Big Publishing

From Public Books:

Culture industries increasingly use our data to sell us their products. It’s time to use their data to study them. To that end, we created the Post45 Data Collective, an open access site that peer reviews and publishes literary and cultural data. This a partnership between the Data Collective and Public Books, a series called Hacking the Culture Industries, brings you data-driven essays that change how we understand audiobooks, bestselling books, streaming music, video games, influential literary institutions such as the New York Times and the New Yorker, and more. Together, they show a new way of understanding how culture is made, and how we can make it better.

—Laura McGrath and Dan Sinykin

. . . .

After the first lockdown in March 2020, I went looking for book sales data. I’m a data scientist and a literary scholar, and I wanted to know what books people were turning to in the early days of the pandemic for comfort, distraction, hope, guidance. How many copies of Emily St. John Mandel’s pandemic novel Station Eleven were being sold in COVID-19 times compared to when the novel debuted in 2014? And what about Giovanni Boccaccio’s much older—14th-century—plague stories, The Decameron? Were people clinging to or fleeing from pandemic tales during peak coronavirus panic? You might think, as I naively did, that a researcher would be able to find out exactly how many copies of a book were sold in certain months or years. But you, like me, would be wrong.

I went looking for book sales data, only to find that most of it is proprietary and purposefully locked away. What I learned was that the single most influential data in the publishing industry—which, every day, determines book contracts and authors’ lives—is basically inaccessible to anyone beyond the industry. And I learned that this is a big problem.

The problem with book sales data may not, at first, be apparent. Every week, the New York Times of course releases its famous list of “bestselling” books, but this list does not include individual sales numbers. Moreover, select book sales figures are often reported to journalists—like the fact that Station Eleven has sold more than 1.5 million copies overall—and also shared through outlets like Publishers Weekly. However, the underlying source for all these sales figures is typically an exclusive subscription service called BookScan: the most granular, comprehensive, and influential book sales data in the industry (though it still has significant holes—more on that to come).

Since its launch in 2001, BookScan has grown in authority. All the major publishing houses now rely on BookScan data, as do many other publishing professionals and authors. But, as I found to my surprise, pretty much everybody else is explicitly banned from using BookScan data, including academics. The toxic combination of this data’s power in the industry and its secretive inaccessibility to those beyond the industry reveals a broader problem. If we want to understand the contemporary literary world, we need better book data. And we need this data to be free, open, and interoperable.

Fortunately, there are a number of forward-thinking people who are already leading the charge for open book data. The Seattle Public Library is one of the few libraries in the country that releases (anonymized) book checkout data online, enabling anyone to download it from the internet for free. It isn’t book sales data, but it’s close. And such data might help us understand how the popularity of certain books fluctuates over time and in response to historical events like the COVID-19 pandemic (especially if more libraries around the country join the open data effort). Literary scholars have also begun to compile “counterdata” about the publishing industry. Richard So, a professor of English and cultural analytics at McGill University, and Laura McGrath, an English professor at Temple University, have respectively collected data about the race and ethnicity of authors published by mainstream publishing houses. Through their work, So and McGrath each prove that the Big Five houses have historically been dominated by white authors and that they continue to systematically reinforce whiteness today.

While all of this data is powerful in its own right, it becomes even more powerful if we can combine it all together: if we can merge author demographic data with library checkout data or with other literary trends. This promise anchors the Post45 Data Collective, an open-access repository for literary and cultural data that was founded by McGrath and Emory professor Dan Sinykin, and that I now lead as a coeditor with Sinykin. One of the goals of the repository is to help researchers get credit for the data that they painstakingly collect, clean, and share. But a broader goal is to share free cultural data with anybody who wants to reuse and recombine it to better understand contemporary literature, music, art, and more.

. . . .

BookScan’s influence in the publishing world is clear and far-reaching. To an editor, BookScan numbers offer two crucial data points: (1) the sales history of the potential author, if it exists, and (2) the sales history of comparable, or “comp,” titles. These data points, if deemed unfavorable, can mean a book is dead in the water.

Take it from freelance editor Christina Boys, whom I spoke with over email, and who worked for 20 years as an editor at two of the Big Five publishing houses (Simon & Schuster and Hachette Book Group). Boys told me that BookScan data is “very important” for deciding whether to acquire or pass on a book; BookScan is also used to determine the size of an advance, to dictate the scale of a marketing campaign or book tour, and to help sell subsidiary rights like translation rights or book club rights. “A poor sales history on BookScan often results in an immediate pass,” Boys said.

Clayton Childress, a sociologist at the University of Toronto, came to similar conclusions in his 2012 study of BookScan data, in which he interviewed and observed more than 40 acquisition editors from across the country. Bad book sales numbers can haunt an author “like a bad credit score,” Childress reported, and they can “caus[e] others to be hesitant to do business with them because of past failures.”

According to editors like Boys, the sway of book sales figures has siphoned much of the creativity and originality out of contemporary book publishing. “There’s less opportunity to acquire or promote a book based on things like gut instinct, quality of the writing, uniqueness of an idea, or literary or societal merit,” Boys claimed. “While passion—arguing that a book should be published—still matters, using that as a justification when it’s contrary to BookScan data has become increasingly challenging.” In a similar vein, Anne Trubek, the founder and publisher of the independent press Belt Publishing, told me that BookScan data is a strong conservative force in the industry—one of the reasons, though not the only reason, that Belt Publishing stopped subscribing after only one year. Trubek says that BookScan data encourages publishers to keep recycling the same kinds of books that sold well in the past. “I didn’t want to be a publisher who was working that way,” she elaborated. “That was not interesting. I think a lot of Big Five publishing is driven by data, and I think that things end up much more unimaginative as a result.”

Despite these claims, other publishing professionals maintain that BookScan data has not changed their work quite as dramatically. Childress interviewed one editor who explained that he manages to use BookScan data in creative ways to support his own independent choices. Yet even when editors find inventive ways to use BookScan data and to preserve their own aesthetic judgment, it is striking that they must still use and reckon with BookScan data in some form.

Perhaps most importantly, however, it is likely that books end up much more racially homogenous—that is, white—as a result of BookScan data, too. For example, in McGrath’s pioneering research on “comp” titles (the books that agents and editors claim are “comparable” to a pitched book), she found that 96 percent of the most frequently used comps were written by white authors. Because one of the most important features of a good comp title is a promising sales history, it is likely that comp titles and BookScan data work together to reinforce conservative white hegemony in the industry.

. . . .

For all of its extensive influence, most of us outside the publishing industry know surprisingly little about BookScan data: how much it costs, what it looks like, or what exactly it includes and measures. According to a 2009 business study, publishing house licenses for BookScan data cost somewhere between $350,000 and $750,000 a year at that time. Literary agents, scouts, and other publishing professionals can subscribe to NPD Publishers Marketplace for the humbler baseline price of $2,500 a year, and many authors can view their own BookScan data for free via Amazon.

But academics and almost everyone else are out of luck. When I inquired about getting access to BookScan data directly through NPD Group (the market research company that bought US BookScan from Nielsen in 2017), a sales specialist told me: “There are some limitations to who we are permitted to license our BookScan data to. This includes publishers, retailers, book distributors, publishing arms of universities, university presses and author agents. Do you fall within one of these categories?” When I reached out to NPD Publishers Marketplace, they told me the same thing. David Walter, executive director of NPD Books, confirmed that NPD does not license data to academic researchers: “We only license to publishers and related businesses, and … our license terms preclude sharing of any data publicly, which conflicts with the need to publish academic research. That is why we do not license data for the purposes of academic research.”

Link to the rest at Public Books

PG notes that the OP continues to delve into the details and problems of excluded data in BookScan and he recommends reading the article in its entirety.

PG has written about BookScan on several prior occasions. BookScan is presently owned by Hellman & Friedman, a private equity investment firm headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York City and London.

This structure means that BookScan’s activities and finances are watched carefully by a group of numbers guys and numbers gals (although all the big bosses appear to be guys).

A quick look at H&F’s portfolio companies reveal 77 present and past subsidiaries that are all over the board. Insurance, cloud computing, home décor products, home security, customer experience management, energy and metals research, etc., etc.

H&F’s description of the companies it formerly owned/invested in shows more than a few that the company purchased, rehabbed and resold.

While sampling H&F’s past and present portfolio companies, an old term floated into PG’s mind, Pump and Dump. Pump and Dump involves acquiring shares in a publicly-held company, then fraudulently inflating the price of shares of stock of that company and selling out while the share prices are high. Such activity was often followed by a decline in the price of the company’s shares.

Pump and Dump is illegal and PG is not suggesting that H&F’s activities with its past or present portfolio companies constitutes an illegal Pump and Dump scheme.

However, the company does list former portfolio companies it acquired and later sold presumably for a higher price after increasing the health and value of the company.

The traditional publishing industry’s reliance on BookScan for a whole lot of decisions that impact authors is, as the OP implies, close to a religion.

If anyone in the traditional publishing business asked PG for his opinion regarding the tracking of book sales (pigs flying is more likely to occur), he would advise developing an analytics system that sliced and diced sales on Amazon in a large variety of ways.

While not ignoring BookScan completely, PG suspects that publishers would gain more actionable data from watching sales (and returns) of their ebook and print editions in close to real-time from the world’s largest bookstore instead of a collection of traditional retail outlets that have been losing market share in books for a very long time.

In PG’s monumentally humble opinion, those people who regularly purchase books from a physical bookstore are not representative of the book-buying public as a whole.

From The Guardian:

William Boyd, 70, is the author of 26 books, including Any Human Heart (2002) – adapted for television in 2010 with three actors playing the lead role of Logan Mountstuart – and Restless, the Costa novel of the year in 2006. His new book, The Romantic, is set in the 19th century and presents itself as a biographical fiction inspired by the personal papers of one Cashel Greville Ross, a Scots-born Irishman who fought at Waterloo, met Shelley, smuggled Greek antiquities and set out in search of the source of the Nile, among other adventures. Boyd, whom Sebastian Faulks has called “the finest storyteller of his generation”, grew up in Ghana and Nigeria and lives in London and the Dordogne, from where he spoke over Zoom.

