Big Publishing

From Publishing Perspectives:

In a follow to Monday’s (August 30) update on the United States’ market, NPD BookScan’s research team has released a genre-specific look at the thriller and suspense category, finding that US sales have dropped six percent in the last year.

Thrillers and suspense are probably most popular in the United Kingdom’s market, where they reign at the top of the list, much as romance seems to do in the American market. But the category is a major one in the States, making its apparent trend toward a softening interesting.

NPD sees thrillers standing as one in eight adult fiction print and ebook buys in the American market.

To date this year, thrillers are the third largest-selling category, NPD Books reports, with unit sales for adult thrillers when combining print and ebook sales reaching 14.1 million units for the year-to-date through the end of May. But sales are down six percent in the past year.

Kristen McLean, NPD’s lead books analyst points to notable new thrillers released in 2021 and sees the category being “up slightly” over last year. However, she says it has fallen behind the pace set by the rest of the adult fiction market, which has risen by 15 percent, in combined print and ebook formats through the end of May.

“As with Christmas books,” McLean says, “there’s always room for another great thriller on the shelf. It’s a core evergreen category that’s always ripe for new energy,” which might indicate there’s some concern for those in the business working the thriller/suspense category.

“In 2021,” she says, “the category has not kept up with overall fiction growth trends, but  perhaps not for obvious reasons.”

. . . .

“Part of the declining growth in thrillers seems to be because of changes in consumer tastes,” McLean says–which could indeed be predictive of more weakening in the category.

“But it’s also true that books that have traditional elements of thriller and suspense books are now being categorized in in other hot areas of the fiction market,” she says, “like women’s contemporary fiction, general fiction, and young adult fiction, where they’re driving growth.” That trend of thriller and suspense content going into other traditional categorizations might be what’s behind the downward pressure on the category.

As an example, McLean points to Laura Dave’s recent bestseller, The Last Thing He Told Me (Simon & Schuster, May 4), which is categorized as general fiction. At this writing, the book stands at No. 2 on the Amazon Charts’ most-read fiction side, its 17th week on the list.

McLean also points out that two of the four new thriller writers topping NPD’s growth list in the category are women. Suspense and thrillers have, in the past, been dominated by male authors in the States.

“The rising profile of women authors,” McLean says, “indicates that there may be a market for more female voices in this genre,” in the American field—which, of course, could be a key for international markets looking to find a foothold with translations sold into the US trade marketplace.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From The New York Times:

For a snapshot of how politically polarized the country has become, consider the best-seller list in this Sunday’s New York Times. Political books hold the top five spots on the hardcover nonfiction list, but they offer wildly divergent views.

No. 1 on the list is “American Marxism” by the Fox News host Mark Levin, which argues that liberals, including President Biden, are advancing a socialist agenda. Two titles that follow present sharply critical views of the Trump administration: “Here, Right Matters,” a memoir by Alexander Vindman, the retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who had a role in Trump’s first impeachment; and “I Alone Can Fix It,” an explosive account of Trump’s last year in office by the Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. Next come books by the conservative media stars Ben Shapiro and Jesse Watters.

“The same kind of polarization that we’re seeing in the mainstream culture is happening in the book market,” Kristen McLean, an analyst at NPD BookScan, a market research firm, said. “The appetite is there on both sides of the political divide.”

When Biden took office, publishers braced for a slump. The Trump years had been an enormous boon to their industry, with a torrent of best sellers that included bombshell exposés by Bob Woodward and Michael Wolff, and tell-all memoirs from John Bolton and Mary Trump. Political book sales hit a 20-year high, according to NPD BookScan.

As predicted, sales of political books fell in the first seven months of this year. But publishers remain bullish about the genre. While sales have tapered off, the numbers are still well above what they were in 2016, and even 2019. Books by conservative authors are starting to pick up, as is often the case when there’s a Democrat in the White House.

“It’s easier to sell political books when your audience is in the opposition, when it’s feeling embattled and they’re more worked up and angry,” Thomas Spence, president and publisher of the conservative publishing house Regnery, told me. “The first two quarters of 2021 have been great for us.”

The conservative book market also carries risks for big corporate publishers, though. After the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in January, Simon & Schuster canceled plans to publish a book by Senator Josh Hawley, who tried to overturn the results of the presidential election. (Mr. Hawley, who accused the company of violating the First Amendment, released his book with Regnery.)

Simon & Schuster later announced that it had signed a two-book deal with former Vice President Mike Pence. The decision outraged liberals, including some of Simon & Schuster’s own authors and staff members, who signed a petition calling on the company to stop publishing books by former Trump officials. But the petition failed to sway executives, and news broke soon after that Simon & Schuster had bought a book from Kellyanne Conway.

Those acquisitions didn’t appease conservatives like Tucker Carlson, who attacked Simon & Schuster over its decision to drop Hawley, and accused the company of censorship in his new book, “The Long Slide.” (His claim of censorship is undercut by the fact that his book was published by, well, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.)

Link to the rest at The New York Times (link may expire. if so, PG says sorry.)

PG’s heart aches for the poor wittle New York publishers. They have such a tough job. Their little hearts must ache all day when people say bad things about them.

It’s no wonder they have to drink and do drugs when they get home.

From The Guardian:

First globally successful entertainer . . . and now novelist … Dolly Parton seems determined to prove that there are few things she can’t do.

The singer, best known for country-pop hits including Jolene and 9 to 5, has written her first novel, to be published by Penguin Random House next year. Run, Rose, Run, which is about a young woman who moves to Nashville to pursue her music-making dreams, has been co-written by Parton and bestselling novelist James Patterson. Both UK and US editions will be published on 7 March 2022.

Parton will release an album of the same name alongside the book, consisting of 12 original tracks. She says the new songs “were written based on the characters and situations in the book” and their lyrics will also feature in the novel.

“It’s been an honour – and a hell of a lot of fun – to work with the inimitable Dolly Parton,” said Patterson, who has sold more than 300 million books and has collaborated with other writers on scores of novels including Bill Clinton on 2018’s The President Is Missing. “The mind-blowing thing about this project is that reading the novel is enhanced by listening to the album and vice versa. It’s a really unique experience.”

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

PG will remind one and all that Big Publishing is, first and foremost, the curator of culture for the universe. All other considerations are subordinate to the carrying out of this divinely-ordained mission.

In keeping with artistic soul of Randy Penguin, the photo is full of meaningful symbols.

PG admits that he’s only a lowly scrivener and unlikely to be able to interpret all the symbolism in the photo. However, he’ll do his best.

The purplelishy alien life form behind the two subjects’ heads is probably a symbol of the ever-expanding financial universe of Randy Penguin, eagerly gobbling up small planets harboring a variety of life-forms.

Dolly has long red fingernails and James doesn’t. Dolly has hair and James has a little something on his head that might be hair or not. Dolly’s the star and James isn’t.

The photo of Dolly on the right-hand side of the photo depicts Dolly wearing a cowgirl hat. James would look pretty silly in a cowgirl or cowboy hat, but it would have the virtue of hiding his hair-like bumps.

Dolly has a well-rehearsed celebrity smile. James looks like he might have been gritting his teeth when the photographer told him to smile. Or maybe he’s a little constipated.

Dolly has her hips slightly turned and her hand placed on her front hip, which PG immediately recognized as an oft-rehearsed western and Hollywood star-pose.

Patterson is standing in wrinkled jeans like he’s having his picture taken in front of the Dumbo ride at Disneyland.

He does have his right hand around Dolly’s shoulder, however, the meaning of which which is fairly straightforward. She’s his best pal right now and he doesn’t want her running off with any other ghost-writer.

What puzzles PG is what it means for Patterson to have his left hand in the left back pocket of his jeans. (Jeans and Dolly probably go together, but what’s with the pocket? Dolly would never carry anything in her back jeans pocket.)

The left rear pocket is the most common location where PG usually carries his billfold when he’s wearing jeans, but PG is not a famous author.

Perhaps, that pocket is where Patterson’s muse resides.

From Yahoo News:

In a statement published to the Shelf Awareness blog Monday, American Booksellers Association CEO Allison Hill apologized for an incident in which Candace Owens’s Blackout was accidentally featured in lieu of a social-justice-oriented book with the same title by Dhonielle Clayton and other authors.

An employee subbing for the employee who is normally responsible for curating the best-seller list, Hill said, unknowingly selected the wrong cover image for the book. A second employee new to copyediting also failed to cross-check the photo and recognize the error before mailing the list out to members.

Apologizing for the employees’ mishap, Hill wrote, “It was a terrible mistake with terrible racist implications. However, based on our investigation and the demonstrated diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) commitment of these individuals, we have no reason to believe the action was malicious in intention.”

Hill’s statement followed an official inquiry into the episode and an audit of all ABA procedures and programs in collaboration with the organization’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee.

“The employees are very apologetic and very committed to vigilance going forward. They have been held accountable and have agreed to training, both on procedures as well as on DEI, and we have added layers of checks and balances to this process,” she continued.

Coinciding with the time of the Blackout mistake was another event in which Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage was included in a box mailing to 750 eligible bookstores, eliciting outrage from ABA leaders and members. In her Monday apology, Hill also clarified the details around that book’s shipment, which an earlier ABA statement called a “serious, violent incident.”

The premise of Irreversible Damage is that there is a social contagion effect of young girls rushing into invasive transition surgeries and medical interventions for gender dysphoria that they are likely to regret later.

“Publishers pay ABA to include titles in the box, and ABA sends it to eligible bookstores. Until now, no one has ever reviewed or screened the titles submitted by publishers. It has been a pay-to-play program,” she said. “The policy to not review or screen titles submitted is in line with many members’ preference to not have ABA decide what books they have access to, preferring to review books themselves to determine what they read, buy, sell, and promote.”

Hill said that many members expressed to her that they still value having autonomy over book choices, “despite being horrified by this book.” She added that the ABA Board of Directors may implement a new permanent policy to prevent the kind of injurious oversight that let Owens’s book slip through the cracks.

Link to the rest at Yahoo News

From Michelle Sagara/Michelle West:

Some of you may remember a couple of months ago I said things were… stressful (possibly worst month ever) on Twitter.

If I had been thinking, I would have made certain to separate terrible month from pandemic, which has – for my family – remained a large and consistent weight in the background. We’ve been lucky; we’ve lost no one. We made sure that the less internet-savvy were signed up and vaccinated, and we got vaccinated ourselves; I have no under 12s in my household, and there are none in the household we bubble with when its safe to do so.

Mostly, however, what I was thinking was: How do I tell people? And what do I do going forward?

So let’s start with that first part: Telling people the bad news. TLDR: DAW will no longer be publishing the West novels going forward.

. . . .

My first four books were published by Del Rey. They were The Books of the Sundered, my first sale. And I watched those with anxiety. I’ve worked in bookstores since I was sixteen years old, so I knew that books that I loved with the passion only an adolescent can achieve disappeared without a trace, going out of print and becoming inaccessible.

