The Penguin Random House trial
shush.substack.com
shush.substack.com
It also imposed a lot of restrictions on pricing, length, and free distribution.
Obviously people do well by publishers but IMO it's hard to make a case that they're the vitally important gatekeepers they once were. YMMV of course.
If you get a huge upfront payment, they will do some marketing, of course, as they need to try to recoup their investment. But if you are not one of the top .01% of authors, they are just spinning a wheel to see if the decapitated chicken hits Yahtzee.
Right, and this is basically an admission of their own uselessness. They'll only help you if you can prove you don't need the help. They're rent-seekers at this point.
To be fair, it is a hard problem. In the visual arts, you can tell if someone is talented immediately. With authors, especially in fiction, there's about a 12-hour commitment before one even knows if they know how to begin, carry, and finish a story. Literary agents, who are supposed to be the gatekeepers, are beyond useless at it (although it is worthwhile to get one, if you can, because you need one to be a serious player in traditional publishing).
But yeah, marketing is basically you're in the catalog of (in my case) a technical book publisher and maybe you're included as part of some digital subscriptions. But even for more popular works, you're probably mostly not going on book signing tours or having a bunch of review copies sent out. You'll have to hire a PR agency for that and pay any costs out of your own pocket for the most part.
What I've written has been good for me but mostly because I'm not trying to directly make money off it. If I had been naive enough to think I'd be getting meaningful royalty checks that valued my time more than a few dollars an hour I expect I'd be disappointed.
The worry is that a merger would reduce upfront payments to authors because there is less competition (among other things). Authors like upfront payments as it reduces the risk for them. However, it is unclear if this would reduce payments as the market is pretty fractured.
"but why does that matter so long as there is a cheap, non-censored method of getting writings out into the ether?"
Many authors are not technical, and for them, dealing with formatting, uploading it to services, and all that "tech" stuff is immensely hard (especially if they have an FT job and a family).
And, to create a great book requires a great editor most of the time. That isn't cheap, especially if they are going deep into your story. Traditional publishing is still a huge stamp of quality that helps sell books, gets the author exposure, and gets you in physical bookstores.
Plus, if you are a new author, you write book(s) while doing something FT. That is hard; if payments go down, you could lose entire generations of authors as they don't have the time or money to devote to writing. We probably already are losing generations of authors given how rough the market is with the changes over the last 20 years.
Does that help?
How many publishers actually provide serious story development support to authors starting out? Never done fiction but development editing in my non-fiction case was mostly in molding to house style. Even all the changes I made in v2 were essentially all of my own doing.
Did you get any help from an editor or was that out of pocket?
You can self publish only up to a certain point. If your book is truly popular, or you want it to become so, or you want to make real money, there is no way to "self print" millions of copies and distribute them, feature them on Amazon, etc. That's literally why the publishing company exists. "Sharing ideas" is completely orthogonal to the point of large publishers.
Relevant to this suit, large conglomerates like PRH actually operate as many independent publishing houses (most of which have been acquired over time). They each have their own brands and editorial staff and want to show good results. This leads to intra-company bidding for the same books, which is obviously good for authors but bad for the company. So this merger would just make that effect more extreme. Probably the DOJ scrutiny is warranted here.
In terms of boosting already existing authors who you enjoy, unfortunately sales are still king. Buying a bunch of copies of their book within 18 months of it's release (including in ebook or audiobook format!) is basically the strongest signal that you can send to get them additional visibility and promotion. Some publishers take softer metrics (like social media engagement, tour/signing turnout, etc) into account, but again, mostly as a proxy for what sales might look like.
From one POV this is nonsense. Trad pub throws a lot of books at the wall and a few of them stick.
But from another it does so selectively. In fiction the big advances go to established or potential personalities - not so much to outstanding authors, but to authors who are known to sell well.
For new authors that means trad pub looks for individuals who will appeal to a target demographic. (For new contemporary fiction that usually - but not exclusively - means aspirational, college-educated, female.)
Which being the case, even limited PR is better than no PR. And the big pubs can do effective PR in a way that solo self-pubbed authors can't, by setting up reviews/interviews in the mainstream press.
An interview or a review typically costs nothing, but can be a huge driver of sales. The author needs to be reasonably interesting, at least a little photogenic, and have some kind of personal story the demographic can identify with and maybe admire. (Not usually the same story as the one in the book.)
So it matters who does this, because it's not just about the money. It's really about a monopoly on gatekeeping cultural status.
The money takes second place.
Which is why publishing is simultaneously almost comically amateurish but also throws big sums around. The amateurishness is a remnant of the days when there were tens of medium sized publishers run by amateurs and enthusiasts who would often publish books just because they liked them.
The industry is much more of a corporate monoculture now. But clearly it's still better to hang on to some remnants of choice and diversity - even if the choice is between a handful of monoliths, each of which still has a unique culture of sorts, instead of tens of smaller houses.
At that level, definitely not in it for the money. At the C level though I got the sense that there was supreme respect for the cultural role of publishers - but it was a narrow second to business concerns, and they would make that tradeoff if necessary.
