bookgrotto

Deeply dispiriting post: testimony from a DOJ antitrust action reveals the entire book publishing industry is celebrity memoirs, established franchise authors like James Patterson, children's books, Bibles, and back catalogues (e.g. Lord of the Rings). Publishing new authors is not even a rounding error; you get the sense it's only done anymore out of a vague sense of obligation, and the moment one of the Big Five decides on the defect strategy, and stops doing that to save a few more bucks, it will end entirely.

It's bizarre to see this being presented as a recent crisis in book publishing. None of this is new or different. The vast majority of the publishing industry has always been this sort of "trashy" disposable publishing. It's why historically publishers would acquire new authors knowing the first book or two would bomb unless the publicity got lucky. Precisely as this article says, the back catalogue gradually starts earning money over time and makes up a significant chunk of both the publisher and an established author's income, which is why it takes ten books or so for an author to have a steady income.

What is different now is partially that fewer people statistically hobby read in general, yes, but mostly that publishers increasingly don't bother investing in writers, either in terms of dedicating publicity to their sales or accepting that multiple books are needed to draw an audience and make a writer profitable. I suspect this is a product of the mergers creating a couple of huge publishers who 'own' all of the authors anyway (as is the idea that a successful book should be moving 500k units, which has never exactly been common). Overhead varies in ways that are complicated in relation to individual books, but an author that sells, say, 10k units or so per book is generally a solid, profitable midlist author. What this sounds like, bluntly, is venture capitalists used to very different industries whining that books are not endlessly fungible in the way that, like, groceries are, and running a profitable publishing business actually takes work and is usually going to make steady returns and not wild exponential profits.

Also KU, etc, have existed for ten years. They aren't some kind of new crisis, in part because the books available are very different from the rest of the publishing industry. Romance publishing has always involved churning out many, many books for romance readers who want to tear through a new book with a similar formula every day, and romance publishers like Harlequin are still doing fine.

Lot of the eyebrow-raising stats in the piece are claimed by employees/literary agents/financers working with the major publishers PRH/Simon Schuster who are advocating for a merger. Lots of contextualisation missing. Re. some of the eyebrow-raising claims, Lincoln Michel has done two very good separate breakdowns about how a lot of it is smoke and mirrors wrongness to build a narrative about an imperiled publishing industry where a major merger between PRH & Simon & Schuster, therefore, doesn't really count as a monopoly.

From a Bookscan analyst in the comments on that piece:

𝐒𝐢𝐡𝐚𝐲𝐚

For every man in your camp, there are thousands somewhere in the West Indies living under the same yoke, chained in fields, pressed on ships, sold into indenture. When they see a sitting governor protected by His Majesty’s Navy, deposed by an alliance of pirates and slaves, how many consider joining that fight? How many thousands of men will flock to Nassau, join your ranks, and help you defend it?

BLACK SAILS 3.05 “XXIII.”

You’ve heard of one shots, now get ready for none shots! It’s when you think of an idea for a fic and then don’t write it

#not to brag but im so fckn good at this

Fanfic tiktok is wild... I see so many people saying shit like "I could never read anything below 60k!!", or "What story can you even tell in under 5k words?" or "A oneshot below 10k isn't even a story!" or "I always filter completed fics by 100k< only!"

And I'm like...

A) which fandoms are you reading fics for where you have this kind of offerings on the regular?

B) have you heard of short stories? If you truly think every story NEEDS to be longform to connect with people, I sincerely feel sorry for you.

C) Average novel length is between 50k to 100k. I'm sorry, but CONSISTENTLY demanding fic writers to push out fics of that length is insane. Just think about it: YOU DEMAND AUTHORS TO PUT OUT FICS THAT COMPARE TO COMMERCIAL NOVELS IN LENGTH (AND QUALITY) AS A BASELINE.

Yall are wilding.

Lazy cat

Edwin & Charles hugs.

I need a way to say this character makes me feel insane amounts of lust but not in a sexual or romantic way

Guards, dissect this man

No it's too clinical I need something that emphasizes the feral desire to devour

Guards, sous vide this man

Guards, prepare this man for dinner

Guards, rend this man asunder

Guards, hand this man's heart to me on a platter so that I may devour him

Guards, resurrect him I didn't like that last phrasing

my liege is everything okay in there

Leave me be I'm trying to figure out how to metaphorically cannibalize someone

Peacocks are hilarious, really. They really are just like

Tech bros who think digital is forever and that uploading your consciousness to a computer is immortality crack me up. Like bro, you'd be "immortal" on the computer for like a year until your own company sends out some software update that makes you incompatible and whoops, there goes TechBro.soul into the great Recycling Bin in the sky

Not people saying “Fandom has always been like this” in that vent post I made. No. It hasn’t always been like this. Fandom has NEVER been like this until recently and if you were in fandom pre-tumblr purge, pre-twitter, pre-netflix boom, pre-tiktok….then you would fucking know it was nothing like this.

We still had the drive to create. We still sold prints and charms and made zines…but it was never like this.

The introduction of streaming, binge shows that drop all at once, tiktok and vine RIP i still love u vine but you were the beginning of a particularly ugly era) creating this bite sized, quick paced ‘content’ era of creation and it bled out into fucking everything else.

Fandoms didn’t die down when the show ended or the season was over. You didn’t mass unfollow artist, writers or moots just because they changed fandoms. There wasn’t this need to please the algorithm in order for your posts to get seen by people and enjoyed.

Fandoms used to last YEARS. Star Trek is literally the oldest running fandom out there and you got people in there that could care less about the new stuff and still have been happily prancing through their fucking fifty year old fandom today. Hell, even SPN after all it’s fuckups and shitshows has a dedicated fanbase STILL creating tons of art and fic.

There is no patience anymore. No calm feeling of taking in fandom and friends at a pace that which doesn’t make you stressed and is still fun.

Do I blame fandom for this? Of course not, but people are complacent with it and start changing their vocab to accommodate and end up making the situation so deep it cant be fixed.

We call Art & Fic Content now, completely stripping the value of what it is to a level of consumerism instead of personal entertainment & community bonding.

Let OP talk, they’re absolutely right.

Catch me on Ao3 promoting unsafe sex, huge age gaps, adultery, and blasphemy.