It was shocking to me; it was inconceivable that something so brilliant could disappear without warning: when I was sixteen, I equated “good” with “successful”. If I loved it, how could it be unsuccessful?

The obvious answer is: not everyone loved it as I did, because we all have different tastes (the acceptance of this obvious answer would not occur until another decade had passed.)

So the first series did not, in the end, succeed at Del Rey.

. . . .

I wrote the Hunter books; Hunter’s Oath was my first DAW title. I wrote The Sun Sword series.

The House War series was, in the end, eight books long. It was supposed to be shorter; it was supposed to be fewer books. It would have been, had Hidden City not insisted on being the book it became, because my intent with that, when I started it six times, was to write a braided past/present narrative.

I always watched the sales numbers with a certain tension, and that escalated with time. I have always loved my West readers, and I have always, always loved these books — but truthfully, the sales numbers failed to climb in any way.

In publishing that’s … not good.

. . . .

DAW is, and has been, distributed by Penguin Random House (PRH going forward) for decades (I could go into their distribution granularly, because they started with NAL, which was absorbed by Penguin NA, and then by Random House, but I think the general statement covers that).

DAW has offices in the PRH building in NYC; their books are produced in the PRH production department; their books are sold to stores by the PRH sales reps; their books are warehoused in PRH warehouses and shipped by those warehouses. DAW is, however, independently owned. But all of the elements of the publication process are tied tightly into Penguin Random House. Someone with no knowledge of SFF publishers could easily be forgiven for assuming that DAW is a division – like Ace or Roc – of Penguin Random House, given office space, etc.

They aren’t.

Editorial is independent. Editorial decisions are made by DAW, not a PRH editorial board.

Distribution, however? All PRH. In order to be distributed by PRH, DAW has a distribution agreement, which gets renegotiated as it nears the end of its term. This agreement is what gets DAW all of the above: office space, production/PR departments, sales force, warehouse and shipping-to-bookstores. All of the above is necessary.

That negotiation period is this year. And the negotiations have impacted the West novels which are a) too long and b) not great sellers. My DAW editor has, in spite of this, continued to publish the West novels until now, because she’s always loved them.

But she can’t do that going forward.

This isn’t her fault. This isn’t, in the end, PRH’s fault either, although it is largely their decision. I’d like to think it’s not mine, because I wrote the books and as much as I can love anything I’ve personally written, I love them fiercely.

But the last leg of the West series will no longer be published by DAW. While writing is a creative art, publishing is a business. PRH has no personal connection to me or my writing; what they have is numbers, which is how business decisions are ultimately made.

. . . .

This has been a stressful couple of months as I’ve tried to envision some way forward. I did try to start again from page zero, to see if I could structure the books to be shorter, because shorter books would be acceptable to PRH. But as this would only be proven true or false when I reached the end, and no attempt I’ve ever made has worked, I gave up on that.

I then began to look at the publisher side costs. Editing. Copy-editing. Proof-reading. Covers. Those expenses would, except for the cover, be at least double what most self-publishers would have to pay, because the books will be longer, and most freelancers charge by either page or per 100k words.

Revenue neutral activity is, essentially, a hobby. It makes no money, but you do it for love. If the costs are higher than the income coming in it becomes an expensive hobby. We work to earn money and we pour it into our hobbies because we love our hobbies, right? But… for most of us, a hobby is distinctly separate from work.

. . . .

Self-publishing will make some money. But…

Self-publishing is most successful at shorter lengths (like, say, 75k words), and at shorter publishing intervals (three to four months).

The Michelle West novels are exactly the wrong type of novels for self-publishing success. I don’t know how many of my current readers will follow ebook only new releases. (The cost for print on demand for Broken Crown, a book whose length I do know, would be 36.00 US for a trade paperback, assuming I make 1.00 a book, and the PoD service takes the rest. Page-count defines the price of a PoD book, sadly.)

Because the publishing gaps between books would be much longer than self-publishing ideal, and the books would be 3 – 4x too long, I… can’t gain traction, in a purely sales sense, publishing them myself. Also: These are related to the previous books; they’re not something new. They’re not the books that will draw in new readers because I can’t control the pricing/promotion of all of the books.

Link to the rest at Michelle Sagara/Michelle West and thanks to E. for the tip.

The original post is much longer than the excerpt.

Most of the OP wasn’t a surprise for PG. If you’re with a traditional publisher and your books don’t sell, regardless of whose fault it really is, it’s always the author’s fault and the author pays the price for not selling enough books.

The one item that interested PG was Ms. Sagara/West’s comment that her books won’t work for self-publishing because they’re too long. She then mentioned the cost for POD for one of her long books would be $36.00 for trade paperback and each sale would result in her earning $1.00.

Her only mention of ebooks is “I don’t know how many of my current readers will follow ebook only new releases.”

Perhaps an alien invasion occurred last night and the world is completely changed from yesterday, but yesterday, most indie authors typically earn the large majority of their income from ebook sales.

Ebooks are gold because you don’t have to pay $35 to publish a long ebook.

KDP ebook files can be up to 650MB. KDP will accept Word doc and docx files, MOBI, EPUB, HTML, and PDF.

In the interest of scientific inquiry, PG pulled up the MS Word manuscript for one of Mrs. PG’s early books, The Last Waltz, which Amazon says is a 480 page POD trade paperback (priced at $14.99 for hardcopy and $4.99 in ebook).

The original manuscript is 1.8 megabytes, virtually all text.

PG was going to copy and past a complete copy of the manuscript at the end of the original and continue repeating that process until he had a manuscript that was 650 MB in size.

However that process would be taking PG’s scientific research too far. Applying simple mathematics, 650 MB would hold more than 360 copies of Mrs. PG’s book.

If 360 copies of Mrs. PG’s book were combined to make a single large book, that book would be over 172,000 printed pages long, about the largest ebook file that KDP would permit you to upload and self-publish on Amazon.

Circling back to the OP and the author’s concerns about her books being too long to self-publish successfully, PG thinks she may wish to do a bit more research.

As far as the author of the OP being concerned that her current readers won’t “follow” her into self-publishing, PG suggests a couple of brief investigations:

1. Are the author’s current traditionally published books available in ebook form? A quick check suggests that the answer is affirmative although the sales ranks aren’t very good, in part because the ones PG checked are overpriced.
2. Of the titles PG checked, the sales rank for the ebooks was significantly higher than the sales rank of the printed books. (PG hopes sales through physical bookstores were better than via Amazon.)
3. For PG, this means that the author won’t have as much problem getting her fans to follow her to ebooks as she might think she will, especially if she prices her ebooks right. It’s quite likely that the author’s current ebook readers are buying almost all of the ebooks she sells through Amazon, so the transition to the author’s indie ebooks should be pretty automatic.

For PG, the worst part of the story is that apparently, the author isn’t in a position to get the rights back to her current DAW books, or at least, she thinks she isn’t.

PG didn’t check to see what the costs of a book the size of the author’s prior work would be through KDP’s print on demand service, but someone else can do that and provide that information in the comments.

One final observation – If Ms. Sagara/West is still wedded to the idea of physical books in physical bookstores as her future career path, PG wishes her well.

However, he suggests that becoming a professional indie author with KDP (and agreeing to the exclusivity part to bump ebook royalties to the highest rate possible and pricing her ebooks in a sweet spot for Amazon ebook sales and max royalty rates) may be her best avenue to continue her writing career profitably.

But, as usual, PG could be completely wrong.

From Publishers Weekly:

Ableism against neurodivergent authors is a widespread problem within the publishing industry. Neurodivergent people include those diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, and other neurological differences.

Popular, award-winning books with neurodivergent characters written by authors who don’t have lived experiences of neurodivergence permeate the publishing landscape. Some of the common and harmful stereotypes that appear in these books show neurodivergent kids as burdens to their families, or depict neurodivergent protagonists who “overcome” their disabilities. When neurodivergent authors present different, more nuanced experiences in their books, they’re asked to change them to be more like these award-winning books, or they’re rejected outright because of narratives that don’t fit publishers’ expectations of how neurodivergence should be represented.

I thought I was one of the lucky ones. A publisher approached me to write a children’s picture book based on my lived experiences with autism, which became my debut, Too Sticky! Sensory Issues with Autism. But I was shocked when my agent, Naomi Davis at BookEnds, told me the same publisher sent a rejection letter with ableist comments about my new chapter book series highlighting neurodivergent experiences. It indicated that my proposed series was too focused on kids with issues and therefore wouldn’t reach a wide audience.

Kids with “issues.” The publisher referred to neurodivergent kids as kids with “issues”—as if neurodivergent children are defined by their weaknesses rather than their strengths. As if they shouldn’t be embraced for their different ways of experiencing the world. And as if they don’t have any interest or need to read a series like this.

At least one in five kids are neurodivergent, according to the CDC’s statistics. But in a 2019 study, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center found that only 3.4% of children’s books have disabled main characters, and only a fraction of that includes neurodivergent main characters—nowhere near the 20% that should represent neurodivergent kids.

The rejection letter went on to say that the series wouldn’t reach a wide audience because that’s not what I wanted. The publisher claimed that it didn’t want to push me into creating a series that it wanted.

Despite my desire to reach a broad audience, and the multiple rounds of revision I had already done on this proposal over eight months, I was blamed for the publisher’s view that my story would not matter to people beyond the neurodivergent community. The publisher spoke over me, rather than hearing my voice.

My agent wrote a long response, objecting to the language in the rejection and pointing out how it implied that neurodivergent stories appeal only to neurodivergent readers. The publisher’s rejection language was ableist. It’s not what we expected from a publisher already publishing my book specifically about autism. It’s insulting to imply that a book that appeals to neurodivergent readers more than to neurotypical readers won’t have a wide enough audience. We were shocked, and we were furious.

The publisher’s response to my agent’s letter was a performative one-line statement “apology” that provided no insight into how it intended to repair our relationship, support my currently published book, or do better going forward. In fact, it seemed to place the burden of this conflict on my agent and me for being upset, rather than on its actions.

If an agented and published author like me faces ableism from a publisher, how is the publishing industry treating unagented aspiring authors? 

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

PG isn’t quite certain what he is supposed to say or not say regarding an article written by a neurodivergent author.

PG is certainly divergent in a number of ways, but doesn’t believe he is neurodivergent as he understands the term.

However, the author’s reported experience with a prospective publisher as described is not at all atypical of the way publishers treat all sorts of people – healthy, impaired, etc., etc.

Additionally, there is no great surprise if a manuscript from an agented and published author is rejected by a publisher for any reason or no reason. There are no versions of a season pass for a season of any length in the traditional publishing world.

Publishers as a group are also noted for their reluctance to work with an author who is “difficult” for any reason.