Where did this novel begin?
My mid-20s were steeped in Romantic poetry because I spent eight years at Oxford not finishing a PhD on Shelley. I’ve always felt that nothing is wasted, and I was asking myself how I could recycle this material when I read The Life of Henry Brulard, the fantastically modern-feeling autobiography by [the 19th-century French writer] Stendhal, who I don’t think is much read in UK literary circles. He called himself a romantic because he kept falling in love – he felt it was a curse – and I decided that this store of knowledge I had about Romantic poets could gel with writing about someone with that kind of temperament.

How does writing a “whole life” novel – this is your fourth – compare with writing your thrillers?
It’s more challenging. In a tightly structured spy novel like Restless, the plot machinery is part of the allure. Here, the narrative has to seem like it’s happening randomly, like life, yet it can’t flag: Cashel is 82 when he dies, and you can’t write a 5,000-page novel with every month and every year. My other three whole-life novels are told in the first person, so nothing can happen and it’s still interesting because of the voice. I was conscious that writing The Romantic in the third person meant that things had to keep happening, even at the end of Cashel’s life. What I came to understand was that 19th-century lives were incredibly crowded; Anthony Trollope went to Australia twice and America six times.

. . . .

What about your use of faux-real framing devices – what attracts you to those?
When I published my novel The New Confessions in 1987, it was reviewed in the Times by Bernard Levin, who said he was so convinced by the novel’s autobiographical form that he found himself riffling through looking for the photographs. That was where the idea of Any Human Heart was born. I had a kind of test drive for that novel when I used anonymous photographs of real people in my art hoax, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960, a biography of this nonexistent painter, where I got people like [David] Bowie to join the conspiracy. In [Boyd’s 2015 novel] Sweet Caress the photos telling the story of the main character’s life all come from junk shops and websites. It’s an old trope – Daniel Defoe pretended Moll Flanders was a real person – but I want people to think, God, did Logan Mountstuart really exist? I’m trying to show that fiction can grip you in a way that reportage and history can’t.

How has the writing life changed since you began publishing?
The 1980s was a kind of boom period but the challenge for a literary novelist now is to just keep the show on the road. It used to be you could write a novel every couple of years or so and have a perfectly nice bourgeois life. Now the mid-list has gone. The brutal fact is you either sell or you don’t. Friends of mine who’ve written 12 novels can’t get published or their advances have dropped by 80%. It’s a much tougher world.

Link to the rest at The Guardian and thanks to C. for the tip.

The OP describes a currently secret method/process for serializing traditionally-published books and making money from sales of such serials. It’s focused on traditional publishers and is, potentially, a different way of monetizing their backlists.

It is a long-standing practice in traditional publishing to put most titles out to pasture a few years after their initial release. They’ll keep some copies in a warehouse in case someone or someone’s friendly local book seller, contacts the publisher Agatha Christie and similar evergreen authors are among the rare exceptions to this habit.

It is pretty clear to PG that Publishing Perspectives was required to sign a non-disclosure agreement with some teeth in it before being briefed on this method/process, so the OP includes a lot of dancing around, presumably to work around the requirements of the NDA.

From Publishing Perspectives:

Our sources tell us that the company developing this app expects that it will welcome new content as well as backlist, “seeing serialized fiction as representing a major opportunity for publishers to bring new and exclusive content to a rapidly growing storytelling medium while also allowing them to unlock revenue and value from back-catalogue content. The company sees this new revenue opportunity for back-catalogue content as similar to how streaming unlocked new revenue for studios.”

What’s more, the age-demographic shift from that of Webtoon and Wattpad is quite significant. At Wattpad, for example, 90 percent of the platform’s universe of users is GenZ and millennials, and Webtoon’s anchoring aesthetic in comics and graphical storytelling keeps it close to a younger readership, as well. Professionally created and operated channels for adult literature (as well as for nonfiction offerings, for that matter) could provide many publishers the leverage of serialization but for a more mature consumer base.

Publishing Perspectives understands that the development team behind the app is already “in discussion with traditional publishers and bestselling authors” as the project comes together. And we’ll have more details of this new development as they’re made available to us.

But as a final note, it’s interesting to remember that a strong dynamic in backlist sales was observed in many markets during the deepest periods of the world’s coronavirus-related lockdowns. In some markets and demographics, that backlist interest has persisted well beyond the spread-mitigation measures of the early pandemic.

If the new app being described to us can take advantage of that trend, it may arrive with a wind at its back as a new and attractive way for readers to consume backlist as well as new content.

. . . .

Both Wattpad and Webtoon are platforms for the creation and consumption of serialized content, and their combined audience at the time of this report stands at some 179 million users.

Wattpad alone tracks a collective 23 billion minutes being spent monthly by roughly 94 million users, and its user-generated storytelling is what the company calls “webnovels,” written by and for huge communities drawn to serialized stories niched by genres and interests.

Webtoon, however, has two tracks of serialization for its presentation of comic and graphic storytelling.

Webtoon has some user-generated content available, but it also has graphics-industry staffers working with its user-“creators” to produce a class of content with a finished, professional look and feel.
The timing of those serialized releases is coordinated (rather than being posted whenever a user chooses) and Webtoon’s terminology for these properties is “originals,” meaning in this case work that the platform itself is professionally developing and producing.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From Publishers Weekly:

No matter which way you look at it, sales of mass market paperbacks have been in steady decline since 2017. NPD BookScan data shows that unit sales fell 31.5% in 2021 compared to 2017, while the Association of American Publishers put the decline in dollar sales at a more disturbing 42.7% in 2020. Both data sets show more declines occurring in 2022.

To be sure, the mass market paperback format has experienced ups and downs in the past. The last time PW wrote about the prospects for mass market paperbacks, in October 2014, the format was trying to recover from the shock it suffered due to the explosion of cheap e-books, especially in such important areas as romance and science fiction and fantasy. (Asked last week, during the DOJ’s trial to prevent PRH from acquiring S&S, whether he had made reductions in title output following the Random House–Penguin merger in 2013, PRH CEO Markus Dohle pointed to adjusting the number of mass market paperbacks published by Berkley/NAL in response to the flood of 99¢ and $1.99 self-published e-books that hit the market, luring away readers of genre fiction.)

Low prices have always been one of the most important attractions for readers to mass market paperbacks, and that continues to be the case, according to Craig Swinwood, CEO of HarperCollins’s Harlequin subsidiary and CEO of HC Canada. The most recent research, conducted by the company after the worst of the pandemic was over, found price accessibility and portability to be the first- and second-ranked reasons that consumers buy mass market titles.

Jennifer Long, v-p, deputy publisher of Gallery Books Group, the home to Simon & Schuster’s mass market Pocket Books imprint, said pricing is a “very important consideration” for some readers. “As long as those consumers who want mass market continue to support it, we will continue to publish into it or risk losing them as readers.”

All mass market publishers are aware of the price sensitivity around the format, and even as a few publishers have increased the trim size of mass market paperbacks, they are reluctant to go beyond the $9.99 price point. The so-called price cap, especially in a time of rising costs, puts pressure on margins, acknowledged Swinwood, who noted that sales of mass market paperbacks for the company are generally flat, though they still account for about 49% of the publisher’s revenue, down from 59% a few years ago.

The pricing limit is one reason mass market publishers have cut back on their output. Kristin McLean, analyst for NPD BookScan, said a factor in the drop in both mass market title output and sales is the steady migration of what she calls “the next generation” of major romance and mystery/thriller authors from mass market to trade paperback, a format that has had “tremendous growth” since 2017. One author who has undergone such a transition, McLean added, is Colleen Hoover.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From Publishers Weekly:

After months of anticipation, the government’s bid to block Penguin Random House’s acquisition of rival Big Five publisher Simon & Schuster got underway in Washington, D.C., on August 1. It wasn’t exactly an electrifying start.

In opening arguments, there were no surprises. The parties largely stuck to their pre-trial briefs, with the government asserting that a merger would harm authors and the defense insisting on the opposite. Then the government’s first witness, Hachette Book Group CEO Michael Pietsch, took the stand to offer a basic, foundational view of the current competitive landscape in the publishing world, with many a detour into the nuts and bolts of the business.

The result was a sort of meandering publishing 101. In halting, often clipped responses, Pietsch, a 45-year publishing veteran who estimated he has personally acquired between 300-400 titles over his career—and overseen many more acquisitions as an executive—attempted to explain to the court how basic things like book advances and rights auctions work, and how publishers manage their bidding strategies.

But the key points of his testimony involved the competition for book rights, in which Pietsch explained in no uncertain terms that when Hachette loses a book they’ve bid on, they “very seldom” lose it to a publisher outside the Big Five, and even more rarely when it comes books with advances over $250,000, the portion of the market the government is focusing its case on. In fact, Pietsch revealed that Hachette keeps a running list of the books the publisher loses out on over $500,000—called “The Ones That Got Away”—and of the 302 books on the list (at the time the list was entered into evidence) Pietsch told the court that Hachette lost the most to PRH (124), followed by their fellow Big Five publishers in order of size: HarperCollins, S&S, and Macmillan.

Under questioning from the government, Pietsch also outlined the significant advantages that the Big Five publishers hold over their smaller competitors, chief among them their large backlists, cobbled together over decades of acquiring other companies (HBG has made six acquisitions under Pietsch). A bigger backlist means more revenue, and importantly more profitable revenue—and more revenue means more resources, and a greater tolerance for taking risks on higher advances. Hachette derives roughly $300 million a year, roughly a third of its revenue, from backlist sales, Pietsch testified, noting that smaller publishers do not have such a cushion, and later adding that it is “not conceivable” that a new entrant in the publishing business could build a competitive backlist advantage “organically.”

