Here’s yet another essay proving how misguided book publishers are (who despite their handicaps still manage to do pretty well). The piece is by Elle Griffin at Elysian Press, and is a good introduction to how trade publishing works, though it is entitled “No one buys books” — a claim which is patently nonsensical. This image from the piece might almost take the place of reading all Ms Griffin’s arguments.

The problem with this sort of crisis crying is that everybody knows what you are saying, and has discounted it a million times already: it’s almost like spending a couple of hours proving that water is wet. That so few books are profitable is not an indication that publishers don’t know what they are doing: it is the nature of the beast — nor does it mean online “publishing” is automatically better. Clearly publishers keep on doing what they do, so the mathematics must be working out over the long run.

Ms Griffin does provide quite a lot of interesting detail though — her post is ultimately a digest of her reading of The Trial, an account of the 2022 trial which prevented Penguin Random House’s attempt to takeover/merge with Simon & Schuster. Here for instance is what we are told are Random House’s “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

Commenting on this list Ms Griffin asks whether “anyone else [is] alarmed that the top tier is book sales of 75,000 units and up? One post on Substack could get more views than that”. Among those not alarmed are all publishing houses. Does the fact that Taylor Swift gets millions of listeners mean that orchestras should never again play anything by Beethoven? Nor of course is Ms Griffin really alarmed or surprised: just a few paragraphs before she has told us “The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies“. Clearly, while we have no objection to sales of 75,000 or more, publishers are by and large not spending much time thinking about such numbers.

It is of course ultimately irrelevant, but Substack* views should not be counted as equivalent to book sales. If we cared enough to invent a system which would register every time someone cracked a book open we might easily find that that chemistry monograph which amassed sales south of 2,000 had indeed been looked at 75,000 times. Just think of all those people picking up a book in a bookstore and putting it down again — online that counts as a view. Book publishing self-evidently remains a viable business. You may think there are better ways to do things, and that’s fine: we manage to survive in the city with both busses and subways. If you chose to live online, that’s just hunky-dory; but if publishers chose to print and publish books it’s not because they are crazy, misguided or motivated by a death-wish; it’s just not what you’d do in the mode of publication which you prefer.

Thanks to John Samples for the link.

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* Substack is an online platform allowing authors to collect payments (or not). Perhaps it goes without saying, but writers on Substack are not in the business of book publishing.