PG is not certain whether there are any degrees of “difficult” that apply in this behavior by publishers.

Whenever he’s read/heard about it, “difficult” seems to be a binary characteristic for an author. One is or one is not difficult. If one is a teeny bit difficult, perhaps such behavior is not enough to trigger the difficult trapdoor.

Additionally, an author may be in the good graces of a publisher one day and difficult the next. Overstep some invisible line, even if it wasn’t present yesterday, and you’re difficult.

Disagreeing with a decision made by a publisher as is depicted/implied in the OP is a behavior characteristic of more than one “difficult” author regardless of whether the author is absolutely correct and the publisher is absolutely wrong or not.

It’s not about right vs. wrong, it’s about not difficult vs. difficult.

Publishers may be difficult to any degree, but authors may not.

PG will note upfront that this is an excerpt from a much longer and more detailed essay. He’ll have a couple of comments at the end, but doesn’t have the time to respond to every one of Mr. Doctorow’s points contained in this review of publishing history and traditional publishers.

From Cory Doctorow:

Publishing is doing great

Publishing is doing great. Despite panic at the start of the lockdown, book sales were actually up during lockdown, as people turned to books to pass the time, joining online bookclubs and finding ways to support their local indie booksellers.

But authorship? Not so great.

Every part of the publishing supply chain has undergone radical concentration over the past 40 years, starting with consolidation of mass-market distribution in the 1980s. “Mass market” books are produced for sale in non-bookseller channels —pharmacies, grocery stores, news-stands, etc (books produced for sale in bookstores are called “trade books” because they’re sold through the bookselling trade).

. . . .

Enter Sam Walton, twirling his mustache

But by 1990s, when I started selling stories and then books, that advice was long past its sell-by date. Nationally, groceries and drugstores had been transformed in a process that originated with Sam Walton, who took advantage of deregulation to expand Walmart nationwide. Walmart was followed by waves of copycats who used predatory pricing to drive local merchants out of business. Big-box stores became a fixture, and represented such an important part of the mass-market bookselling channel that they were able to restructure the entire market.

First among their demands was an end to regional distributing. A retailer with outlets in 50 states didn’t want to manage 50 distribution accounts (indeed, most distribution territories were citywide, or even neighborhood-by-neighborhood, so a national chain might need to open hundreds of distributor accounts to serve all its stores). Within the space of a few short years, the number of distributors nationwide fell from about 400 to fewer than ten, in an orgy of bankruptcies and mergers.

This had a profound effect on the mass-market. Decisions about which books would be sold where were no longer in the hands of thousands of drivers who knew their territories intimately through long experience — rather, they were centralized into the hands of a few buyers who used databases to track sales and make predictions about the most “efficient” titles to stock nationwide.

The number of titles for sale nationwide fell off a cliff, and woe betide an author whose book failed to meet sales targets. A single stumble could lead to the permanent exclusion of that author from a big box chain’s consideration. Without those big box stores, publishers could no longer profitably publish those authors. If you are a genre fan of a certain age, you’ll remember the wave of established writers who rebooted their careers by switching to pen-names in a bid to trick these all-powerful buyers into giving them another chance.

Monopolies beget monopolies

The effects of deregulation —the Reagan-initiated “consumer welfare” reconstruction of antitrust enforcement —weren’t confined to Walmart and other big box retailers. Bookstore chains devoured one another in a too-fast-to-follow blizzard that saw mall stores nationwide changing corporate ownership more often than they changed their window displays (Borders was bought by Kmart, merged with Waldenbooks, spun out again, renamed, merged with a toy retailer, expanded globally, merged with the UK chain Books etc, flipped to private equity, debt loaded and crushed; Barnes and Noble bought B. Dalton and Bookstop, went public, bought Gamestop — yes, that Gamestop — started haemorrhaging money, got flipped to private equity, and rebooted under new leadership with James Daunt at the helm).

These mergers weren’t just driven by deregulation, though: monopoly begets monopoly. With mass-market sales dominated by big-box retailers (who could use predatory pricing to discount books below their wholesale prices), booksellers’ share of mass-market revenues collapsed. Getting big enough to negotiate preferential terms from publishers — in the form of “co-op” payments to promote blockbuster titles, as well as sweetheart discounts, “incentives,” and favorable credit terms — was one way for bookselling to compete in the new market.

This was bad news for publishers, of course (it was even worse news for independent booksellers, who not only couldn’t get the favorable terms extorted by big box retailers and the Big Two national bookstore chains, but actually saw their terms get worse in this period, as publishers took their gains where they could get them).

Consolidation in both trade and mass-market retail and distributorship was met with consolidation in publishing. Publishing went from dozens of publishers to a handful that continues to dwindle to this day: the Big Six publishers of the 2010 are now the Big Four, thanks to Penguin-Random House’s acquisition of Simon & Schuster (the full name of this monstrosity is properly “Viking-Putnam-Berkeley-Avery-Ace-Avon-Grosset & Dunlop-Playboy Press-New American Library-Dutton-Jove-Dial-Warne-Ladybird-Pelican-Hamish Hamilton-Tarcher-Bantam-Doubleday-Dell-Knopf-Harold Shaw-Multnomah-Pocket-Esquire-Allyn & Bacon-Quercus-Fearon-Janus-Penguin-Random House-Simon & Schuster”).

Health-care-ificatoin of publishing

Meanwhile, both trade and mass-market retail were collapsing even further, as Amazon claimed the lion’s share of both markets, giving the final say over what books were connected with which readers to a single firm, whose executives used a mix of algorithms, superstition, vindictiveness and raw, anticompetitive bullying to determine which books would succeed or fail.

. . . .

As competition in publishing has faded, the deal for most writers has gotten worse. We’ve seen a rise in odious contracting terms, from binding arbitration waivers; to “joint accounting” that allows publishers to drain money owed for a successful book’s sales to cover the failure of another book; to non-negotiable inclusion of ebook, foreign, graphic novel and audio rights (with no increase in advances); to the abolishment of rights-reversion for out-of-print books. Advances and royalty rates have stalled.

Books are doing fine, authors (and publishing workers) are not — just as health insurers, hospitals and pharma companies are thriving, while patients and medical workers’ fortunes are growing steadily worse.

The decline in the author’s share of the pie is directly attributable to a decline in competition among publishers (which, in turn, is directly attributable to a decline in competition among retailers and distributors). In a world with four large publishers, if Publisher A passes on your book or makes a unacceptably low offer, you try your luck with Publishers B, C, and D, and, if four decision-makers all make no offer or a poor offer, you’re done.

This situation is bad for writers, readers and publishing workers (the same dynamic plays out for publishing workers — if you don’t get a job at Macmillan, Harpercollins, Hachette or Random Penguin, then you have been rejected by every major publisher). Many things have been tried to fix this system.

The myth of the benevolent giant

First came the search for an alternative to publishing itself (just as the mass-market was an alternative to trade publishing). Writers, readers and editorial workers sought out other sectors who’d get the books they wanted into the hands of readers. There were a lot of startups that tried to fill this niche, but apart from some religious publishers, the only one that attained liftoff was Amazon, which leveraged its dominance in every other area of publishing to create a successful alternative to the publishing industry itself.

But while Amazon produced some high-profile wins for indie writers, and a port of call for editorial workers shed by the major publishers in post-merger layoffs, the honeymoon was destined to be short and end bitterly.

After all, the reason companies in concentrated industries treat their customers, workers and suppliers badly is because they can. Google doesn’t shower its tech workers with stock options, free kombucha and massages because of its generous spirit —if the company was a champion of labor rights, then these same perks would extend to its low-waged workers, too. The fact that these workers are misclassified as independent contractors and paid through a staffing agency cutout reveals the true predictor of how Google will treat you: how hard you are to replace.

When the options for writers dwindled — as publishing concentrated into fewer hands — the treatment for the writers who defected to Amazon also declined. They became replaceable. Right on schedule, the company embarked on a program of wage theft that stole tens of millions of dollars from the indie authors who’d shackled themselves to Amazon’s platform.

The only way that the mass of disorganized readers, workers and suppliers of an industry can get a fair deal is for the industry itself to be disorganized — to consist of competing firms that have something to lose if we walk out of the door. Trading one monopolist for the other in the hopes that it would look more kindly upon us was doomed from the start.

The writer-friendly mid-tier

In parallel with this effort to pit one giant against another, many publishing workers embarked upon upon a very different project: to fill the gap between self-publishing and the Big Six^H^H^H Five^H^H^H^H Four publishers with “boutique” publishers staffed by publishing veterans and bright young publishing workers, scooping up the fantastic authors who had been turned away from the big publishers.

This project has been much more successful than the giant-seeking expedition that ended with Amazon devouring the writers who’d helped it build its indie platform.

Today’s publishing landscape boasts a very exciting mid-tier of publishers, some organized as nonprofits, others as commercial entities. Several of them — Canada’s Raincoast, the UK’s Bloomsbury — have been able to grow to regional juggernauts thanks to their willingness to publish JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter novel after it was rejected by major publishers.

These scrappy publishers are doing marvellous things, and the internet has allowed them to connect with audiences in unique ways, while a new tier of distributors have cropped up to serve as a bridge between the mid-tier and the nation’s struggling, tenacious, and utterly vital indie bookstores.

I’ve dealt with several of these mid-sized publishers and I can report that they are great to work with. To be fair, they can screw things up just as much as the big publishers (whom I also work with) do, and it’s true that from a writer’s perspective it doesn’t matter if something bad happens to your book because a giant publisher’s bureaucracy failed it or because a small publisher didn’t have the staff or ready cash to capitalize on an opportunity. But they can also score wins with books that the big publishers can’t or won’t figure out how to get into readers’ hands, and they represent a competitor and hedge against further intensification of the Big Four’s squeeze on writers.

The endangered mid-tier

But the existence of this thriving mid-tier doesn’t change the overall dynamics of publishing. The squeeze on workers and writers isn’t just the result of an industry dominated by four publishers — it’s also the consequence of an industry with one major distributor (Ingram), one major brick and mortar bookstore (B&N) and one major online bookseller (Amazon, whose audiobook dominance through Audible is even more extensive than its dominance of print and e-books).

The one advantage that the Big Four publishers have that the mid-tier of publishing does not is that they are big enough to push back (with limited effectiveness) against Amazon and Ingram’s worst practices. Lacking this might-checking-might, the mid-tier is in a precarious place indeed.

Amazon, recall, is the company that once created a “Gazelle Project,” to “approach the small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue sickly gazelle,” to get them to accept unfavorable terms for their books in the Kindle store. That was in 2004. Does anyone think the company has gotten less willing to play hardball since then?

Fewer people are attuned to the risk of all of distribution consolidating into one company, Ingram, but this should alarm anyone who cares about publishing. Distributors are incredibly powerful, and anyone who distributes on behalf of third parties has numerous opportunities to engage in funny accounting practices whereby they cream off a sneaky share of their own.