Furthermore, Pietsch explained, the Big Five publishers enjoy other significant scale advantages over other publishers, including more media pull, review attention, as well as marketing and retail advantages. He noted that Amazon Publishing, despite its parent company’s size and influence in the book business, has not emerged as a competitor where book acquisitions are concerned—nor is the self-publishing industry Amazon helped forge. “Anyone can publish a book now, and that’s a wonderful thing,” Pietsch said—but those books and authors simply do not compete with the major publishers.

When finally asked for his take on how for a PRH/S&S merger would impact the industry, Pietsch expressed a litany of concerns. Advances would likely decline, he suggested, as one of “the major houses” would be subsumed, decreasing the number of bidders for a work. Title count would also likely go down, he surmised, as there is likely some redundancy between PRH’s and S&S’s publishing programs that would be eliminated. Pietsch also expressed concerns about the impact on the “variety” of books published and the risk of “homogenization.”

On cross-examination, defense counsel Daniel M. Petrocelli engaged in a few strained exchanges with Pietsch. These included a line of questioning about bidding strategies, which was intended to suggest that PRH would be unwise to pursue a strategy of offering lowering advances because other publishers—including Hachette—would simply step up and win the books, but instead left Pietsch questioning Petrocelli’s logic.

One of the punchier exchanges involved a discussion of the potential buyers for S&S should the merger be blocked—including Hachette, with Pietsch admitting that he would like to see parent company Hachette Livre bid on S&S even though the company did not do so in 2020.

“So you’re not concerned with a 5-4 merger,” Petrocelli remarked, to which Pietsch responded that he was never concerned with a merger taking the Big Five down to a Big Four, but with the creation of one “super dominant publisher” that is “so far out of scale” with the rest of the business, a view shared by many industry insiders. The problem isn’t so much that S&S is being acquired, Pietsch suggested, the problem is that Penguin Random House, already the largest Big Five publisher, was acquiring it.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From The Wall Street Journal:

Famed horror novelist Stephen King took the witness stand in a federal antitrust case on Tuesday, testifying that up-and-coming authors would be harmed if his longtime publisher Simon & Schuster is acquired by larger rival Penguin Random House.

“I came here because I think consolidation is bad for competition,” Mr. King said in a Washington, D.C., courtroom. “That’s my understanding of the book business, and I’ve been around it for 50 years,” he said.

The bestselling author said less-established writers are harmed by corporate consolidation in the industry. As publishers combine, “it becomes tougher and tougher for writers to find money to live on,” he said.

Mr. King’s testimony came on the second day of trial in the Justice Department’s lawsuit challenging Penguin Random House’s planned purchase of Simon & Schuster, a deal valued at more than $2 billion.

The trial is being closely watched by authors, literary agents and publishing-industry executives. Instead of arguing that the deal will increase book prices, the government has focused on author wages, saying writers of anticipated bestsellers likely will receive smaller upfront payments, or advances, if the deal is completed.

Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster have defended the transaction as pro-competitive, saying that author advances won’t be lowered and that Simon & Schuster authors will benefit from access to Penguin Random House’s distribution channels and supply chain.

The German media company Bertelsmann SE, which owns Penguin Random House, agreed in November 2020 to buy Simon & Schuster from ViacomCBS.

. . .

Mr. King testified that he wasn’t reassured by Penguin Random House’s pledges that, if the merger is completed, imprints it owns will continue to compete against imprints owned by Simon & Schuster.

“It’s a little bit ridiculous,” Mr. King said. “You might as well say you’re going to have a husband and wife bidding against each other for the same house,” he said.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal and thanks to S. for the tip

PG notes that Bertlesman is a very large media conglomerate which is owned and controlled by one very wealthy German family, both directly and via a family-controlled trust.

PG suggests that such ownership is usually not conducive to innovation, including lower prices.

From The Nation:

In a remarkable brief filed on July 7 in their ongoing lawsuit, four titans of corporate publishing (Hachette, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Wiley) accused the Internet Archive of stealing, “mass-scale copyright infringement,” and “[distributing] full-text digital bootlegs for free.” Those are pretty wild allegations—especially considering that the Internet Archive’s Open Library operates on the traditional terms that libraries in this country have abided by for centuries. The Open Library loans books, which it owns, to one patron at a time, for a fixed period—just like any other library. Like any public library, the Open Library doesn’t charge money for this service. The main difference is that the Open Library loans e-books online. Each e-book is scanned from a paper copy, and the paper copy is stored away and doesn’t circulate; this practice is called Controlled Digital Lending, or CDL.

One book, lawfully bought or acquired, one scan, one patron at a time—no money changes hands. And yet the publishers’ brief does its best to cast the librarians of the Internet Archive as a gang of thieves and pirates.

In reality, the publishers’ attack on the Internet Archive is a Trojan horse for a very different, and radical, idea: that e-books are fundamentally—legally—different from paper books. If accepted, their argument would remove e-books from the many statutory protections upon which library rights positively depend. That outcome would leave libraries vulnerable to the draconian licensing deals under which e-books are increasingly offered. And libraries would have to pay and pay, in the absence of digital books that can be permanently bought and owned outright.

The publishers’ true goal appears right on page 6:

Controlled digital lending, as practiced by Internet Archive, collapses the boundaries between physical books and ebooks. CDL’s basic tenet is that a non-profit entity that owns a physical book can scan that book and distribute the resulting ebook as a proxy for the physical copy. But this ignores that ebooks are a fundamentally different product from physical books.

They may be a different product, but e-books are still books.

The real stakes in this lawsuit concern not digital piracy but the preservation of library rights; the real renegades here are not the librarians of the Internet Archive but the publishers, who are looking to take a machete to the Copyright Act in order to make their e-book products rental-only, so that libraries—along with you and me and everyone else—will have to keep paying for them forever. Libraries will no longer be independent entities, free to make their own decisions about what to lend; they’ll be limited to whatever publishers want to offer—or not offer.

“We need strong and independent publishers,” says Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, “and we need strong and independent libraries.”

Because the statutory protections for libraries were written decades ago, when technical constraints on copying and distribution were entirely different from what they are now, preserving traditional library rights has presented challenges in the digital age. These issues were always going to be revisited in the courts, one way or another. In fact, in 2011, in her seminal paper on the legal framework that came to be known as CDL, legal scholar Michelle Wu foresaw this very lawsuit:

[P]ublishers have used new technologies to exert control over works beyond the control they had over printed works. They are replacing ownership with licensing, where they can regulate not only the number of users but also the number of uses.… Given this trend toward greater control over material by publishers, it would be remarkable if the industry did not object to libraries’ digitizing printed materials.

Having anticipated the legal pushback from publishers, Wu observed that the spirit of the law is on the side of libraries: The Copyright Clause was adopted not only to protect authors but to promote the advancement of learning and public knowledge. “At the heart of copyright,” she wrote, “is the public good.”

In the years following the publication of Wu’s paper, a score of leading experts on copyright and libraries joined forces to create CDL, a whole legal toolkit for the traditional library lending of e-books developed with exactly these legal challenges in mind. The Internet Archive’s digital lending relies on CDL, and its reasoning is what is really being tested in the lawsuit.

Disingenuously, the publishers’ brief flatly misinterprets the long history and development of CDL: “Internet Archive…has searched for years to find a legal rationale for its radical infringements. Around 2018, it helped manufacture and market a theory called ‘controlled digital lending’ or ‘CDL.’”

“Publishers spend millions of dollars to make books available to the public,” according to their brief, and that is true. Publishers shepherd books into the world, providing a vitally important service for all. They have every right to profit fairly from their work. But they don’t have the right to change the laws protecting libraries.

Public-spiritedness, by the way, is a quality conspicuously missing from this document. Perhaps realizing they’d better choke out a statement of support for libraries in general, they were able to manage the following: “The Publishers deeply value libraries, recognizing that they foster public literacy, serve local communities, and increase the visibility of authors through book clubs, author talks, and other creative means of reader involvement. Libraries support authors by paying for print books and ebooks.”

They sure do! Libraries have become a huge cash cow for publishers, especially during the pandemic, when nobody could visit a physical library. They admit it themselves, in this very brief: “The publishers’ annual revenue from the library ebook market, which is shared with authors, has risen to hundreds of millions of dollars, simultaneously establishing an important market channel for many titles and serving a more digital public.”

I’m a writer, obviously, and I find it entirely startling that these powerful publishers have no discernible sense of responsibility to the public commons, nor of the symbiotic relationship that principled publishers in a free society should have with libraries. They’re supposed to be on the same side: the side of an educated, healthy and informed public. Publishers should be the champions of libraries, not their enemies.

Link to the rest at The Nation

PG says that, to the extent it ever existed, the ideal that publishers should consider the common good, encourage knowledge and art to be widely distributed within the general population, rich and poor, or cultivate new generations of readers has entirely disappeared with the consolidation of publishing into massive international conglomerates in which the managers of individual publishers are far down the hierarchy of corporate power.

Those up higher in these power structures understand messages in dollars, pounds and euros, not in airy-fairy ideals and principles of democratic concerns of the greatest good for the greatest number.

From Publishing Perspectives:

Trade Sales Down 8.9 Percent in April

In its April 2022 StatShot report released this morning (July 11), the Association of American Publishers (AAP) cites total revenues across all categories down 12.6 percent over April of 2021, at US$788.3 million.

The April figures exclude PreK-12, but include higher education course materials; professional publishing; and university presses. PreK-12 data has, once again, been delayed, and the program expects to update when it becomes available.

In year-to-date revenues across all categories except PreK-12, AAP reports that the numbers were down 2.3 percent, at US$3.8 billion for the first four months of 2022.

. . . .

Trade (consumer books) sales were down 8.9 percent in April, at US$685.7 million.

