse?
And then this one gave me a bit of a chuckle:
Penguin Random House US has guidelines for who gets what advance:
- Category 1: Lead titles with a sales goal of 75,000 units and up
- Advance: $500,000 and up
- Category 2: Titles with a sales goal of 25,000-75,000 units
- Advance: $150,000-$500,000
- Category 3: Titles with a sales goal of 10,000-25,000 units
- Advance: $50,000- $150,000
- Category 4: Titles with a sales goal of 5,000 to 10,000 units
- Advance: $50,000 or less
Is anyone else alarmed that the top tier is book sales of 75,000 units and up?
Well, Michael Cader corrected her on this one:
This comes from an exhibit in conjunction with The Trial. But the full document is a 2012 Crown Publishing Group document that delineates marketing plans for titles at various levels—lead titles; opportunity titles; etc. The document was sent to Madeline McIntosh by Maya Mavjee, who wrote: “I know this is out of date. But it was useful as a guideline. Once everyone, including editors, understood the parameters for each category it made the author care conversation more manageable.”
So, there’s another alarm silenced.
At this point… why keep going? Are we, any of us, surprised by statements like: “Franchise authors are the other big category,” “Publishing houses want a built-in audience,” and “A big audience means publishing houses don’t have to spend money on marketing”?
Name a business that doesn’t operate in precisely the same way.
This one actually made me laugh out loud: “Publishing houses pay for Amazon placement.”
Really? You mean they haven’t been doing that at chain brick and mortar stores for decades and decades and decades? You know that the food companies do that at super markets, too, right? This, my author friends, is why I advise everyone at least try to get your book published by one of the Big Five before you go the indie route. This is visibility you will never be able to pay for on your own. You won’t even get the meeting.
And, “shockingly,” we learn that, “even celebrity books don’t sell…” Any book by or about anyone or anything likely won’t “sell.” We’ve seen that data. That’s the reality of any and every business.
And in the end we’re left with Elle Griffin’s assertions that “Books don’t make money,” except we’ve seen that sometimes they do, and those books pay for all the other books. And because audiences are fickle—and always have been—publishers have to publish as many books as they can and hope that some reasonable percentage of them will sell lots and lots of copies, so at the end of the year the company might turn a profit, which will likely be in the single digits.
So, anyway, summing up: Nothing is substantially different about the book publishing business today than it has been in the almost forty years I’ve been a part of it.
But what about the existential threats, like: “Amazon is the biggest threat to the industry,” which people have been saying since Amazon first went online and it’s no more true today than it was then. Amazon has not just changed the retail book industry, it’s changed the entire retail landscape. They make money by selling other people’s stuff, and their own publishing efforts are not terribly significant. I know people who went to work for them as an “editor” only to find that Amazon’s definition of that job is some version of data mining. Amazon’s imprints are there to respond to user searches that fail to come up with a currently in-print book. If enough of those searches come up, Amazon works to get that book back in print themselves They’re not a publishing company, they are, like the rest of the tech sector, a data company, and this is a tiny sliver of their business. Amazon in no way benefits from the destruction of traditional publishing, or any of the other industries they seek to be the sole retailer of.
And as for a “A ‘Netflix of Books’ would put publishing houses out of business,” which boils down to the Big Five won’t sign on to Kindle Unlimited so they’re going to miss the boat on that and so definitely collapse under their own traditionalism.
Really?
Just like Netflix has destroyed Paramount, Dreamworks, or any other movie studio?
No?
No.
And in the end what Elle Griffin is trying to tell us is that the future of books is entirely in the indie sphere, that there’s no reason to fall into the traditional publishing trap, which is in the process of failing, and the future is 100% independent.
Which is one way of saying that instead of having five big publishers predominately sold by Amazon, we’re hoping for a time when everyone works directly for Amazon.
Are you sure that’s the book business you want?
Are you sure that’s better than the book business that’s been in operation in its current form for at least ninety years and is healthy enough that one company wanted to pay $2.2 billion to buy another one?
I know it sucks to beat your head against the querying process. And for some people it may not be worth it. I work with indie authors all the time. I buy and read indie books—I really do. It’s become a vibrant and exciting landscape for book lovers, and a safe place for authors to do some great work—especially in genres and categories and styles the admittedly “hit-driven” Big Five might be reluctant to give a try. As authors we do have that choice now. It’s not just desperately hope to find an agent then desperately hope your agent will sell your book or then nothing—total failure. But go into traditional or indie publishing (or both) armed with the full story. Know the advantages, not just the disadvantages, of traditional publishing, and make decisions for yourself in a reality-based way, not in a false panic over all the out of context and alarmist takes on this one court case.
Calm down, y’all, and celebrate that we have options, and that includes a healthy and vibrant, if a bit business-as-usual traditional publishing industry.
—Philip Athans
Oh, and from May of 2011: The Publishing Business is Not Dying
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Thank you for this reasonable breakdown of the publishing situation.