. . . .

Self publishing

With all this, you may be tempted to self-publish. After all, the mechanics of self-publishing have never been simpler or more extenisve. Lulu will print beautiful books onshore, quickly, and cheaply (I ran up some “author’s galleys” for a couple of my upcoming books to use in soliciting blurbs and feedback and discovered to my delight that I could print a 6 inch x 9 inch finished, perfect-bound book with a full-color cover for less than I pay to photocopy and side-staple a manuscript at my local copy shop!). Smashwords and Bookbaby offer extensive author services and ebook distribution.

And, of course, Amazon will take your book for the Kindle store, and Ingram will accept it as a print-on-demand title available to every bookstore in the country (if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em).

I often hear from friends and strangers who want to know what I think of self-publishing. Here’s what I tell them:

Publishing a professional-quality volume has never been easier. Working with publishing platforms, you can contract with excellent proofers, copyeditors, cover artists, book designers, typographers — the whole stack of professional services that go into making a book into a finished product (many of them are publishing veterans, still using their skills after merger-based layoffs). You can hire as many or as few of these professionals as you need, based on the skills you bring to the table.

But that still leaves you with a serious problem — perhaps the most serious problem in publishing. All of that stuff is writing and printing, but until the book finds its readers, it is not publishing.

As my beloved novel editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden told me long, long ago, “Publishing is the process of identifying a work and its audience, and then taking whatever steps are necessary to connect the two.” That may include cover design or marketing copy or copy-editing, but it also includes the huge, ill-defined, and nebulous world of marketing, sales, and publicity.

Put simply, you need to figure out why anyone, anywhere should give a shit that you wrote a book. This is a very hard problem. Indeed, it’s the hard problem of religion, advertising and politics: getting someone else to care about something you want them to care about.

. . . .

Here’s where publishers have an advantage: they have a longitudinal view of how books and audiences find one another. They publish lots of books. They try variations on their marketing, sales and publicity with each book, see which tactics show the most promise, and refine them. They can iterate.

That’s the single largest disadvantage faced by self-publishers. You go into your marketing and publicity plan without any precedents to have learned hard lessons from. You are a data-set of one.

. . . .

Publishing is — by definition — very good at targeting readers, but when it comes to targeting the vastly larger world of non-readers, publishing’s expertise is far patchier. After all, understanding “non-readers” involves understanding the whole world, the motivations not just of people who do buy books, but people who don’t.

Mega-bestsellers are just books that a small proportion of non-readers read. “Airport novels,” books that Oprah pitches, books that get made into movies — these are all books that are exposed to groups of non-readers that are orders of magnitude larger than the people who consider themselves “readers.” And they’re funnels: the Harry Potter novels and 50 Shades of Grey both introduced vast numbers of non-readers to books, and induced a small proportion of those non-readers to become readers.

This is where self-publishing has a potential advantage relative to publishing. You may be in touch with a group of non-readers — a faith group, members of a subculture or fandom, a professional association or a political movement — that you have well-developed ideas for reaching and convincing to give a shit about your book. It’s entirely possible that you are the first person who’s ever considered the potential pathway to engaging that group of people, that is, you might be the world’s leading expert on the subject.

In that instance, a publisher brings a lot less to the table. 

Link to the rest at Cory Doctorow and thanks to C. for the tip.

As mentioned at the outset, PG doesn’t agree with all of Mr. Doctorow’s ideas and opinions although there are many good ones.

PG’s main disagreement is that publishers are good at what they do. In the US, traditional publishing is a shared monopoly that has a strong connection with book distributors (Ingram and Baker & Taylor) and, through them an excellent connection with traditional bookstores, including rapidly-collapsing Barnes & Noble.

With respect to the place where the most people buy their books, Amazon, traditional publishing doesn’t have a monopoly and all the old boy networks that run through traditional publishing channels don’t mean anything.

Here’s PG’s hypothetical question – if you had to choose one of the following (and only one), which would you rather be:

#1 bestselling author at Barnes & Noble?

or

#1 bestselling author at Amazon?

As a matter of fact, PG thinks most authors would prefer being the #1 bestselling author on Amazon to being the #1 bestselling author on all the other book sales platforms combined.

Traditional publishing simply has not been able to make the transition to an internet-dominated book sales channel. Yes, they spend money on author tours (both virtual and meatspace) and NYT reviews and persuade Oprah to talk about their books, but they also take the large majority of all of the revenues the book generates and give the author only a small piece of the pie.

Traditional publishers are simply not able to hire and retain very smart people. Does anybody at the top of their MBA class at Wharton go to work for a big New York publisher? Does anybody at the bottom of their MBA class at Wharton go to work for a big New York publisher?

Does anybody who is reasonably intelligent and talented who has other employment options (and no trust fund to fall back on) go to work for a New York publisher?

End of PG rant. You may enjoy Mr. Doctorow’s OP more.

From BookBub:

Link to the rest at BookBub and thanks to D (who wonders how BookBub identifies authors of color) for the tip.

PG also wonders whether BookBub has any processes for determining whether someone who claims to be an “author of color” in order to obtain additional promotion and other benefits from BookBub is, in fact, an author of color.

In the OP at the link, PG could find no definition of “author of color”.

The date of the OP was June 28, 2021. BookBub published an earlier post on the same general topic on June 18, 2020, about a year earlier. The earlier post included the following paragraphs:

Link to the rest at BookBub

NOTE: PG drafted this post a few weeks ago, but did not put it up, then forgot about it for awhile.

PG is a bit cranky from spending too much time traveling to and from airports and on airplanes during the past several days. He remembers when airlines tried to create a veneer of glamour that accompanied the flying experience and seemed pleased when he showed up at the airport to board a plane.

That is definitely no longer the case. The decline was present before September, 2011, but it has greatly increased since the installation of a great many ill-paid and surly government employees at every airport who change the security protocols every few weeks to keep the terrorists and tourists off-balance.

PG is not 75 years of age, but, after failing one or more security processes at various airports, he was asked if he was 75 years of age (not necessarily the best ego-booster around) on several occasions, Perhaps the airport security theater process may have aged him prematurely.

Evidently, if PG survives to the age of 75, government employees will have a whole new security process for him. Perhaps the new one will be designed to get PG off the Social Security rolls as quickly as possible in addition to catching ancient terrorists.

PG suspects questions like, “How many fingers am I holding up?” and, “What was the make, year and model of the car you were driving during your first drivers license test?” may be added to airport security protocols to make certain that foreign evil-doers disguising themselves as senile men of a certain age don’t blow up airplanes while sitting in coach.

But back to the OP.

If an “author of color” is not expressly defined, PG will argue that he qualifies. Due to a bit of time spent out in the sun, he is a bit brown with darker speckles which appear from otherwise unobtrusive. If he holds his arm up to a sheet on a hotel bed, PG is definitely not white. The sheet is white and PG is a color other than white.

As a person of color, PG strenuously objects to being wrongly classified with persons who have no color. He is simply different from them on a fundamental basis. From the earliest days of his youth, PG’s skin has never resembled a white bedsheet. He loudly contends that spotted tannish lives matter.

From Writers Helping Writers:

Now that in-person conferences are back, it’s a good time to review proper etiquette for these gatherings. I’ve been teaching at writers conferences for over twenty years, and I’ve seen a ton of aspiring writers in various stages of disequilibrium. Everyone wants to get a book contract and everyone’s a little scared they never will. They hear stories about the odds and it sends shivers to the tips of their typing fingers. 

In the course of these conference years I’ve seen a number of writers who have gotten that contract and gone on to be published by major houses. I’ve even helped a few get there, which is nice. And while it’s nearly impossible to judge why one manuscript makes it and another—which is comparable or even better—does not, I have made note of one item: The overwhelming majority of writers I’ve seen make it are those who look and act like a professional.

When you meet unpublished writers who act like pros, you form the immediate impression that it’s only a matter of time before they make it. This impression is not lost on agents and editors. 

So what are the marks of a professional? 

Grooming

Successful writers-in-waiting look professional. They do not come off as slobs or slackers. They dress sharply though unpretentiously. They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but we do it all the time with people. Don’t shoot down your first impression by looking unkempt or having stink-breath that can kill low flying birds.

Industry Knowledge

Professionals know something about their profession. They spend time reading blogs and books and the trades, though not to the exclusion of their writing.

To the Point

A pro has the ability to focus on what the other person (e.g., an agent) will find valuable and, most important, can deliver that in a concise and persuasive manner. You should be able to tell someone, in 30 seconds or less, what your book is about, in such a way that the person can immediately see its potential. 

Courtesy

Common courtesy goes a long way, especially these days. If you have an appointment with an agent, be there two minutes early. When you’re done, thank them. Follow up with a short and appropriate e-mail.  Don’t call them unless you’ve been invited to. Don’t get angry or petulant, even if there’s a reason for it. Burning bridges is never a good career move.

Link to the rest at Writers Helping Writers

PG is certain the author of the OP is knowledgeable and meant well with his suggestions, but, for PG’s PG-ish tendencies, especially in the morning, the OP represented a great many things he dislikes about the traditional book business.

We only deal with the right kind of people.

Fit in or else.

Remember who has the power and who doesn’t.

A little groveling goes a long way.

We don’t need you but you need us.

A great many people PG has dealt with in the traditional publishing establishment think they’re smarter than they are.

He’ll rant on lawyers who work for publishers because, for PG, they represent tendencies he sees in many different areas of the publishing biz.

1. They’re not very good lawyers. Nobody who graduates from a decent law school with decent grades wants to go to work for a publisher. For one thing, they can make a lot more money working elsewhere and for another, the work they do on a daily basis isn’t very challenging or interesting.
2. They aren’t very good negotiators (one of the most important talents of a good business/contracts attorney) because they don’t think they have to be. After all, every author needs a publisher more than the publisher needs them.
3. They spend most of their time dealing with literary agents, not other lawyers. Some agents are intelligent and competent, but anybody can call themselves a literary agent. There are no entry requirements, no classes they have to take, nada. And every agent needs a publisher way, way more than the publisher needs an agent. (There may be a small group of elite agents representing gonzo best-selling authors who are more important, but the gonzo combination is pretty rare.)
4. Like everyone else in publishing, they secretly know that Amazon has changed the world, but they don’t like to think about that because they’re not sure where else they could find a job.

PG will stop being uncharitable for awhile, but he has always been annoyed by paper-thin establishments that act stupidly.

From Publishers Weekly:

I came to the trade division at Houghton Mifflin in fall 2003 as senior v-p of trade sales, at the tail end of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. The French conglomerate Vivendi had purchased Houghton a few years earlier, taken it private, and had sold it to a consortium of bankers and investors at a huge loss. Vivendi was the first, but it wouldn’t be the last disastrous foreign investor in what had historically been the highly profitable U.S. education business. Meanwhile, the trade division was coming off an outstanding three-year run thanks to Tolkien—perhaps the best in its long and storied history.