In print formats:

• Hardback revenues were down  16.8 percent, coming in at $232.4 million
• Paperbacks were down 2.8 percent, with $251.9 million in revenue
• Mass market was down 22.0 percent to $14.1 million
• Special bindings were up 2.1 percent, with $12.5 million in revenue

In digital formats:

• Ebook revenues were down 8.3 percent for the month as compared to April 2021, for a total of $84.3 million
• The downloaded audio format was up 5.6 percent for April, coming in at $66.6 million in revenue
• Physical audio was down 47.9 percent, coming in at $1.2 million

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From Publishers Weekly:

Unionized employees of HarperCollins have voted to authorize a strike if the publisher does not agree to a fair contract.

The union, Local 2110 of the UAW, represents more than 250 HC employees in the design, editorial legal, marketing, publicity, and sales departments. According to the union, current contract negotiations with HC management began in December 2021, when a one-year pandemic extension of the contract was set to expire. The union is bargaining for higher pay, improved family leave benefits, a greater commitment to diversifying staff, and stronger union protection.

Until a deal is reached, the unions will continue to work without a contract. A union spokesperson no new bargaining session has been set, and no deadline for a strike has been announced.

The negotiations are the first to take place since HC bought the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt trade division, and the union said that it is disputing the company’s refusal to include former HMH Boston-based employees in the bargaining unit or to recognize the seniority of former HMH New York–based staff who now work for HarperCollins. The negotiations also come after HC posted a record year in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2021.

“I worked at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for two years before HarperCollins bought my division in 2021,” said Carly Katz, audio coordinator in a statement. “The company’s current offer isn’t even coming close to accounting for the current rate of inflation. If they can buy a whole division and still have record setting profits, they can raise salaries to match the cost of living.”

Indeed, improving low wages is a major objective for the union. “Most of us earn low salaries that are unlivable in major cities like New York and Boston,” Laura Harshberger, a senior production editor in Children’s Books and the union chairperson, said in a statement. The union is comprised mainly of women who have an average salary of $55,000.

“All of our proposals are to make HarperCollins a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace,” Harshberger said. “The company says publicly it supports diversifying the industry, but management is refusing to meaningfully address the low pay rates or codify policy changes in our union contract. Our members are tired of empty gestures. They want meaningful change.”

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

It’s not pretty working for an organization that is in long-term decline. PG suspects note about the last fiscal year’s financial reports reflects Covid shutdowns, staff pruning and a lot of help from Amazon selling their books.

A union won’t save employees if the enterprise is on a long-term downsizing path.

PG seldom posts two items from the same source during a single day, but he couldn’t pass on Big Publishing at its finest.

Plus, this is the first time PG recalls the head of Amazon Publishing being quoted in a story that’s all about New York Publishing and its idea of smart marketing, e.g. selling to people exactly like themselves or how they imagine themselves if they’re not the CEO.

From The Wall Street Journal:

The siren call of the “beach read” finally reached Jennifer Weiner, who long considered the term dismissive of writing associated with women.

“After years and years of, ‘This is sexist,’ I was like, ‘You know what? If I can’t beat them, join them,’ ” said Ms. Weiner, whose new book out this spring, “The Summer Place,” is set on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

“I wanted to be at the beach,” said the author, who wrote the novel during the pandemic, the last in her three-book Cape Cod series. “I wanted to be anywhere but stuck in my house with my family.”

Beach reads, loosely defined as any engrossing tale released for summer, are under pressure to perform. June has been the second-biggest month for adult fiction sales for the past decade, according to NPD BookScan, and book sales overall soared during the pandemic. Now, as vacations start in earnest with the Fourth of July holiday, publishers are trying to hang on to those numbers.

Novels with beachy covers are so popular, book industry executives say, publishers put bare feet and glistening seas on all manner of titles.

“Authors perhaps have a darker element only to find that our covers are enormously beachy and sunshiny,” said beach-read novelist Jane Green. “Publishers think that a beachy cover will pull in readers even when it has little to do with the story.”

Ms. Green had a working title of “The Hemlock Sisters” for her 2017 novel about a dying mother who calls her estranged daughters back home to assist in her suicide. It ended up with the title “The Sunshine Sisters” and features an aquamarine sea on its cover.

Last summer’s hit “Malibu Rising” by Taylor Jenkins Reid has a cover of surfers shot from above on a seductive blue ocean, but its tale of sibling bonds after a mother’s drowning death is far from a Barbie beach party. This year, “Vacationland” by Meg Mitchell Moore uses a similar image—an overhead view of an ocean just begging the reader to jump in—while the book explores the impact of cancer and Alzheimer’s disease on its characters.

Ms. Reid and her publisher declined to comment and attempts to reach Ms. Moore and her publisher were unsuccessful.

“There’s a reason publishers lean this way,” said Sarah Gelman, editorial director of Amazon Books. “Beach books sell well when people who don’t have time to read say, ‘This is the one book I’m going to pack when I go to the Jersey Shore.’ ”

Successful beach-read authors know what readers are looking for. “They want to hear the scrape of a palmetto frond against a screen door,” said Mary Kay Andrews, author of the new book “The Homewreckers,” about a widow who stars in a beach house renovation reality show. “They want to see those curtains blowing in the summer breeze, and they want to hear the waves lapping at the shore.”

Ms. Andrews mostly writes in her Atlanta home with a scented candle she said “smells like waves” to get into a nautical mood.

Others ponder how to put “summer” in their book titles or find new ways to describe sand. Ms. Weiner pictures the “splayed fingers of a clutching hand” on a shrub-covered sand dune, Nancy Thayer describes an “elbow of sand” while Elin Hilderbrand writes about a “long arm of golden sand.”

“I’ll just be like, ‘I hope I haven’t said this before,’ ” said Ms. Hilderbrand, a novelist who is so associated with Nantucket, Mass., she wrote sightings of herself into her latest book, “The Hotel Nantucket,” which came out in June. (The “local author” is spotted by the ferry and at a bar.)

Sunny Hostin, the legal journalist-TV host who wrote the 2021 bestseller “Summer on the Bluffs,” entered the beach-read genre because she saw it lacking diversity. She set her novel in Oak Bluffs, Mass., a town on Martha’s Vineyard with a history as a summer escape for wealthy Black families.

“I think a lot of people underestimated this book,” Ms. Hostin said of the first novel in her beach-set trilogy. “I knew there was an audience.”

Beach-read writers make efforts to not tread on other authors’ turf. A swath of North Carolina’s Outer Banks often appears in Kristy Woodson Harvey’s books. Isle of Palms, S.C., is author Mary Alice Monroe’s territory. Spots on the Georgia coast belong to Ms. Andrews.

Ms. Green set her 2008 drama “The Beach House” and her 2015 novel “Summer Secrets” on Nantucket. She has since switched to Westport, Conn., where she has a home by the water.

“Today, I would never dare write about Nantucket,” Ms. Green said. “Nantucket is owned by Elin and should be owned by Elin.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The Wall Street Journal:

Simon & Schuster is giving away two books meant to help readers engage with people holding opposing views as the country is divided on issues ranging from abortion to gun rights.

The book publisher, a unit of Paramount Global, is making the digital audiobook and ebook editions of Amanda Ripley’s “High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out,” and Anna Sale’s “Let’s Talk About Hard Things: The Life-Changing Conversations That Connect Us” available for free until the end of July.

Jonathan Karp, the publisher’s chief executive, said it is the first time to his knowledge that Simon & Schuster has given away books outside of charitable efforts—a decision that he said was prompted by a flurry of recent events that further worsened divisions.

“The Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade was on my mind, along with the debates Americans are having about guns, the 2020 election, Jan. 6, climate change and immigration, to name just a few of the issues that divide us,” he said.

Both Ms. Ripley and Ms. Sale are on board with the plan and agreed not to receive royalties for the copies that are downloaded, Mr. Karp said.

“High Conflict” and “Let’s Talk About Hard Things,” which both came out in 2021, have sold more than 19,000 print copies and more than 11,000 print copies respectively so far, according to book tracker NPD BookScan.

Both books are “trying to help us understand how we got to a place where we have turned on each other,” said Ms. Ripley, a journalist and host of the weekly Slate podcast “How To!” She said, “What is a better way to handle conflict?”

She said giving away the books was akin to paywalled news sites making health-related content available to all during the pandemic.

Ms. Ripley said “High Conflict” argues that “there is a kind of malignant conflict that becomes conflict for its own sake, in which everyone ends up worse off, as opposed to ‘good conflict,’ which is healthy and generative.”

“Let’s Talk About Hard Things,” Ms. Sale’s debut book, focuses on how to have thoughtful conversations about such subjects as money, death and identity, while being able to listen to other opinions.

. . . .

“Publishers see that the books addressing the ideological extremes often sell the best, even though polling indicates that a majority of Americans are somewhere in the middle,” Mr. Karp said. “What’s needed are more books that show us how to find common ground.”

Paramount Global agreed to sell Simon & Schuster to Bertelsmann SE’s Penguin Random House publishing unit for about $2.18 billion in November 2020. The planned sale was later challenged by the Justice Department on antitrust grounds, and a trial is expected to start Aug. 1.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

PG would have been more impressed if S&S had paid the authors of the two free books a reasonable sum to replace the royalties they might be losing under the free book promotion.

When PG checked, “High Conflict” had a Best Sellers Rank of #1,765,731 in Kindle Store and “Hard Things” had a Best Sellers Rank of #1,413 in the Free category of the Kindle Store (PG couldn’t find any non-free ranking info for either title). The authors may have concluded they were not likely to earn out their advances, so going free had no financial downside.

A Wall Street Journal article by itself, is a big boost for the authors’ brands and maybe the authors get S&S brownie points until the Bertelsmann acquisition goes through, at which point, “free” goes out the window forever.

From Publishing Perspectives:

[Multiple Individuals Shared Their Opinions on this Topic]

I was fascinated by the call from the chair of the International Booker Jury, Frank Wynne, for translators to be recognized as equals in terms of cover placement and royalty share.

More or less the first book I published was a translation. I was relieved to discover that the translator was identified on the title page, but not on the jacket.