The "cultural role" is drummed up in order to get people to work on below-subsistence salaries.
It's probably more about ego than money for the high-level people. Since people are cheap (because "passion") they can have large teams under them without their organizations having to pay the typical costs of large teams.
The truth about it, though, is that the culture is too balkanized for any of this stuff to make sense. Very few people go out of their way to read or find the best books; for good or for bad, they've all self-segregated into warring genres and subgenres--and the so-called "literary" crowd who insist their genre is not a genre are often the worst in this regard. The balkanization is probably why no one knows how to market books anymore; people really understand a small slice of the total readership and, in any case, the lines are always changing.
Now, is it unfair that the compensation component is so low that people who don't have other means of income effectively can't take the job? Personally, I don't think so. I would love to research butterflies 24/7 and if I was independently wealthy perhaps would, but I completely understand that demand for butterfly research doesn't generate enough funding to make it possible to do that and lead the life I live now.
FWIW, from my limited experience leadership were all perfectly lovely people, extremely passionate about publishing as well, who in some cases had worked all of these "drummed up" jobs themselves on their way up the ladder.
The stereotype in NYC of publishing is of it attracting young, well-educated daughters of families who can subsidize New York living beyond the low salaries.
It's not hard at all, that's what crowdfunding is for. It's been quite successful at rewarding free and open content, especially for lower-cost media like books (compared to live action movies or AAA games).
Crowdfunding is, among other things, a marketing effort. The campaigns which succeed are, in some way or another, adept at marketing themselves. If they’re starting with minimal budget, that means someone with marketing acumen is either personally invested or confident in a return. If they’re not budget constrained… they’re just choosing their investors by buying access to them in a way that’s not traditional but incredibly common now.
In either case, framing the endeavor as “not hard at all” strikes me as neglecting either the kind of specialized talent that goes into marketing, or the kinds of marketing strategies that can manipulate the former neglect.
To be clear I’m coming at this from a perspective where I realized I lack the charisma and social confidence to crowdfund a project I was wildly passionate about. I find marketing mostly distasteful, but I respect it as a particular set of instincts and talents. The notion that it’s “not hard at all” is as outlandish to me as it would be if I told anyone else that uncommon talents which come to me instinctively should be as trivial to them.
Also, it's much harder to build a platform organically than it used to be. I was semifamous in the 2010s and was literally almost killed for it. (Some people who were high in Y Combinator were on the wrong side of history there, but I digress.) So, I know how these systems actually work and how to exploit them (if one wants to go black hat). The game of getting attention is more competitive these days because there are so many more spammers, bad actors, and general-issue crapflooders. You can buy 10,000 fake Twitter followers for less than a hundred bucks and you probably won't get caught or face any negative consequences; on the other hand, getting from zero to 1000 legitimate followers is really difficult (much harder than it was in 2010).
Publishers do provide some essential services like editors, and making sure your book looks good, and distribution.
However, much like the music industry, they are unbelievably greedy bastards. And we all know what happened to music industry. There are only four big music corporations in the world that have a stranglehold on ~90% of world music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation
You really don't want that to happen to any media.
You’re conflating two issues here: this lawsuit has nothing to do with whether or not publishing houses are censorship. This lawsuit is about whether or not a merger of this size would cause authors to make less money from publishing traditionally because it would reduce the number of bidders for their work.
Could that have been anyone other than the Dalai Lama?
On profits:
> PRH’s Dohle said that the top 4 per cent of his books produce 60 per cent of his profit. The best books, he says, are the ones “that you don’t pay a lot for and become runaway bestsellers.” He excuses the fact that so few of his big bets pay by comparing himself to a venture capitalist. The book industry, he says, is “the Silicon Valley of media.”
On marketing:
> The big houses are skeptical about book marketing. One publisher said, “I don’t think marketing money can create a success,” it can only amplify or extend a success. That may be true but the big houses, we also heard, are not really trying. They spend little on marketing: roughly 2 per cent of expected revenue per book. (…) Some agents ask publishers to guarantee how much they will spend on marketing a book before they’ll sign. Most won’t.
On advances:
> about 70 per cent of all the money paid on advances by the Big Five goes to $250,000-plus books. Judge Pan asked if $250,000-plus books comprise 70 per cent of Big Five book sales. The answer was no, not even close.
IE, nobody knows what books will be huge and which won't.
Of course, that also means it's a lot easier to find a publisher than a studio. Or to self-publish vs. create and release your own film (where you won't even have access to theatrical channels for the most part).
If a book doesn’t sell, they’re out the advance and some pulp, which they can likely recycle.
For me personally it seems pragprog.com usually has consistent quality, apress I’ve read good books but they seem a lot more hit or miss. I think Oreilly is also considered to be pretty good?
I've taken to buying more self-published books lately, as they're often getting more money to the authors pocket (way more), and I can often refer to the authors other work (blog, videos, trainings, etc.) to get an idea of what I'll be getting from the book.