The longevity of HM (founded in 1832) isn’t unique among publishing houses, but it was certainly a source of pride inside the division and within the larger corporation. There was a deep respect for the history, close attention to the present, and a vision for the future. In other words, it was a company that knew what it was about: educating and entertaining children and adults. But dark clouds were forming on the horizon.

The education marketplace had been a cash-rich business for decades, with much higher margins than those in the consumer business. Educational spending was slowly but steadily rising in these years, which attracted investor attention. In short, the industry was ripe for takeover and consolidation. Investors began leveraging these cash-rich businesses, taking on what they thought was manageable debt and looking for synergies across their acquisitions.

In December 2006, Riverdeep Holdings purchased Houghton Mifflin. One year later, Riverdeep purchased the educational and consumer publisher Harcourt Education and created Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Both purchases were highly leveraged. In need of cash to service its enormous debt, Riverdeep sold the trade imprint Kingfisher to Macmillan, and shortly after, sold the college division to Thompson Learning (now Cengage).

It was in this environment that I was asked to take over as president of the trade division in fall 2007. A year later, the Great Recession roiled the economy and educational spending plummeted. After a tumultuous and difficult year of painful cost cutting, the trade division was put up for sale in 2009. Offers were made, but a deal was never struck. Through several debt restructurings, and a few turnovers in the corner office, the company went public in 2013.

In 2015 HMH made a cash purchase of Scholastic’s EdTech business, but the financial pressures in the education business continued. In 2018, the standardized testing division, Riverside, was sold. In fall 2020, more than 500 employees were laid off. Once HMH made the decision to transition into a primarily digital company, it was only a matter of time before what was called HMH Books and Media (Trade) was sold to continue paying down the debt.

. . . .

And now, it’s gone. Yes, the HMH logo will appear on the spines and copyright pages of books and audios for a short while, but the proud and feisty trade publisher we all loved and adored is no more, with the brand to be used by the digital technology company. HMH is now part of history, another merger story, among so many in publishing.

During my 40-plus years in the book business, I’ve experienced my share of mergers and acquisitions, but this one especially hurts.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

Greater Fool Theory

From Investopedia:

What Is the Greater Fool Theory?

The greater fool theory argues that prices go up because people are able to sell overpriced securities to a “greater fool,” whether or not they are overvalued. That is, of course, until there are no greater fools left.

Investing, according to the greater fool theory, means ignoring valuations, earnings reports, and all the other data. Ignoring the fundamentals is, of course, risky; and so people subscribing to the greater fool theory could be left holding the bag after a correction.

Understanding the Greater Fool Theory

If acting in accordance with the greater fool theory, an investor will purchase questionably priced securities without any regard to their quality. If the theory holds, the investor will still be able to quickly sell them off to another “greater fool,” who could also be hoping to flip them quickly.

Unfortunately, speculative bubbles burst eventually, leading to a rapid depreciation in share prices. The greater fool theory breaks down in other circumstances, as well, including during economic recessions and depressions. In 2008, when investors purchased faulty mortgage-backed securities (MBS), it was difficult to find buyers when the market collapsed.

. . . .

Greater Fool Theory and Intrinsic Valuation

One of the reasons that it was difficult to find buyers for MBS during the 2008 financial crisis was that these securities were built on debt that was of very poor quality. It is important in any situation to conduct thorough due diligence on an investment, including a valuation model in some circumstances, to determine its fundamental worth.

Due diligence is a broad term that encompasses a range of qualitative and quantitative analyses. Some aspects of due diligence can include calculating a company’s capitalization or total value; identifying revenue, profit, and margin trends; researching competitors and industry trends; as well as putting the investment in a broader market context—crunching certain multiples such as price-to-earnings (PE), price-to-sales (P/S), and price/earnings-to-growth (PEG).

Link to the rest at Investopedia

From The New York Times:

The Victoria’s Secret Angels, those avatars of Barbie bodies and playboy reverie, are gone. Their wings, fluttery confections of rhinestones and feathers that could weigh almost 30 pounds, are gathering dust in storage. The “Fantasy Bra,” dangling real diamonds and other gems, is no more.

In their place are seven women famous for their achievements and not their proportions. They include Megan Rapinoe, the 35-year-old pink-haired soccer star and gender equity campaigner; Eileen Gu, a 17-year-old Chinese American freestyle skier and soon-to-be Olympian; the 29-year-old biracial model and inclusivity advocate Paloma Elsesser, who was the rare size 14 woman on the cover of Vogue; and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, a 38-year-old Indian actor and tech investor.

They will be spearheading what may be the most extreme and unabashed attempt at a brand turnaround in recent memory: an effort to redefine the version of “sexy” that Victoria’s Secret represents (and sells) to the masses. For decades, Victoria’s Secret’s scantily clad supermodels with Jessica Rabbit curves epitomized a certain widely accepted stereotype of femininity. Now, with that kind of imagery out of step with the broader culture and Victoria’s Secret facing increased competition and internal turmoil, the company wants to become, its chief executive said, a leading global “advocate” for female empowerment.

Will women buy it? An upcoming spinoff, more than $5 billion in annual sales, and 32,000 jobs in a global retail network that includes roughly 1,400 stores are riding on the answer.

. . . .

“When the world was changing, we were too slow to respond,” said Martin Waters, the former head of Victoria’s Secret’s international business who was appointed chief executive of the brand in February. “We needed to stop being about what men want and to be about what women want.”

. . . .

Founded in 1977 as a store where men could feel comfortable shopping for lingerie, even the name referred to male fantasies of prim Victorian ladies who became naughty in the boudoir. The retail billionaire Leslie H. Wexner bought Victoria’s Secret in 1982 and turned it into a phenomenon that helped shape society’s view of female sexuality and beauty ideals. Central to its ethos were the “Angels” — supermodels like Heidi Klum and Tyra Banks who posed exclusively for the brand, often in G-strings, stilettos and wings. In 1995, it introduced the Victoria’s Secret fashion show, a sort of cross between a runway show and a pole dance that aired on network television for nearly two decades.

It has taken years for Victoria’s Secret to acknowledge that its marketing was dated. In that time, the value of the brand eroded and a slew of competitors grew in part by positioning themselves as the anti-Victoria’s Secret, complete with more typical women’s bodies and a focus on inclusivity and diversity.

. . . .

“In the old days, the Victoria brand had a single lens, which was called ‘sexy,’” Mr. Waters said. While that sold for decades, it also prevented the brand from offering products like maternity or post-mastectomy bras (not considered sexy) and prompted it to sell push-up sports bras (sexy, but not so popular). It also meant, he said, “that the brand never celebrated Mother’s Day.” (Not sexy.)

There are plenty of people who do, in fact, find motherhood seductive, but the myopia of the Victoria’s Secret lens was such that they were never acknowledged, let alone listened to.

. . . .

Victoria’s Secret is betting a chunk of its marketing budget that persuading such unexpected personalities to join its cause will in turn convince consumers, and potential investors, to similarly believe in its shift, giving a new meaning to halo effect.

As Ms. Rapinoe said, “I don’t know if Victoria has a secret anymore.”

Link to the rest at The New York Times

For PG, the NYT’s key quote (and one of relevance for the book business and everybody else) is, “When the world was changing, we were too slow to respond.”

For PG, traditional publishing is the epitome of not changing when the world has changed.

He won’t go on a rant to prove his point, but there’s a good rant hanging in the back of closet of his mind if he ever needs one.

From The New Publishing Standard:

Seriously? It’s taken a pandemic to make publishers realise that marketing can be done online? No wonder indie authors have been raking in a billion bucks in royalties from KU while mainstream publishers have been looking the other way.

Mixed headlines this past week as Publishers Weekly acknowledged backlist sales could be sustained even after high street bookstores re-opened, while The Bookseller focused on how lockdown supposedly hurt frontlist sales due to less discoverability of debut authors.

Of course there are elements of truth on both sides, but the key point that publishers chose to offer fewer new titles during the pandemic and therefore fewer books were available to be sold is barely acknowledged.

It’s the same kind of self-defeating argument we see about ebook and audiobook subscription, where frontlist titles and big name authors are kept off these sites and publishers then point to low engagement as a self-fulfilling prophecy that subscription cannot deliver.

But let’s stick with the issue of backlist, by which we mean books first published at least a year previously. Books that therefore no longer receive any publisher love and promo-cash and are left to wither on the vine.

At PW’s US Book Show in May representatives from four major houses discussed,

strategies on how to continue to build a publisher’s backlist revenue.

PW explained:

Panelists agreed that the pandemic was the major reason backlist sales have soared as more buying shifted online, an environment that tends to favor backlist titles over new releases.

Well, yes and no.

Here’s the problem with this argument. Bookstores are great for discovery, no question. I can (if I were in a country that had such an option) walk into a well-stocked bookstore and with a sweeping glance see literally thousands upon thousands of books, and I can move down an aisle and have books to the right of me, books to the left of me, all full size, tangible and within a hand’s reach.

Online I’m faced with at best a page of thumbnail images. I go to another page and the previous page is out of sight. I narrow down to a particular book and I have to search again to find my next promising title.

Recommendations will be flung at me that are either paid ads or algorithm driven.

But what does a bookstore offer in terms of discovering a new debut author, which seems to be the concern of The Bookseller?

The reality is, very little, unless the publisher is paying the bookstore to showcase the title. And if that’s the case, what exactly is stopping the publisher putting the same energy and money into showcasing the title online?

The answer is that the publisher generally is print focused and will not give equal promotional efforts to the bookstore and to the online retailer, perpetuating the myth that frontlist titles perform better in high street stores than online.

Publishers might, then, want to ask themselves how so many indie authors manage to sell books when they are almost totally digitally-focussed.

Per past TNPS posts, the volume of ebooks being sold that are not tracked by Nielsen or the AAP runs to tens of millions of dollars worth each month. Said books being by digital-first/POD online publisher and seller APub, and by digital-first indie authors.

Since Jan 2018 the Kindle Unlimited ebook subscription service has paid out over $1 billion in royalties to indie authors

Somehow said indie authors managed to bring in over one billion dollars in royalties over the past three years – just from Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited ebook subscription service, where absolutely no bricks and mortar stores are involved.

. . . .

The Bookseller, meanwhile offered some revealing statistics. For example, that,

As a proportion of the (UK) market as a whole, backlist accounted for 57% in volume (in spring 2020), compared to spring 2019’s 50%.

The Bookseller goes on to say, using Enders Analysis data, that sales initially crashed as lockdown first arrived,

With publication dates moving and events cancelled, before they more than recovered, with annual growth rates “much higher than would be expected in a good but ‘normal year’”.