But before that, I was addicted to translated works, usually in the black Penguin livery reserved for “foreign classics”—Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy, even Machiavelli, although I don’t think I learned  from him as much as I should have. And then to the racier Alberto Moravia and the ever-entertaining Don Camillo series by Giovanni Guareschi. Not to mention the fantastic Asterix and Tintin series.

I think translated books play an enormously important role in furthering our understanding of other countries, other systems, other geniuses.

It’s, therefore unsurprising that the role of the translator is crucial. A bad translation can ruin a book. A great one can allow an author’s words to reach out to a new and bigger readership.

Rewarding translators is a given, as is giving them credit. But this particular announcement got me thinking.

[A Different Person’s Opinion]

It’s not my job to work out what would be best for literary translators, but it would be my strong recommendation that they should avoid sharing any profits from the sales of the books they’ve translated. There may be a few titles for which this would make sense but, at least in the world of translations into English, the translators would find that this would result in having to pay out quite substantial sums to publishers for their share of the losses.

Most translations into English are lucky to cover their real costs, at least in the short term. In fact, most books find it difficult to cover their costs, and translations even more so.

However, it could be that the translators were really asking for a share of the revenue rather than the profit generated. This would make more sense, but I fear that the income from this would in most cases be lower than a typical flat fee and, of course, a lot less certain. It would also lead to translators having to make decisions about which book to translate based on likely sales rather than importance.

In addition, and from the publisher’s point of view, where would this additional royalty come from given the low profitability of translated books in general?

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From Publishers Weekly:

Authors Eliot Schrefer and Brandy Colbert withdrew from separate book appearances within the past year over censorship concerns—Schrefer from the Plum Creek Literacy Festival and Colbert from a Black History Month presentation. Below, they discuss why they took a stand.

Colbert: Eliot, we experienced surprisingly similar situations with book censorship over the past year. First, you were set to attend the Plum Creek Literacy Festival and then withdrew after seeing that your LGBTQ YA book The Darkness Outside Us was missing from the order form—along with another celebrated LGBTQ YA book—and discovering that the host college had a policy to discipline students for “active involvement in a homosexual lifestyle.”

Schrefer: Yes, that captures it! Then, a few months later, you were invited to present to a school district in Texas, except they said a few days beforehand that they didn’t want you discussing your newest book, Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, as it was “too controversial.” When your publisher pushed back, the organizers decided not to censor your presentation, but said they would not purchase Black Birds as part of the book buy-in for students, choosing one of your backlist titles instead. You withdrew.

Colbert: All this at an event that was expressly designed to honor Black authors during Black History Month! Both of our cases seem like soft censorship to me, in that the organizers didn’t object to our presence and overall work, but refused to provide students with access to specific books. I think it’s even more important to push back against this type of censorship, as it’s still quite harmful and can lead to more blatant bans.

Schrefer: Soft censorship is usually invisible, which is why it’s so effective. We both happened to be in situations where it was revealed. Me because I clicked on an order form; you because the school district became scared of the “CRT” bogeyman.

Colbert: It’s difficult to turn down appearances where we’ll get to meet and interact with our readers, but it’s vital that we stand up for ourselves and our work. Allyship is also important; authors whose work hasn’t or won’t be censored should stand by the authors whose books are under attack. In your case, I was pleased to see so many other authors withdraw.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From Publishing Perspectives:

In its StatShot report released this morning (May 27), the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for March 2022, released for publication today (May 27), trade revenues are seen falling 6.4 percent, but are up 2.0 percent, year-to-date.

March trade revenues across all other categories came to US$804.4 million, which is down 4.2 percent from the figure for March 2021. Year-to-date revenues up that slight 2.2 percent, came in at $3.0 billion for Q1. As Publishing Perspectives readers know, the AAP’s numbers reflect reported revenue for tracked categories including trade (consumer books); K-12 instructional materials; higher education course materials; professional publishing; and university presses.

That step back of 6.4 percent translates to $702.5 million. And what to watch for is just below: Look at this big drop in hardback sales from last year’s March figures.

In print formats:

• Hardback revenues were down 19 percent, coming in at $238.1 million
• Paperbacks were up 8.6 percent, at $266.0 million in revenue
• Mass market was down 30.7 percent to $14.3 million
• Special bindings were down 17.6 percent, with $12.7 million in revenue

Paper formats, according to a note from the association’s team, “still account for 75.6 percent of all trade sales. And–as was discussed in an audiobook and podcast panel Publishing Perspectives moderated this month at the Jerusalem International Book Fair, a part of what’s reflected in that paper-formats observation may have to do with the fact that downloadable audio—so loudly praised for its gains on the market—in March came in at 9.0 percent of the overall trade, trailing ebooks at 10.9 percent. (See the graphic to the right.)

In digital formats:

• Ebook revenues were down 12.2 percent for the month as compared to March 2021 for a total of $76.9 million
• Downloaded audio was up 8.4 percent for March, at $63.5 in revenue
• Physical audio was down 20.1 percent, at $1.3 million

Year-to-Date Numbers

• Year-to-date, the industry’s trade revenues were up 2.0 percent, at $2.1 billion for the first three months of the year.

In print formats:

• Hardback revenues were down 3.0 percent, coming in at $740.6 million
• Paperbacks were up 14.6 percent, with $763.5 million in revenue
• Mass market was down 20.1 percent to $49.4 million
• Special bindings were down 3.1 percent, with $43.6 million in revenue

In digital formats:

• Ebook revenues were down 9.8 percent as compared to the first three months of 2021 for a total of $249.3 million
• The downloaded audio format was up 2.7 percent, coming in at $194.5 million in revenue
• Physical audio was down 23.4 percent coming in at $3.7 million

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

PG notes that the report only covers revenues generated by traditional publishers and likely does not include more than a few small and mid-sized traditional publishers. Plus, to the best of PG’s knowledge, publishers report on the honor system and the AAP doesn’t perform any sort of checks or audits on the financial information they receive.

He will also note that, due to the right that many traditional bookstores have to return unsold hard copy books to the publisher for full credit/refunds, big purchases of books by bookstores of all sizes in December may generate large returns in January or February, adversely impacting publisher financial performance for the first calendar quarter of the year.

Additionally, to the best of PG’s knowledge, Amazon doesn’t disclose its sales of KDP ebooks and POD to any third parties, nor is he aware that Amazon Publishing shares its sales outside the company.

PG suspects that traditional publishers that are either publicly owned or are subsidiaries of larger companies which are publicly owned provide accurate numbers due to potential claims for fraudulent disclosures under the laws and rules governing what publicly owned companies must disclose and the penalties for knowingly disclosing incorrect information about the company’s sales, etc.

Here’s an excerpt from the AAP’s description of how it gathers information underlying its reports:

From Publishers Weekly:

The international circuit begins each year with two spring fairs: the Bologna Children’s Book Fair and the London Book Fair, typically held in March and April, respectively. The several book fairs of the summer and fall follow: Beijing International Book Fair and Frankfurt Book Fair held, respectively, in August or September and October. The fairs rounding out the year include those in Guadalajara, Mexico, and Sharjah, UAE. A slew of other fairs are also of some international, but primarily regional, importance, including those in Abu Dhabi, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Cairo, Gothenburg, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Kyiv, Leipzig, Montreal, Moscow, New Delhi, Paris, Prague, São Paulo, Seoul, Taipei, and Thessaloniki. One could spend the entire calendar year just traveling to book fairs.

Sometimes world affairs intervene to create challenges for the fairs, such as in the fall of 2008, which saw, first, the Russo-Georgian war in August and the global economic collapse in September. The impact of both events was apparent at the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair, where the stands of Greece, Iceland, and Ireland stood nearly empty as a result of the economic crisis, and the Georgian stand, in close proximity to Russia’s stand, staged a days-long protest in which Georgians bombarded the Russian stand with paper airplanes made from pages torn out of Russian books.

Fast forward to 2022. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is likely to cause ripples on the international book fair scene as well, though the full impact is uncertain at press time. For starters, nearly all the major international book fairs announced they have banned Russia’s state-sponsored publishers and booksellers from exhibiting at their fairs, though independent publishers will be allowed. The primary concern is that the war will spill over into other countries in Europe and create hesitation among fairgoers about traveling to the fairs or exhibiting; this would have significant consequences for both Bologna and London. Both fairs have been idle for two years due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and each had offered virtual alternatives in both 2020 and 2021. Most people found these virtual events less than satisfying, however, and it is urgent that the fairs return to in-person events as soon as possible, lest fairgoers lose their sense of loyalty.

Frankfurt, Beijing, and Guadalajara also went digital in 2020, and then each returned with scaled-down in-person events in 2021. Having benefited from its late date in the year, Sharjah was able to hold a modest book fair at the end of 2020, then returned in 2021 with its full show. Thus, Sharjah could take bragging rights to being the biggest book fair in the world last year, attracting 1.3 million people, compared with just 75,000 in 2021 for Frankfurt, which would typically bring in some 300,000, and Guadalajara, which allowed in just 200,000 people, when it would usually host more than 700,000. The Beijing fair was said to be half its usual size in 2021, which generally brings in 300,000 people. All these fairs are not exclusive to publishing professionals and cater to some extent to consumers and members of the public, who account for most of the attendees. In contrast, both Bologna and London only allow professionals to attend and typically draw 30,000 and 25,000 attendees, respectively.

These large numbers of people spend a lot of money and, accordingly, represent a huge, predictable influx of cash into the community hosting a book fair. Some people take advantage of this, such as the hoteliers in Frankfurt who triple their rates during the fair. When Covid-19 shut down the fairs, national governments were compelled to step in and shore up the finances of the organizers to ensure the fair would keep going. Still, Covid did have some consequences: Jacks Thomas, director of the London Book Fair for seven years, retired, then started working with Bologna, while Frankfurt closed several overseas offices and significantly reduced its overall staff numbers.

