The first quote is an encapsulation of the winner's curse principle.
There are all-access services already, like Libby - I wonder what stops them being publisher-killers?
2: She talks about those. The main thing seems to be that the big publishers refuse to participate.
Or let their authors participate, but the big authors who actually sell books have a lot of leverage so that may be starting to change.
Libby has a limited number of copies available. It's no more dangerous to publishing than any other library-based reading.
Anyway, it's a really interesting link!
I just checked on my Libby list. It has big names available to borrow - Tolkien, James Patterson, John Sandford, Lisa Scottoline, various others that the article mentions.
It may depend on the library you are linked too, but my Libby usually shows no available copies for most currently popular books and about half or more of older, but still regarded well, books.
Doesn't say much about distribution. Anne Trubek writes pretty transparently about her experience of running the small press Belt, https://mailchi.mp/hotsheetpub/bloom-books?e=e188238b4d#mctoc3 . Her substack has financially detailed posts also.
11: Neat! A while back on bluesky she posted that they were very open to pitches, and I sketched out an idea for a Berlin anthology (they have a city anthology series), but haven't actually pitched them.
OP: The bit of that article that seems to be getting a lot of pushback among writers/publishers on bluesky is that the median number of books sold is 12. Along with a general caveat was a lot of the the details are from two of the biggest publishers trying to poormouth themselves so as to convince the DOJ (and whatever judges and/or regulators were involved) that their proposed merger was not anti-competitive, when it obviously was.
Also too, the Hollywoodification of publishing and bookselling, which I presume is in the article somewhere, was a problem when I was a bookseller, some 30 years ago. I'm sure it's gotten worse, but it's been a gravitational pull on publishing for quite a while now.
Also also too, I'm still cranky that they're not officially Random Penguin.
Been learning some about romance publishing now that RWM has a book deal. One big difference is that romance books are almost always small advances where you're expected to actually earn out your advance and make money on royalties, so it's not the same high risk high reward model. Also relevant to the subscription model, because my understanding is that historically Harlequin made the bulk of its sales selling themed mail subscriptions to people who read tons of books.
The industry depending on backlist sales and franchise authors isn't very surprising. The huge focus on, and huge advances paid to, celeb authors was - but probably shouldn't have been. Libraries and bookshops are full of celeb memoirs, so there's obviously people reading them. (I was given "The Woman Inside Me" by Britney Spears for Christmas and as a result I can now spell "Britney Spears" correctly, unlike the article's author. How fleeting is celebrity.)
Did someone here recommend "Cyclonopedia" by Reza Negarastani, by the way? It's been on my to-read list for years and I finally bought it and started it.
I haven't got very far but I am not sure whether it is written by a paranoid schizophrenic, written by a normal person who is competently and deliberately imitating the writing of a paranoid schizophrenic, written by someone who is deliberately highlighting the degree to which critical theory writing sounds like the writing of a paranoid schizophrenic, or written by a critical theorist who has no idea that he's coming across like a paranoid schizophrenic.
Is the the book with the holes in it?
19: actually, yes. Except he thinks he's doing something clever by using the words "holey" as a pun meaning sacred and related to holes, and "()hole" as a pun to mean both whole and hole.
I don't remember that part. Just the caterpillar eating and then becoming a butterfly.
19: Yes. Also Tidalick (sp?) the frog. It was so great to find them here. Old friends!
The OP is good and reminded me of Charlie Stross's also good blog series on the practicalities of publishing. That said I found the general The Bankers' Plot Exposed! framing weird; if you like books and authors and think there should be more books and authors, it's a good thing that some of the profits from celebrity memoirs, textbooks, and Bibles get chucked at new titles! I am pretty sure that if I was to propose taxing Stephen King's copyrights to offer advances to new authors I'd get unanimous support round here.
A hypothetical publisher that did only celeb memoirs and no new authors or titles would be able to offer bigger advances to celebrities, keep more of its sales as profit, or some combination. That would strictly be worse for literature. Nobody's tried as far as I know, probably because nobody wants to pass up the chance of getting hits or have a list that's never refreshed.
Also the publishers are doing what the Kelly criterion says they probably should; even if you have a celeb memoir on the hook, there's still some risk it will flop, and if you overcommit to it you're also passing up chances elsewhere, so don't go all-in and do keep some budget for The End of Cats: The Case for Feline Abolition.
Top-rated goodreads review for the Negarestani book:
so its super complex and you gotta know a bit of deleuze an guattari and theres a whole chapter on dust and i know what youre thinking: i could read like five or six animorphs books in the time it takes to read this. well the good news friend is that its worth at least that many animorphs if not more (and yes before you say it that includes the one where they all turn into dinosaurs). startling i know but there you have it
Has anyone read Adorno's book about astrology columns in LA, Stars down to Earth? On my to-read list for a while.
Insects pupa stage is pretty freaky, they spend a short life in one form, grow a shell, melt and reform inside the shell, and emerge differently. Our ability to meaningfully change after infancy is basically placentas for half of us and adult teeth.
23 matches my reaction as well.
FWIW this is a good post on why you need to careful about the precise numbers quoted, but I don't think it changed the big picture: https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-only-a-dozen
Also Doug's point is well taken that there should be "a general caveat was a lot of the the details are from two of the biggest publishers trying to poormouth themselves."
The intended audience of the OP seems to be authors (and prospective authors), which may explain some of the weird framing.
I keep running across rl insdr rprts blaming the Currently Worsening State of Publishing on a legal decision ?about back stock? ?called Thor?. But I haven't come across anyone proposing a legislative fix or carve-out for books*, or saying why one is impossible politically or Constitutionally.
* Heck, maybe it's an unfortunate decision for all industries and appliances would be more fixable if it had gone the other way.
29: Yeah, I was seeing some of that too. Then I spent thirty seconds on research and learned that the decision was handed down when Jimmy Carter was president. So I am kinda skeptical about how much it explains authorial woes 45 years later.
I'm totally hooked on Kindle and the convenience of being able to carry 1000+ books in my back pocket and read any one of them any time I want during any downtime in my day. I'd subscribe to an all-access electronic book service like the first day. I'd save probably 1000+ dollars a year from doing it because I am such a heavy reader and purchaser of books; they couldn't possibly set a widely available price that would equal what I spend on books already. I suspect that it doesn't happen because it doesn't make economic sense; publishers would give up significant revenues by making their full catalog available for a single subscription fee when addicts like me will buy the books individually.