One more unhelpful admission that bricks and mortar bookstores are not as indispensable as previously believed, and that in fact book sales rose, as more booklovers went online, which almost begs the heretical question, might bricks and mortar stores actually stifle sales to some extent?

The reality is both bricks and mortar and online sales are invaluable sales channels for publishers, but of course online tends to mean Amazon, and that presents a whole range of issues for publishers who have traditionally demonised the Everything Store while simultaneously milking it for all it’s worth to sell ebooks, audiobooks and of course print.

. . . .

Jeremy Trevathan at Pan Macmillan, talking about rising backlist sales, said:

It was more of a blip than a massive change in what we do. It did focus our minds on the increased possibility of backlist sales. There’s no diminution in the appetite of launching new authors or doing new things. What has changed is the possibility of online marketing and things like events, which I suspect will go hybrid as much as hybrid working [will].

Seriously? It’s taken a pandemic to make publishers realise that marketing can be done online? No wonder indie authors have been raking in a billion bucks in royalties from KU while mainstream publishers have been looking the other way.

Link to the rest at The New Publishing Standard

From Publishing Perspectives:

In the StatShot report released Thursday (May 27) by the Association of American Publishers, the United States’ total revenues across all categories monitored by the system were up in March 40.2 percent as compared to March 2020. That brings the monetary figure to US$896.1 million.

. . . .

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.

Trade Revenues

The trade’s sales are being reported up 34.2 percent in March, coming in at $743.9 million, and up 24.9 percent year-to-date, with $2.1 billion in revenue.

Year-Over-Year Numbers

In terms of physical paper format revenues during the month of March, in the trade category–remember, this is consumer books):

• Hardback revenues were up 50.9 percent, coming in at $293.7 million
• Paperbacks were up 27.7 percent, with $239.9 million in revenue
• Mass market was up 34.6 percent to $20.6 million
• Board books were up 46.5 percent, with $15.3 million in revenue
• Ebook revenues were up 21.0 percent for the month as compared to March of 2020 for a total of $88 million
• The downloaded audio format–about which so many in the industry are enthusiastic–was up 16.7 percent for March, coming in at $58.5 million in revenue
• Physical audio was down 16.1 percent coming in at $1.6 million, the ongoing downward glide of formats now overtaken by digital

Year-to-Date Numbers

In Q1 2021:

• Hardback revenues were up 34.0 percent, at $765.3 million
• Paperbacks were up 19.3 percent, with $651.2 million in revenue
• Mass market was up 36.6 percent to $61.8 million
• Board books were up 9.8 percent, with $44.9 million in revenue
• Ebook revenues were up 20.7 percent as compared to the first three months of 2020 for a total of $278.2 million
• Downloaded audio was up 21.0 percent, at $189.4 million in revenue
• Physical audio was down 5.3 percent, at $4.8 million

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

PG says if anyone sees any stats for Amazon’s year-over-year book sales for Q1 2021, he would appreciate it if you would forward him a link or message the Contact PG button toward the top of the blog.

From Publishers Weekly:

Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle was joined by PRH author and organizational psychologist Adam Grant . . . on Monday in a live online conversation entitled “Rethinking Our New ‘Old’ Business: Why Books and Publishing are Flourishing.”

Presented as a combination of personal and managerial reflections on life and the book business under a pandemic, Grant and Dohle traded pandemic anecdotes and responded to a range of concerns about the current state of the book publishing industry. The two touched on such topics as the pandemic-driven demand for books, digital publishing, e-commerce and Amazon, the challenges facing physical retail, and PRH’s growing size, as well as the enduring importance of the physical book. The conversation closed with Dohle’s optimistic projections for the book industry as it warily emerges into a new and uncertain post-pandemic economic reality.

. . . .

Grant asked Dohle if book professionals thought the industry would grind to a halt and languish because of the pandemic.

But while Dohle was quick to acknowledge that it has been “a tough year for everyone,” he said, in fact, “business went through the roof last year,” and growth has continued into 2021, with print unit sales up about 25% into mid-May over the comparable period last year. Rather than grinding to a halt under the pandemic, the book industry was flourishing. Indeed, Dohle continued, looking back over the last 25 years, he emphasized that the book industry has fared better than any other media category.

“That’s not what the public thinks, and, unfortunately, it’s not what publishing people think,” he said. Indeed, Dohle noted that, in 2017, he decided to go on a “global road show,” to impress on the industry and others that “this is the best time in publishing ever since Gutenberg,” highlighting the fact that “the vast majority of the growth comes from the printed format.”

Dohle offered six reasons why this is the best time in publishing, backed, he said, by data: 1. the continued growth of the global book market year over year; 2. the industry’s robust model for print and digital distribution; 3. the continuing strength of physical books and its coexistence (80% print, 20% e-books) with digital in the market; 4. world population growth and spiking literacy rates, creating new readers; 5. the especially fast growth of children’s books, producing even more new readers; and 6. the boom in audiobook sales, which is not cannibalizing other formats.

Grant continued to question Dohle’s rosy depiction of the business, citing the mounting size of PRH (and its pending acquisition of S&S) and asking if his best-of-times characterization simply “supports your efforts to build monopoly power.”

“The Key Performance Indicators of this industry are all going in the right direction,” Dohle said, noting that revenue is growing for publishers and retailers, while author royalties also have increased. Addressing PRH’s size, Dohle asserted that the publisher represented about 20% of the book markets in each of the 25 countries in which it operates. He added that the publishing sector is fragmented, characterizing a 20% market share as “not that big.” (When told by Dohle of PRH’s current market share, Grant said that didn’t sound like a monopoly). Dohle also argued that, over the last 10 years, small and independent publishers have “outperformed the big houses,” particularly those who are strong in a niche.

Dohle said that while publishing is fragmented, “Amazon has accumulated a lot of market share” on the retail side, noting that four of every 10 units sold by PRH are bought through Amazon. Having said that, Dohle said, PRH can work with the e-tailing giant. “They innovate, and they present challenges as well as a lot of opportunities,” he said, adding, “perhaps more opportunities than threat. Why fight our biggest customer? Complaining is not a strategy.”

While online sales jumped last year, Dohle promised that PRH will support both e-commerce and physical bookstores. “We want to grow in all channels,” he said, adding that the publisher has just extended payment terms for bookstores again to give them more financial flexibility and help their cash flow. In response to a question from Grant, Dohle said he hoped the industry would one day solve the question of bundling print and digital copies of books, noting that one challenge there is the pressure bundling could pose on author royalties. He even discussed the ability of PRH imprints to compete for book acquisitions as PRH waits for governmental authority to acquire S&S. (It’s allowed, Dohle said, as long as non-PRH publishers are involved.)

Dohle also hit back against the thinking that, as the lockdowns fade and people return to more normal routines, reading and book buying will decline. He said that the industry has a great opportunity to keep people who made reading a habit over the last year in the book-buying ecosystem and to raise the baseline of readers. His answer for how to achieve that? “Publish good books.”

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From Vox:

Book publishing is having an existential crisis. The industry is finding itself saddled with deals by polarizing political figures, and no idea how to handle them. Which, in turn, gives rise to some fundamental questions about the purpose of publishing.

Is the industry’s purpose to make the widest array of viewpoints available to the largest audience possible? Is it to curate only the most truthful, accurate, and high-quality books to the public? Or is it to sell as many books as possible, and to try to stay out of the spotlight while doing so? Should a publisher ever care about any part of an author’s life besides their ability to write a book?

These questions are becoming more and more urgent within the private realms of publishing, amid debates over which authors deserve the enormous platform and resources that publishers can offer — and when it’s acceptable for publishers to decide to take those resources away.

Within the media watering hole of Twitter, it can look as though these concerns are being imposed from the outside: by progressive authors calling on their publishers to abstain from signing right-wing writers; by angry YA fans and Goodreads readers; by petitions and boycotts and special interest groups. But the conversation about who deserves a publishing deal is also happening within the glass-and-steel walls of the industry itself.

Insiders describe recurring generational battles, with young and junior staffers flagging the work of certain authors as potential publicity risks, and then struggling to get older and more conservative executives to take their worries seriously. “It’s like a relationship you really want to work,” says one young staffer, “but your partner is not making it easy for you.”

This April, Simon & Schuster announced two new book deals that left its staff polarized and furious: one with former Vice President Mike Pence, and one with former Trump administration official Kellyanne Conway. More than 200 staffers at Simon & Schuster signed a petition calling on the company to cancel the deals. (As in literally cancel their contracts — though this does overlap with the idea of “cancel culture.”) More than 3,500 figures outside the company added their support, including two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward.

That very public show of internal outrage from Simon & Schuster staffers was only the latest iteration of this larger generational fight, one that usually takes place behind closed doors. In 2019, Penguin Random House imprint Dutton quietly dropped its author Linda Fairstein, who oversaw the 1989 prosecution of the Exonerated Five, in the wake of a public outcry following the Ava DuVernay series When They See Us. Dutton never made so much as a public statement about its decision to part ways with Fairstein, but former Dutton employees described to Vox an internal dynamic similar to the one playing out publicly at Simon & Schuster. At Dutton, junior staffers repeatedly sounded the alarm over an author they considered a liability for the imprint, a former employee says, only to have their concerns brushed aside by senior executives invested in maintaining the status quo, right up until the status quo became untenable.

American culture is changing rapidly right now, and publishing is changing along with it. The stories of Mike Pence’s book deal and Linda Fairstein’s contract speak to the struggle in which publishing is enmeshed: determining what it stands for and what its purpose is.

. . . .

“Your decision-making is only guided by profit right now”: The fight over Mike Pence’s book deal
On April 7, Simon & Schuster announced that it had reached a two-book deal with Mike Pence and that it planned to publish his autobiography in 2023 through the company’s flagship imprint.

Within days, angry staffers began circulating a petition urging Simon & Schuster management to cancel the Pence deal, to commit to refusing to sign any other members of the Trump administration, and to end all association with Mattingly’s publisher, Post Hill Books. When they delivered the petition to CEO Jonathan Karp on April 26, they had signatures from about 14 percent of the company.

“Editors exercise subjective judgement every day at S&S—we put our trust in them,” a group of organized employees wrote in a cover email delivering the petition to management. “When S&S chose to sign Mike Pence, we broke the public’s trust in our editorial process, and blatantly contradicted previous public claims in support of Black and other lives made vulnerable by structural oppression.”

Karp wrote a letter in response maintaining that Pence’s book deal would go forward. “We come to work each day to publish, not cancel,” he wrote, “which is the most extreme decision a publisher can make, and one that runs counter to the very core of our mission to publish a diversity of voices and perspectives.”

. . . .