Despite returning to live events this year, the fear remains among the fair organizers that as publishers become accustomed to doing business digitally, they will feel less and less compelled to travel to meet with colleagues in real life. Going into 2022, for the first time in many people’s careers, the relevance and importance of attending in-person events is being questioned.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From A Writer’s Notebook:

At least once a month, there’s a big discussion online about something or other that has happened in publishing. It might be about where novelists find inspiration, or how authors use sources in nonfiction, or the research practices of journalists versus academics, or the intent of a memoirist, or how much power and influence your average author has. Regardless of the topic, one thing I’ve noticed, which tends to run through all these discussions, is a series of common misunderstandings and misconceptions about how modern trade publishing actually works.

It makes sense, in a way. Why should your average non-author know what an author actually does in the process of writing, publishing, and promoting a book? Most representations of authors and the publishing industry in popular culture, from television and film to characters in books themselves, do not reflect reality. It’s a fantasy, and people project onto that fantasy. They see Carrie Bradshaw enjoying a book party that costs more than most people’s weddings, and assume that a toned-down version of this must await most authors at the end of the publishing rainbow.

Yes, every now and then a first-time author who is not already famous will get a big seven-figure advance. But these are usually hot young novelists, and are quite literally one in a million. They were the exact right person in the exact right place at the exact right time. For the rest of us—the remaining nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-nine—the reality is very different.

So what is it really like to “get a book deal,” publish your first book, go on tour, and do press to promote it?

I’m a traditionally-published nonfiction author, so I’m talking about trade nonfiction here. That means nonfiction books that are published by the Big Five international publishing houses (Penguin Random House, Hachette, Simon&Schuster, HarperCollins, and Macmillan) and the independents, as opposed to academic presses, texbooks, self-publishing, and other options.

So without further ado, here are nine basic trade publishing myths.

Myth #1:

Getting a “book deal” means getting a bunch of money that the author then “lives on” for years.

No. Not even in the slightest. Especially not for a first book. Almost never.

A realistic first advance for a trade nonfiction book is between $1,000 and $10,000. After your agent takes 15%, you get 25%-50% of what’s left. The first check usually arrives a few months after signing, and then nothing else until the book is done.

A common first advance for a trade nonfiction book is $5,000. You sign your contract, and in a few months you get a check for $2,125 to write between 70K and 100K words.

Sometimes you might get lucky and sell your book to a bigger publisher who is willing to pay more—maybe your first advance is more like $30K! In that case, you’ll get $12,750 to “live on” for the year or years it takes you to write those 70K to 100K words.

Of course, you can’t really “live on” even a first book advance like this. If you have a well-paying full-time job, and you’re somehow writing in your spare time, then this money is more meaningful. However, if you’re a freelancer, you’ve just signed up to write an enormous amount for far, far, far less than you would be receiving for the same hours and word count at a newspaper or magazine.

I’m not meaning to complain here. Most books are passion projects, and authors are generally thrilled to publish at all. But getting “a book deal” in trade publishing does not mean $$$$$. In most instances, the promotion that an academic might receive due to publishing a book without an advance will result in greater earnings in both the short and long term.

Myth #2:

Once you’ve written a trade book, the money keeps rolling in.

No. Most books do not “earn out” their advance, meaning that the author never sees another penny from the publisher for that book again.

This is true even for books that you have heard of. Even books that you read a review of in The New York Times, or hear the author speak on NPR. Of course some books earn out—mine did, thanks to small advances—but most do not. Once your book earns out the advance, then you will start getting a check from your agent once or twice a year with your royalties. Most sales happen in the first year, so these are usually small.

(I’m pretty sure that a single California bookstore is responsible for me still getting enough royalties to take myself out to dinner twice a year because they keep my first book on their shelves. Or did. It stopped during Covid lockdown.)

In our current era, books tend to have “a moment” when they come out, and then there are very few opportunities for readers to find them after that.

. . . .

Myth #4:

Authors are paid for readings at bookstores.

No. I doubt even Stephen King would take a speaker fee from a bookstore, and 99.9999% of the time no fee is offered. The bookstore is doing the author a favor to host them.

If a bookstore is willing to host an author for a reading, it’s great for the author because it means the store will stock their book. It may be on the front table! They’ll have signed copies! This is how books get sold.

Myth #5:

Your publisher will pay to send you on a book tour!

No. Most of the time, there will not be a budget that pays for you to fly places and stay in hotels. All of these costs will fall to you.

When my first book came out, my publisher did schedule me to read at bookstores in different parts of the country, and then informed me of those dates. It was then up to me to see if I could afford the airfare and hotel to actually go and do it.

If a publisher has invested more money in your book, then this equation starts to change and you may be sent on a book tour. But most authors will not be given any financial support in this capacity and are expected to pay for all expenses. The cost of a “tour” alone can easily be more than the entire advance.

Funding your own book tour or series of readings is simply a fact of the business for the majority of trade published nonfiction authors. Again, whenever you can, it is always worth it, and a privilege, to be invited to read at a bookstore, so most do so whenever possible.

Also, if your publisher does not help you secure readings in bookstores—good luck getting them! Even if you have published before and drawn large crowds to your readings, if it’s just you cold calling a bookstore to try to get a reading, you may not be able to get a slot!

Myth #6:

Surely authors must be in control of the cover, title, and subtitle of their books! They get to choose. It’s all them.

No. These choices are made collaboratively, and authors must pick their battles if they don’t agree with a publisher’s choices.

I’ve talked to a lot of authors who go through this, and it can end up being an agonizing experience. For the cover, you’re usually given a few choices, and have to pick one. It can behoove you to go with the one your editor likes best. If you hate them all, it’s a whole thing.

Publishers have professionals whose whole job is to know what will sell the most books. These are obviously different skills from writing the books. Most of the time, authors are encouraged to trust these pros, and often the publisher is right.

Nonfiction books are usually sold to a publisher on proposal with a title attached, and agents can have a lot of say in this too, because they are also extremely good at knowing what sells most of the time. But sometimes the title can change even after signing. Subtitles are trickier and can be actual hell to work out!

A subtitle has two major tasks in a trade nonfiction book:

1. It can explain what the book is actually about.

AND/OR

2. It can tell you what kind of book this is and how it will feel reading it; the genre, tone, popular accessibility, etc.

Link to the rest at A Writer’s Notebook

From Berrett-Koehler Publishers:

1. The number of books being published every year has exploded.
   According to the latest ProQuest Bowker Report (October 15, 2019), nearly 1.7 million books were self-published in the U.S. in 2018, which is an incredible 264% increase in just five years.  By 2019, the total number of books published in the U.S. exceeded 4 million in that year alone—including both self-published books and commercially published books of all types—according to data provided to me by ProQuest. This is 10 times more titles being published annually in the U.S. than Bowker figures show were published in 2007, when book sales peaked. At the same time, more than 20 million previously published books are still available through many sources. Unfortunately, the marketplace is not able to absorb all these books and is hugely oversaturated.
2. Book sales are stagnant, despite the explosion of books published.
   U.S. publishing industry sales peaked in 2007 and have either fallen or been flat in subsequent years, according to reports of the Book Industry Study Group and Association of American Publishers (AAP). Similarly, U.S. bookstore sales have declined 42% from their peak in 2007, according to the U.S. Census Bureau (Statista.com, April 15, 2020).
3. Despite the addition of e-book sales and downloadable audio sales, overall book sales have shrunk.
   After skyrocketing from 2008 to 2012, e-book sales leveled off in 2013 and have fallen since then. E-book sales fell from 28% of trade sales in 2013 to 17% of trade sales in 2019 (U.S. Books Performance Review of the NPD Group, January 22, 2020.) Downloadable audio sales have been the fastest-growing area of publishing over the past four years but still represent only 10% of publishing revenues (Publishers Weekly, March 16, 2020). Even adding in e-book sales and audio sales, the total book publishing pie has shrunk since its peak in 2007—yet every year it is divided among millions more titles because of the explosion of new titles and because most titles ever published are still available for sale.
4. Average book sales are shockingly small—and falling fast.
   Combine the explosion of books published with the declining total sales and you get shrinking sales of each new title. According to BookScan—which tracks most bookstore, online, and other retail print sales of books (including Amazon.com)—only 690 million print books were sold in 2019 in the U.S. in all publishing categories combined, both fiction and nonfiction (Publishers Weekly, January 13, 2020). The average U.S. book is now selling less than 200 copies per year and less than 1,000 copies over its lifetime.
5. A book has far less than a 1% chance of being stocked in an average bookstore.
   For every available bookstore shelf space, there are 100 to 1,000 or more titles competing for that shelf space. For example, the number of business titles stocked ranges from less than 100 (smaller bookstores) to up to 1,500 (superstores). Yet there are several hundred thousand business books in print that are fighting for that limited shelf space.
6. It is getting harder and harder every year to sell new titles.
   Many book categories have become entirely saturated, with a surplus of books on every topic. It is increasingly difficult to make any book stand out. Each title is competing with millions of other titles available for sale, while other media are claiming more and more of people’s time. In a crowded marketplace, brand name authors and books stand out, and an increasing portion of the limited sales are going to mega-bestsellers (Publishers Weekly, November 4, 2019). At the same time backlist titles are accounting for an ever-greater share of publishing revenues (U.S. Books Performance Review of the NPD Group, January 22, 2020.) Result: investing the same amount today to market a new book as was invested a few years ago will yield a far smaller sales return today.
7. Most books today are selling only to the authors’ and publishers’ communities.
   Everyone in the potential audiences for a book already knows of hundreds of interesting and useful books to read but has little time to read any. Therefore people are reading only books that their communities make important or even mandatory to read. There is no general audience for most nonfiction books, and chasing after such a mirage is usually far less effective than connecting with one’s communities.

Link to the rest at Berrett-Koehler Publishers (June, 2020)

Publishing Perspectives:

The NPD report issued Monday (April 11) shows that United States’ market turning in a less high-flying performance in the week ending April 2 than some may have been lulled into expecting.