To the Simon & Schuster staff members who signed the petition, the central issue was one of hypocrisy and normalization. No one is owed a book deal, and editors turn down prospective authors every day without anyone crying censorship. So why, they asked, was Simon & Schuster offering deals to Kellyanne Conway and Mike Pence, after spending the previous summer putting out statements declaring its support for Black Lives Matter? Why, they asked, was it willing to say that Josh Hawley’s support of the Capitol rioters was a bridge too far, but not the Trump administration’s failure to protect Americans during the pandemic?

“There are innumerable ways in which Mike Pence’s anti-LGBTQ, racist, anti-immigrant agenda has and will continue to pose a threat to many people, including those who work for your company,” the group said in another email on May 4. “So, our question remains: Why was the distribution deal with Jonathan Mattingly and the book deals with Josh Hawley and Milo Yiannopoulos canceled, but not Pence’s deal? If a standard of truth in publishing is important, how will that possibly be executed in a project with Kellyanne Conway, who proudly coined the phrase ‘alternative facts’?”

“It’s just like, stop inserting these phony statements about morals and political and ethical commitments,” one staffer commented to Vox, rhetorically addressing Simon & Schuster management. This source argues that Simon & Schuster’s statements aren’t really based in a true moral code: “They’re bullshit. That’s branding that you’re trying to tack on. It’s inconsistent with your decision-making. Your decision-making is only guided by profit right now.”

(Vox spoke to a former Dutton employee and two current Simon & Schuster employees for this story, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional retaliation.)

“Why are we giving him so much money?” said another employee to Vox, referring to reports suggesting that Pence’s advance could be worth around $3 million to $4 million. “Who’s going to buy his book? No one on either side of the aisle likes him. So why can we not give him a smaller advance? Why can’t you distribute the rest of it among your employees, or maybe give bigger advances to BIPOC authors?” (Publishing assistants are notoriously underpaid, in one of the factors leading to the monolithic whiteness of the industry, and Black, Indigenous, and other authors of color are consistently given smaller advances than white authors.)

Karp and the rest of Simon & Schuster have made no additional statements about the decision to publish either Pence or Conway, and Simon & Schuster declined to comment for this article. Some staffers have suggested to Vox that the internal discontent will soon die down, with one employee saying, “I think we’re mostly just grumbling at this point.” But an organizer of the protest said, “We are definitely not intending to let this go.”

Link to the rest at Vox

PG was somewhat hesitant to include anything from Vox on TPV, but made an exception because of the preciousness of some of the quoted publishing employees.

PG notes that no one is easier to replace than a young staffer at a New York publisher. Is this staffer giving management heartburn? Hire a clone for the same salary or less. Repeat this process a few times and the message will work its way through the workforce. Even the wokest Vassar graduate will get the picture.

To be clear, PG thinks it’s fine for anybody who works at S&S to be politically active in support of whomever and whatever on their own time. This political uproar seems to be happening on the employer’s time and Vox is certainly happy to quote people as upset S&S employees who are mad as hell and won’t take it any more.

This little political drama is taking place in a corner of a larger stage. Last year Viacom/CBS decided to sell S&S (unofficial reason – “That dog don’t hunt.”) Bertelsmann jumped into a not very large or enthusiastic group of prospective purchasers and there’s a preliminary agreement in place for Bertelsmann subsidiary, Penguin Random House to buy S&S.

Supposedly, the deal is complete except for the inevitably-slow regulatory approval.

Guess what happens when Penguin becomes the owner of S&S? A whole lot of junior and senior staff become redundant. The joint companies only need one CEO, one Chief Editor, etc., etc., etc. It’s a difficult and bloody process of deciding who you want to keep and who you don’t. One of the big reasons for an acquisition like this is to save money. Since publishers don’t have a lot of hard assets, saving money means cutting payroll expenses.

During this process, senior executives will have enough headaches making decisions about people who are easy to get along with and doing their jobs while not causing political distractions and talking to Vox.

“Professional retaliation” as mentioned in the OP is as good a reason as anything else to dump anybody who is a headache to deal with under such circumstances. Somebody at S&S who says, “It’s just like, stop inserting these phony statements about morals and political and ethical commitments,” sounds like a perfect candidate for a corporate Dear John/Dear Jane letter from the new bosses.

The Bertelsmann family, which has been wealthy for a long time and controls the Bertelsmann mothership via a combination of direct ownership and a wide collection of foundations is not PG’s leading candidate for an instant transformation into Wokeness and its related behaviors. Like many wealthy people, they would like to remain wealthy and don’t care about the US political flavor of the month.

Headquartered in Gütersloh, a city of about one hundred thousand located in Northern Germany not particularly close to anyplace a young New York publishing staffer has ever heard of, Bertelsmann likes profits without a great deal of fuss. It knows how to fire executives who don’t deliver according to its expectations and reward those who do. Although PG has no idea of who it might be, he suspects somebody in Gütersloh receives a copy of every news article that mentions Bertelsmann, including an article that appears in Vox.

From The New Republic:

Seven years ago, when Amazon was in the midst of a contentious pricing battle with one of the country’s largest publishers, a group of famous authors banded together to make the case that publishing was a crucial industry for the nation’s cultural and intellectual life.

“Publishers provide venture capital for ideas,” the authors wrote. “They advance money to authors, giving them the time and freedom to write their books.… Thousands of times every year, publishers take a chance on unknown authors and advance them money solely on the basis of an idea. By assuming the risk, publishers expect—and receive—a financial return.” The letter was signed by a who’s who of American writers: Stephen King, Michael Chabon, Donna Tartt, Lee Child, Ron Chernow, Ann Patchett, and Robert Caro, among many others.

This is more or less the story that publishers have told about themselves for decades. Publishers take chances, they nurture talent, they’re constantly on the hunt not just for marketable books, but for ideas. The industry is, by extension, one of the most important protectors of speech in the country. It doesn’t matter what the idea is or who it comes from, as long as it’s bold and original.

Speaking to PEN America in 2018, then, Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy made the connection explicit, saying, “It is all the more important to reassert our core belief that free speech, the actual discussion and debate of ideas is … the right of every citizen in our society.… When it comes to the right of unfettered discourse we should not, we cannot, accept dissent-quashing tyranny from any side of the political spectrum.”

But even as Reidy was speaking those words, this story was already fraying. In the background was the backlash that followed Simon & Schuster’s brief, disastrous dalliance with Milo Yiannapoulos. In 2021, with staff revolts in response to Simon & Schuster’s signing of Mike Pence and Kellyanne Conway to multimillion-dollar deals—and general angst about publishing former Trump administration officials—the story has collapsed altogether. Publishers have lost their grand narrative, and it’s not clear what will replace it.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the defense proffered by Simon & Schuster’s current CEO, Jonathan Karp. “As a publisher in this polarized era, we have experienced outrage from both sides of the political divide and from different constituencies and groups,” Karp wrote in an email responding to an open letter signed by about 15 percent of the publisher’s staff protesting the Pence deal. “But we come to work each day to publish, not cancel, which is the most extreme decision a publisher can make, and one that runs counter to the very core of our mission to publish a diversity of voices and perspectives. We will, therefore, proceed in our publishing agreement with Vice President Mike Pence.”

It’s worth dwelling on the heart of Karp’s defense: “We come to publish, not to cancel.” Karp is using the word literally—many of his staffers and authors were calling on the publisher to cancel Pence’s book deal, which covers two books. But he is also shouting out a larger culture war driven by right-wingers who have no interest in protecting debate or speech. They are, moreover, actively attempting to limit it in many instances.

The use of “cancel” here is notable in that these types of culture-war defenses are the last refuge of those without a substantive case to be made. And, to be clear, there really isn’t one to be made in defense of either the Pence deal or the Conway one, which came to light earlier this week. In the case of Pence, Simon & Schuster has paid $4 million for two books that will likely be the usual dreck of presidential aspirants, while the author cravenly glosses over the fact that his former boss incited a riot that nearly killed him.

. . . .

What you have now is a confused situation in which all kinds of books are deemed not worthy of publication or circulation—often for very good reasons—but without much consistency or clarity. At the same time, publishers are desperately clinging to anything they can to justify continuing to do whatever they think is in their best interest financially. They are on increasingly shaky ground, however, as Karp’s “canceling” email suggests. The old lines about free speech don’t quite make sense anymore. New ones haven’t been concocted. So they are left with empty rhetoric that only shows that these publishers have long since abandoned their roots as plucky free-speech warriors championing Ulysses.

What is fascinating about this dynamic is that, morally speaking, the corporations have been outflanked by their employees. The moral vision laid out in the open letter to Simon & Schuster, for instance, is much clearer than the one provided by Karp, whether you agree with it or not. “By choosing to publish Mike Pence, Simon & Schuster is generating wealth for a central figure of a presidency that unequivocally advocated for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Blackness, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism, islamophobia, antisemitism, and violence,” the letter reads. “This is not a difference of opinions; this is legitimizing bigotry.”

On one side, you have employees making the kind of value-based argument that publishers have been making for decades; on the other, you have an executive making dubious “cancel culture” arguments in service of the profit motive. This conflict only underscores the artificial nature of book publishing’s marketplace of ideas. As The Washington Post’s Ron Charles wrote earlier this week, “publishers have always made highly selective judgments about who they print and who they don’t,” a calculus that has historically heavily favored white men.

The disconnect between publishing’s rank and file and its leadership is cavernous at the moment. What you hear again and again, talking to staffers at Simon & Schuster and Norton, is the same thing you hear when talking to media professionals: They feel they are not being listened to and want more of a voice in decision-making. That may be more likely at W.W. Norton, which is employee-owned, than at Simon & Schuster, which is in the midst of a merger with Penguin Random House. In largely nonunionized publishing, winning that kind of influence will be difficult unless the wave of organizing we have seen in journalism spreads to book publishing.

Link to the rest at The New Republic

From The Bookseller:

HarperCollins owner News Corp has completed its $349m (£252m) acquisition of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s consumer division.

The deal, first announced in March, sees the HMH Books & media business operated by HarperCollins in the US.

HMH Books & Media has a backlist of more than 7,000 titles and a significant frontlist in the lifestyle and children’s segments. Popular HMH Books & Media titles include 1984 and Animal Farm, Curious George, The Polar Express, Little Blue Truck and The Little Prince. The acquisition gives HarperCollins US rights to J R R Tolkien’s works, meaning the publisher now has global English language rights to titles like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Brian Murray, president and c.e.o. of HarperCollins, said: “We are happy to welcome HMH Books & Media employees, authors, and illustrators to the HarperCollins family. Uniting two publishing companies, each with more than 200 years of literary history, will be the focus of our combined teams. We look forward to new and exciting opportunities as we chart a stronger future together.”