With her usual care to try to avoid scary headlines, NPD BookScan‘s Kristen McLean writes “While US print book sales in March lagged the previous five weeks by 1.8 million units, overall the US book market is turning in a very strong performance by historic norms.

“However, 2021 was far above historic norms, so that’s creating negative comps in all areas of the business, which is why it’s very important to benchmark against historic views.

“The book market is doing okay overall, but the sales softness is likely to continue past Easter in the wider American retail landscape, as domestic and global uncertainty, supply chain issues, and price inflation on non-discretionary categories cause consumers to tighten their belts. We’ll know for sure next month.”

As artfully as McLean is saying “what goes up must come down,” there are those who have been alarmed at the news this week, apparently having expected that COVID-19 would be a kind of permanent booster of the market into a new orbit.

. . . .

On today’s (April 15) “Velocity of Content” podcast from Copyright Clearance Center’s Christopher Kenneally, as a matter of fact, weekly regular Andrew Albanese of Publishers Weekly says the obvious: “We shouldn’t be so alarmed and it’s really not surprising, and it’s not as bad as the headline makes it sound. But it isn’t great news either. Right? So what is the news?

“Well, this is the NPD BookScan quarterly numbers are in and they show the unit sales of print books fell 8.9 percent in the first quarter, which ended on April 2, over the same period in 2021.

“Now 8.9 percent is a pretty big number,” Albanese points out, “and especially after the steady growth we’ve seen over the last two years. But again, none of this is unexpected.

“Remember, first-quarter sales in 2021 were crazy. They soared 29.2 percent over the first period of 2020.

“So while sales are down from a year ago, they’re still up about 16 percent over the first quarter of 2020 and the 183 million or so unit sales in the first quarter of 2022 is still well above 156 million units sold in the first quarter of 2019.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

Perhaps PG is missing some nuances, but it seems to him that the headline might be something like, “COVID Caused the Book Markets and a Bunch of Other Markets to do Strange Things and Experts Don’t Know Why”

or

“Comparing Sales Without COVID to Sales With COVID is not Terribly Helpful Because COVID was a Black Swan of the First Order That Will Never Happen Again. Even If It Does Happen Again, It Won’t be the Same as It Was the First Time”

or

“Nothing is Going to Save the Traditional Book Business”

From The Literary Hub:

Fiction writer and former Tor assistant editor Molly McGhee joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss details of her recent resignation from a position she’d fought for in the industry she loves. She also talks about what’s behind #PublishingBurnout for junior employees and what that means for the future of publishing.

. . . .

V.V. Ganeshananthan: As I was telling you just before we started recording, I was kind of off Twitter, uncharacteristically, working on my own book. And one of my former students texted me and said, “Did you see this?” And I was like, “Oh, my God.” And she said, “Search hashtag publishing burnout. It is not cheerful.” And there was this huge, important public conversation. I’m curious as to whether you got any responses from higher-ups?

Molly McGhee: I had a lot of people reach out privately to me, and publicly, and express that this is something they felt as well, but that they were really nervous to burn any bridges. The thing about publishing is that no matter how high you are, especially if you’re in editorial, you had to start from the bottom. And so you have been experiencing this struggle for years and years, and then find yourself in a position of frustration where you cannot alleviate that struggle for other people below you.

And so this is something we’ve done a lot of thinking about, but because we’re in such a small industry, where so many people know one another, they don’t feel comfortable speaking out publicly about it. And they feel quite disempowered and alone in their struggle towards burnout.

Whitney Terrell: The other thing that’s interesting about what you’re talking about, is you’re talking about a specific kind of position that’s unique to the publishing industry, this editorial assistant position. I wonder if you could talk about that position, and what it is and how it’s developed over time, for listeners of ours who aren’t familiar with that.

MM: Thank you, Whitney, for asking. You know, I think that something really interesting and unique about editorial publishing is that it’s run in an apprenticeship model. So when you come in, especially to editorial, you start from the bottom, no matter your experience, with very few exceptions. Sometimes a celebrity editor can come in at a higher stage, or sometimes people make a switch from marketing and publicity to editorial, but for the most part, you start as an assistant and then go through a period of what I like to think of as hazing; that can take two to five years. I explain it to people like you’re entering into a profession that is highly competitive, with a lot of people in the junior position who want to get into it. So there’s a high pool of people you can hire from.

Before I became an editorial assistant mentor, I had taught undergraduate writing at Columbia, I had worked in associate positions at McSweeney’s and The Believer, but on the digital side of things, I had been a proofreader, a copy editor. I had done narrative consulting for clients like Google and SoulCycle, and I still had to start at an editorial assistant position. That’s because I needed to learn the ropes, as I was told. And this is not abnormal. Everyone that I was working with at Tor had either been in publishing for four or five years before they started an editorial system, or they had master’s degrees, graduate degrees. It is a highly competitive hiring environment.

Once you’re in it, you do a lot of support work, and what this looks like for you can really depend on who you’re supporting. For me, I was supporting three to four editors and their digital workload and their production cycles. What that meant was I was tracking submissions, corresponding with offers, handling the production timeline, working really closely interdepartmentally so that everybody was on the same page, maintaining what was fed out to retailers and sales teams—basically all the invisible labor that goes into getting a book to the consumer. A lot of logistics work.

Most people I talk to think about editorial assistant roles as production manager roles: you’re in charge of a lot of deadlines, a lot of tracking, a lot of high level communication. While your editor focuses on their job: editing, acquiring, making connections, positioning, pitching, those types of things.

Link to the rest at The Literary Hub

From Publishers Weekly (28 Jan 2022):

After increasing 8% in 2020 and 9% in 2021, it is unlikely that unit sales of print books will grow again in 2022, said Kristen McLean, executive director and industry analyst for NPD/BookScan Books Group in a January 26 webinar.

McLean explained that the back-to-back large sales gains in 2020 and 2021 were unprecedented in BookScan’s 18-year history and were fueled by unique circumstances related to the pandemic and the growth in interest in social justice titles after the murder of George Floyd. She doesn’t think print sales “will fall off a cliff” in 2022, but she noted that the industry should be prepared for negative sales figures in the first and second quarters of 2022 compared to the same periods in 2021. In early 2021, the industry benefitted from ongoing lockdowns, which kept people indoors and reading, as well as the arrival of child tax credit checks that spurred spending.

McLean thinks print unit sales in 2022 will fall below 2021 levels but above those of 2019, and possibly even above those of 2020. Among the challenges she sees ahead this year is the likelihood of price increases for books due to higher manufacturing and shipping costs. She noted that the industry will need to monitor consumers’ reaction to any increases carefully. Publishers and other industry members will also continue to contend with supply chain problems, as shortages of paper, packaging materials, and printing capacity are likely to persist throughout the year.

Those factors, as well as the possible easing of pandemic restrictions, may lead to more changes in consumer behavior in 2022, McLean said. For one thing, she believes customer traffic will increase in bricks-and-mortar stores, and that retailers, through changes in store layouts and marketing, are well positioned to take advantage of the higher traffic. In addition, growing concern about climate change and sustainability could lead consumers to limit their online buying, since direct sales involve lots of packaging. And while online book sales have jumped since the pandemic began, McLean believes the online channel’s market share of book sales could decline in 2022 as people return to stores.

McLean also thinks that if some books become hard to find this year due to supply chain problems, the industry could see increased e-book and used book sales, as well as increased library borrowing.

There were a number of positive trends in 2021 that should continue into 2022, according to McLean, including the impact of BookTok in driving sales. She noted that a group of 80 authors that BookScan identified as having large BookTok followings saw sales more than double last year, from a total of nine million copies sold in 2020 to 20 million in 2021. She said BookTok has been embraced by the industry and that its recommendations are being amplified by retailers such as

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From Electric Lit:

In Sensorium by Tanaïs is, at once, a sensuous and gut-wrenching experience in expansive memoir that bleeds across genre and time. Using perfume as a framework, Tanaïs builds the work slowly, moving from the base to the heart to the head notes, recounting alienation and life on the margins as a Brown Muslim growing up in pre- and post- 9/11 America, tracing similar erasure of their ancestors at the hands of colonizers and fascists borne out of the caste system, the genocidal birth of their homeland Bangladesh, the blood-stained lineage of its people—Bengali Muslims, women and femmes—alongside the racism and capitalist greed behind the art and commodification of perfumery.

An exposé of the orientalist gaze, a battle against the eons of patriarchal notions that have oppressed women and femmes and created molds for sexual and gender identities, In Sensorium emerges as “an act of sensuous resistance”—much like a perfume—confronting what Tanaïs terms patramyths, “foundational lies and mythologies recorded in history to protect the powerful.” Trauma, pain, shame—there’s space held for it all, carved meticulously for the ones who have been denied visibility throughout history, encapsulated in exquisite writing, driven toward generational healing. 

Tanaïs is a Brooklyn-based Bangladeshi American Muslim femme, a writer, an artist, a perfumer, founder of TANAÏS, the beauty and fragrance company. Above all, they are proof of the magnificence of manifesting your authentic self, beyond the noise and corruption of the dominant culture.

. . . .

Bareerah Ghani: You speak of perfume as a sensuous act of resistance. Given that you’ve used perfume as a structure, the memoir too is a force of opposition against what you term patramyths. While the memoir and the perfume seem inextricable from one another, there is a liminal space. You’ve spoken about this before, this idea of erasure happening even as you speak of erasure. But perfume, the way you envision it as a language in itself, transcends patramyths. Did the use of perfume as a lens allow you to bridge that liminal space to a certain extent?

Tanaïs: For me, perfume is a way of understanding how the patramyths of purity, male and white supremacy and Brahmanical patriarchy have been established, and I wanted to use this kind of shape of a book to explore how the patramyths around scent have allowed the powerful to wield their domination over others. This shape kind of emerged and there’s an act of transcendence laced into that process, but I also think that, like the book, it’s emerging out of the patramyths too. It’s hard not to be the very thing that we’re trying to throw away. 

Becoming a part of a record is part of why I seek writing as my medium. A book is impermanent in many ways, but we write to create a body that lasts beyond our time. There’s comfort in knowing that a perfume is ephemeral. It’s an experience that’s in the moment, on the body, then it disappears. There’s something to that that felt like the perfect metaphor for borderlessness, for becoming someone who makes an impression, and then is not recorded. A perfume can never fully be expressed through language too, so that’s another aspect of being chosen by perfume and choosing perfume that tries to tell the narrative, the history, eschewing the patramyths because it’s not bound by language in the same way.

BG: You’ve spoken about the intersection of your creative practices of perfumery and writing in the context of rejecting Western rules and respecting your instincts. Can you speak to some of the media, institutions or individuals you’ve relied on in your journey to decolonize yourself, exact your agency and identity in white-centered spaces?

T: I really try to avoid white centered spaces as much as possible. Even among Muslim diaspora, we’re reckoning with casteism, colorism, and history, so I really tried to be aware of the work that’s happening. The people whose work influenced this book like Poulomi Saha (Empire of Touch), Julietta Singh (No Archive Will Restore You)—they’re working to complicate the notion of an archive and what representation is because it really fails to hold the nuance of our lives. The act of us finding each other as Muslim diaspora, writing narratives that have that nuanceI really seek to experience that. Laila Lalami, Randa Jarrar, these writers who are giving us this breath of Muslimah writing that’s flexing the powers of actually writing, not just about our identity. I find great inspiration in that. 

Responding to white-centered spaces is exhausting because they don’t necessarily listen to us, they don’t see us, they don’t accept our work as saying something universal. But I think our faith, our cultural milieu gives us a very deep insight into what’s universal because there’s so many people who are brought together under it. That’s something I’ve come to find as a gift. That’s not easy in America. They try to make us feel ashamed about that. And it’s not just the bigoted white person. It’s liberals, upper caste and Indian people. Pakistanis and Bangladeshis have a certain role in their mind, so you have to really assert your feminist femme power of your mind. You have to reject what whiteness imagines you as, keep clear and tell our story in a way that feels rife with the complexity of human experience.

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

“a sensuous and gut-wrenching experience in expansive memoir that bleeds across genre and time”, “an act of sensuous resistance”, “there’s comfort in knowing that a perfume is ephemeral. It’s an experience that’s in the moment, on the body, then it disappears”, “working to complicate the notion of an archive” and “proof of the magnificence of manifesting your authentic self, beyond the noise and corruption of the dominant culture” seem a bit overwritten and overwrought to PG, but he will, of course, allow others their own opinions.

The publisher, Harper, appears to have made a corporate decision to not offer a “look inside” option for the book on Amazon. Or that lack could be just another screw-up by a Harper corporate drone. A third possibility is that it may be another “act of sensuous resistance” calculated to “complicate the notion of an archive.”

From Sludge:

Last year, Maryland lawmakers unanimously passed a bill that aimed to help public libraries offer e-books and audiobooks to patrons. Publishers were charging libraries three to five times as much as consumers pay for an e-book, and for only a two-year license, state legislators showed. The law, signed in May, would require publishers to license electronic literary products to Maryland public libraries “on reasonable terms.”

A similar measure in New York was also passed, virtually unanimously, over the summer, with 210 state legislators in favor and one voting nay—only to be vetoed in the last days of the year by Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul.

Gov. Hochul’s veto came after the industry group Association of American Publishers (AAP) initiated a lawsuit in December against the Maryland law, arguing that it violated federal copyright law. Hochul echoed the AAP’s position in her statement explaining why she vetoed the bill, which had strong grassroots support from library advocates.

Lawmakers in six other states have introduced bills that seek to support schools and libraries in accessing e-books, as institutions are being hit with high prices and restrictive licensing terms for digital works—and with publishers refusing to make some e-book titles available to libraries. According to a recent survey by the library group ReadersFirst, e-book prices for libraries have tripled over the past nine years, with publishers charging between $20 and $65 for an e-book copy that libraries cannot own permanently. For popular e-books, libraries pay $55 for a copy that expires after two years, or $550 for a copy for 20 years, compared with the about $15 that a consumer would pay, according to the American Library Association (ALA).

. . . .

Libraries and schools worldwide have been increasingly lending out e-books and audiobooks, even before the coronavirus pandemic took hold. Over 500 million copies of digital books were circulated last year, according to digital reading platform OverDrive, an increase from 430 million the year before and 326 million in 2019. Back in 2016, the total had reached 200 million, which was up from just 15 million in 2010.

Library patrons and students went digital to crack the covers of everything from Barack Obama’s memoir to young adult fiction to the latest issues of The Economist magazine—or its rival US Weekly, based on OverDrive’s lists of the most popular e-books. The Toronto Public Library alone circulated nearly 10 million titles last year, a new record, and the Los Angeles Public Library surpassed 8 million lends.

Librarians have been warning that large publishers are squeezing licensing terms on digital works, pushing for libraries to merely rent digital works, rather than allowing them to own copies as they do physical books.

The Maryland law passed 130 to 0 in the General Assembly and 47-0 in the Maryland Senate, and took effect on the first day of this year. Last month, however, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction, siding with AAP’s argument in their lawsuit that the law interferes with federal copyright law. The Maryland attorney general will defend the state’s law, a stance applauded by the ALA.

“Libraries simply can no longer be forced to rent their e-book collections with restrictions and pricing that are designed to minimize the libraries’ ability to provide access to the public, while maximizing publisher profits over that library mission,” said Jennie Rose Halperin, executive director of Library Futures, a nonprofit group that launched in January 2021 to champion the right to equitable access to knowledge.

In 2019, when the House Judiciary Subcommittee of Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law held an investigation into digital marketplaces, the nonprofit ALA slammed the publishing industry’s practices—including those of Amazon, which sells 90% of e-books, according to industry figures.

Link to the rest at Sludge

From Publishers Lunch:

Multiple resignations from the editorial departments at two big houses caused an online reckoning on Friday. Four editors, Angeline Rodriguez and Hillary Sames at Orbit, Erin Siu at Macmillan Children’s, and Molly McGhee at Tor all announced their resignations, leading to a discussion about the workload of junior and mid-level employees and the difficulty of advancement across the industry. The online exchange brought into the open the frustrations of increased workload, burnout and turnover that have been brewing as the pandemic continues. Those feelings are intensified as big publishers report record sales and earnings, even as multiple people report on Twitter they believe their employers are not sufficiently reinvesting those proceeds in additional staff, systems and raises.

At the heart of the discussion was McGhee’s resignation letter which she posted on Twitter. McGhee, who was an assistant editor at Tor/Nightfire, writes that after ten years in assisting roles, she requested a promotion when her first acquisition debuted at No. 3 on the New York Times Best Sellers list. She says in her letter that she was told she needed “more training” before being promoted and she could not expect to be relieved of administration duties “any time within the next five years.”

McGhee pointed to “the invisibility of junior employees’ workload” as a major issue, asserting that “many executives in the publishing industry are technology illiterate” and rely on their assistants to manage databases, pull manuscripts, and navigate new technology, on top of the duties outlined in their job descriptions.

McGhee’s letter opened the floodgates to other people who have left editorial positions recently speaking openly about labor issues. As part of a thread, one former Penguin editor flagged “the fact that editorial productivity ONLY survives because of the exploitation of assistants.” Many others pointed out that the same pressures and frustration are being felt across all departments at publishing companies, though there may be less public awareness, and smart managers and veterans offered empathy and tips, and opened themselves up to consultation. A number of agents also underscored their own difficulties in establishing sustainable careers and keeping up with the workload and representing clients without overburdening editors, while emphasizing the broad financial hardship of converting “advances” into extended “guarantees” that are not paid in advance.

Former editor at Avon Books Elle Keck posted, “As one of the editors who left publishing this year, every editor you know, you’ve seen on Twitter, you’ve heard of: they are miserable and struggling. They’re tired of working all day, working at night, and feeling guilty if they take a weekend off.” Julie Rosenberg, formerly of Razorbill, also noted the “crushing guilt and anxiety” caused by the workload.

Speaking to PL, McGhee described this workload: “I worked with five editors during my time at [Tor parent division Tom Doherty Associates]. I always supported at least two editors, in addition to the publisher, all while building my own list. What this means is that I did all administrative work on my editors frontlist and backlist…. At one point in time I was tracking 150 frontlist titles across four seasons in one calendar year…. On top of doing this I was managing company calendars, scheduling my publisher’s meetings (publishers take a lot of meetings), reading my editors’ and publisher’s submissions, drafting contracts, executing deal memos, writing copy, positioning novels, networking to get to know agents as I chased my own submissions, training other junior employees, creating work flow systems to manage cross department care,” and much more.

McGhee emphasized that she loved working at Tor, but the amount of work was unmanageable, especially in light of the compensation. She said, “I think a lot of folks will view this as a disgruntled employee situation. It is not. I never thought I would leave TDA. I loved my editors, I loved my authors, and I loved my coworkers. But unfortunately the workload expectations and the pay were untenable. There was no way to communicate this to my managers in a way that was not seen as ‘poor time management,’ as they had never assisted/started in the technological environment junior and mid-level employees now face.”

Link to the rest at Publishers Lunch

From Nathan Bransford:

Editors are creaking under chronically low pay, ever-expanding publisher expectations, publisher under-investment in support infrastructure like contracts departments… and oh yes, all of this is happening amid bonanza years for publishers’ bottom lines. This makes it accordingly more difficult for young agents to get their books read by editors and compete in an increasingly “winner takes all” ecosystem where bestsellers are bigger than ever and everyone else is fighting for scraps. You can throw in an often-toxic environment for employees of color to boot.

When you combine all this with an economy where it’s easier to find advancement elsewhere, it’s probably not terribly surprising that you’re seeing editors and agents throw in the towel for more hospitable climes. Those who are staying raising red (and white) flags. 

Link to the rest at Nathan Bransford