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt issued a press release concerning the dumping of its commercial book business. An excerpt:

“This divestiture enables us to focus singularly on serving the large and growing K­­­–12 education market and simultaneously extend our impact on student achievement,” said Jack Lynch, President and CEO, HMH. “With a highly differentiated end-to-end technology platform underpinning our solutions, we are uniquely positioned to meet the need for purposeful digital learning and to enhance the value we provide to our customers—which include 90 percent of the nation’s schools—and create for our shareholders. Importantly, the transaction also enables us to transform our capital structure and create flexibility, as a result of our ability to pay down a significant portion of our debt.”

The sub-head of the press release read:

Establishes HMH as a pure-play K­­­–12 learning technology company

Link to the rest at HMH

PG suggests the subtext of the subhead would read something like, “Please, please, please give is a decent stock-market valuation now that we’ve dumped our boat anchor traditional trade-publishing business on someone else!”

From Nathan Bransford:

It’s not a secret that the quality of books published by traditional publishers varies greatly. Some are breathtakingly magical, some read like lukewarm porridge.

I personally have long felt that authors cast too many aspersions against traditionally published books and underrate how good they really are, particularly if you’ve never read slush to get a sense of the “competition.” If you’re not finding more wonderful books than you could possibly have time to read, you’re really not looking very hard.

But it’s undoubtedly true that there are some traditionally published books that feel a bit, well, mailed in. And whenever an author brings one of these to my attention and uses it to interrogate the standards at traditional publishers, I often ask this question: was it a debut?

There are many reasons an established author might get a so-so book over the line to publication: they might have a faithful readership who will buy any book that hits the right notes, or it may be as simple as the author delivering a second or third book in a contract that has already been signed. These books may not need to reach the same level of excitement that’s required for an editor to go through the hurdles of acquiring a new book on behalf of the publisher.

If you want to know how good you have to be to get a traditionally published book across the finish line: look to the debuts. Those are the ones that had to get an editor excited enough to make an offer and take a chance on an unknown author.

Link to the rest at Nathan Bransford

PG suggests that authors may be best-served by letting readers decide. At a minimum, an indie author with little talent will have more readers and make more money than a would-be traditionally-published author who never gets a book contract.

From Publishing Perspectives:

Less than 100 days into the United States’ Biden administration—and, for that matter, less than two weeks after Simon & Schuster announced its two-book deal with the former vice-president Mike Pence—S&S has experienced new encounters with the heat of political publishing.

Today (April 20), Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp has issued a memo to staff, announcing that “we will proceed in our publishing agreement with vice-president Mike Pence.” That memo–which we’ll return to later in this article–is “in response to a petition, circulated by some of our employees, that calls into question recent acquisition decisions and ongoing business relationships at Simon & Schuster.”

Noting that “we have experienced outrage from both sides of the political divide,” Karp is issuing his second such message to employees in five days.

The backstory here begins late last week, as S&S determined that it will not distribute a book by one of the police officers involved in the raid on the home of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky.

You may recall that on January 7, Simon & Schuster cancelled its contract with Sen. Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, after Hawley had helped lead objections on January 6 to certification of Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump. But when Hawley’s book was then picked up by Regnery Publishing, which is distributed by Simon & Schuster, things from S&S were quiet. Distribution contracts don’t normally allow a distributor leeway over what it will or won’t distribute for contracted publishers.

And yet the question of distributing the book on the Breonna Taylor incident has had a different outcome at this Big Five company, which Bertelsmann has agreed to acquire in a deal still pending approval from regulators. And an especially thoughtful letter from Karp to the company’s employees reflects the level of ethical and business dilemma that executives in publishing can encounter as political and social issues continue to upend national and international dialogue and policy.

The moment becomes one to consider as a potential evolutionary phase in publishing, the focus being on the book business’ responsibilities amid social and political upheaval, and the reach of those responsibilities in the supply chain—in this new case, distribution rather than publication.

On Friday (April 16), Karp wrote, “Yesterday was a difficult day for all of us at Simon & Schuster, our authors, and our colleagues and contacts in the publishing industry. As you know, we decided that we would not distribute a planned book from Post Hill Press by Louisville police officer Jonathan Mattingly, who was involved in the death of Breonna Taylor.”

Taylor, for international readers who may not be recalling the tragedy, was 26 when she was shot and killed as she slept in her home in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 13, 2020, during a bungled police raid as part of a drug investigation. Taylor, who was Black, was an emergency room technician with the University of Louisville Health program, and her boyfriend Kenneth Walker was at her apartment at the time of the raid.

Jonathan Mattingly was one of the white plainclothes police officers involved in the raid. Mattingly was shot in the leg during the raid and his attorney last October announced that he would sue the late Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend Walker. As Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter report at The New York Times, an FBI ballistics report found that police sergeant Mattingly fired at least one of the six bullets that struck Taylor, “though his was not the lethal bullet.”

. . . .

“As a publisher, we seek a broad range of views for our lists. As a distributor, we have a limited and more detached role. The distinction between publishing and distribution is frequently lost on people who do not follow the publishing business closely, but it is a reality of this important part of our overall business portfolio.”

Karp is talking case-by-case basis, and cautions that the distribution role cannot accommodate the decision made on the Mattingly book. The publisher-as-distributor, in other words, is in a bind that’s becoming increasingly visible and uncomfortable.

In what may be the best possible expression of that bind, Karp concludes, “I understand and am sorry that yesterday’s events have caused distress and disruption for you. It has been a tumultuous year, marked by tragedy and injustice. We are grateful that throughout this time you have so openly and courageously shared with us your views and opinions and experiences. We will continue to seek your help and understanding as we strive to move forward as company.”

. . . .

The open letter this spring from publishing industry professionals to the industry’s executives has called on companies to refuse to contract former members of Donald Trump’s administration. The Times article from Alter and Harris indicates that the letter has more than 630 signatures on it. That letter refers to service in the Trump White House as “a uniquely mitigating criterion for publishing houses when considering book deals” and it asserts that book publishing is sometimes given to “chasing the money and notoriety of some pretty sketchy people” with book contracts.

Karp’s answer to the petition today, in asserting that S&S will go ahead with its Pence contract, says, in part, “Our role is to find those authors and works that can shed light on our world–from first-time novelists to journalists, thought leaders, scientists, memoirists, personalities, and, yes, those who walk the halls of power.

“Regardless of where those authors sit on the ideological spectrum, or if they hold views that run counter to the belief systems held by some of us, we apply a rigorous standard to assure that in acquiring books, we will be bringing into the world works that provide new information or perspectives on events to which we otherwise might not have access.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

As PG read the OP, he wondered about the nature of the discussion the S&S CEO Jonathan Karp had with his boss at Bertelsmann.

As PG has mentioned before on TPV, Bertelsmann is a giant world-wide media company headquartered in Gütersloh, a city of about 100,000 located in North Rhine-Westphalia and effectively controlled by a group of billionaires, the Mohn family.

PG suspects the Mohn family is much more interested in short-term and long-term profits than in contemporary US cancel-culture.

PG further suspects that Mr. Karp was informed that a book by the former vice-president of the United States was likely to be a money-maker and that Bertelsmann was not interested in having one of the companies it owned involved in a political catfight in the United States over such a book. If Karp couldn’t handle his employees, Bertelsmann would replace him with someone who could.

But, as usual, PG could be completely wrong.

From Publishers Weekly:

A 29.2% sales increase in adult trade titles and a gain of 11.8% in sales in the children’s/young adult segment led to a 10.3% increase in January industry sales over January 2020 for the 1,359 publishers who report results to AAP’s StatShot program.

Sales in the professional publishing category rose 8% in the month, while university press sales increased 4%. K-12 instructional materials sales inched up by 1.6%. Sales of higher educational course materials fell 2.6%, and sales in the religion segment slipped 0.5%.

Within adult trade, all print and digital formats had double-digit sales increases over January 2020. Hardcovers had the largest increase, 51.5%, followed by mass market paperback (41.1%) and trade paperback (20.7%).

The sales growth of digital audio showed no signs of slowing down, jumping 35.1%. E-book sales increased by 16% in the month.

The digital formats did well in the children’s/YA segment, with e-book sales soaring 75.2% and audio rising to 25.9%. Paperback sales rose 15.3% and hardcover sales were up 7.9%. Sales of board books fell 3.4%.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From The Guardian:

The UK competition watchdog has launched an investigation into Penguin Random House’s $2bn (£1.45bn) takeover of Simon & Schuster, a deal rivals have warned will create a “behemoth of books” with too much power in the global publishing industry.

The deal would bring together a who’s who of starry authors from Dan Brown, Hillary Clinton and Stephen King to Barack Obama, Bob Woodward and John Grisham. An equally impressive combined back catalogue spans titles and authors including Gone With the Wind, Catch-22 and the works of Ernest Hemingway.

On Monday, the Competition and Markets Authority said it was considering whether the deal, which cements PRH’s position as the world’s biggest book publisher, would result in a “substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services”.

German media group Bertelsmann triumphed in a bidding war against rivals including Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which owns the book publisher HarperCollins, sealing the deal less than a year after it took full control of PRH.

The News Corp chief executive, Robert Thomson, subsequently said the deal showed “anti-market logic” and would lead to an anti-competitive “behemoth of books” that would control one-third of the US book market. Bertelsmann has said the merged entity would have a US market share of less than 20%, making the deal clearly “approvable”.

. . . .

In the US, the Authors Guild and the National Writers Union, along with four other writers’ groups and the nonprofit Open Markets Institute, sent a letter in January urging the Department of Justice to block the deal.

. . . .

Concerns raised include that the scale of Bertelsmann’s book empire would be such that it could gazump rivals in deals to secure prime book rights. Shrinking the amount of competition in the market, reducing the global “big five” book publishers to four, could also mean that smaller writers will have fewer imprints to pitch to and bid for their work. On the high street, Bertelsmann will have more muscle to negotiate terms with book sellers.

“The deal will make Penguin Random House the biggest publisher by quite a long way, and it already is the biggest,” said Nicola Solomon, the chief executive of the Society of Authors. “We have nothing against the practices of either company but combined there is that potential for market dominance. Our concern is just that it isn’t in anyone’s interest to have someone in a monopoly position.”

Simon & Schuster publishes about 2,000 books a year, on top of a catalogue of 35,000 titles, and employs about 1,350 staff. Penguin Random House publishes 15,000 titles a year, and has a workforce of about 10,000 people globally.

As with many areas disrupted by the rise of Silicon Valley giants, global consolidation has been a hallmark of the industry in recent years. In the era of Amazon, which dominates ebook, audio book and print sales, as well as the growth of self-publishing, the major players have sought scale to drive cost efficiencies and profits. In an interview last year Thomas Rabe, the chief executive of Bertelsmann, said that swallowing S&S would not change the fundamental power dynamic of Amazon’s dominance of the market. “We need them more than they need us,” he said. “And the transaction doesn’t change that.”

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

One question PG didn’t see discussed in the OP is, “Who’s smarter, the seller or the buyer?”