The publishing industry has a gambling problem
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thewalrus.ca
Nowadays, ebooks is a huge industry with thousands of new releases every day. Word on the street is 10k-30k of marketing spend per year is required to generate any sales at all.
It's maybe the case that books as a whole is a winner-takes-all market. Is there a model could we create to bolster out the middle? If you look at sales data, you'll see the #1 bestseller sells more than 10x more copies than #2 on the list. It just makes economical sense for the big publishers to focus on their bestsellers.
There's so many high quality books being published each day. It's overwhelming! I guess all we can do is continue our patronage for the authors we like, to trust the recommendations from people we respect, and to be willing to try out new authors and new releases.
When working on a book for 2 years nets a $30k advance and it's unlikely to payout. It feels the incentives to pursue writing full-time are increasingly diminishing. Sometimes I wonder if for the majority of people who'd like to pursue authorship that doing so part-time is the only choice.
Extend Copyright? (no, no..)
I have two ideas:
- Recommendations. Publishers connect with private LLM/Agents for custom recommendations. They'd need to keep reviews private, but could trade them among themselves.
- Insurance Pool. Authors could add works to a pool of books, and the profits could be split. Publishers would need to maintain the quality of books or authors won't join.
For less narcissistic authors it may well work, though. Will pitch it, thanks for the idea!
Great is the stream of the Assyrian river, but much filth of earth and much refuse it carries on its waters. And not of every water do the Melissae carry to Deo, but of the trickling stream that springs from a holy fountain, pure and undefiled, the very crown of waters.
If most people will just read one book per year, or better yet, will choose which one book to give to someone else (not having read it at all), of course they will choose #1.
I vividly remember the disappointment I felt when I gave #2 to an acquaintance (where I read both 1 and 2 and genuinely liked the one I gave better), only to be told that I gave the #2 and why didn't they receive the #1, and if that meant anything. Ok, off on a tangent, but geez that still hurts :(
All commercial art follows this pattern, a Pareto Distribution[0]. The top musician gets 10x what #2 does. Same with athletes. On and on. The rule applies to many competitive fields. The sky is blue, but it's astute of you to notice.
It's the same in all creative professions, and even more so for those that grant visibility. I think most would be fine considering this activity as a part-time commitment, instead of chasing something that has little chance of coming true. Of course, you can't be a part-time athlete and aspire to greatness, but I don't think the same applies to writing, for example.
Now, we are in the realm of anecdotes, but the novel “Il Gattopardo,” which I consider to be among the top three Italian, and perhaps European, novels of the 20th century, was written by an amateur who did not even send the manuscript out to be considered for publication. It was discovered after Tomasi di Lampedusa's death by Giorgio Bassani, a talented writer who did not write full-time and who had incredible success with some fantastic novels, such as "Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini" (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis).
John Kennedy Toole is probably the exemplar of this, in that 'A Confederacy of Dunces' was unpublishable during his lifetime, but became the picaresque national narrative after a large push by Walker Percy to get it published a decade after Toole's death. It ended up winning the Pulitzer the following year.
Stoner, a novel by the American writer John Williams, is a lesser known but no less apt example. In 1963 Williams' own publisher questioned Stoner's potential to gain popularity and become a bestseller. It sold fewer than 2000 copies, and was out of print a year later.
After subsequently being discovered and championed by literary luminaries like John McGahern, it was republished and translated into several languages, selling hundreds of thousands of copies across 21 Countries. By 2013, the book had achieved international best-seller status. I'd urge anyone with a love for academia, literature, or modern bildungsromans to give it a go. To me it's effectively 'American Gothic - The Novel'
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/13/stoner-john-wi...
It seems that any product with effectively capped consumption will become a winner-take-all market. People go to the movie theater 6 times a year, so that's winner-take-all. People read 12 books a year, so that becomes winner-take-all. People go to approximately 1 university, so while an average university has 200 million in endowments, Harvard has 50 billion (250x). Heck, I'm pretty sure the same factor is leading to the rise of megachurches because people are only capable of attending approximately 1 service per week.
I recall the book Blockbusters by Anita Elberse (2013) being one of the first to point this out.
It doesn't sound like you know much about the market for books.
Sounds like they may know more than you in this case.
Note also that the average of 12 books a year is dominated by people who read zero a year, and those people aren't relevant to the market.
There’s a realistic cap on total number of books consumed by a large enough group of people to matter economically.
There is an infinitely high cap on the consumption of every good. That can't distinguish anything from anything else.
So...
> Would a figure of 60 books per year change the argument? 100? 200?
Yes, that's the difference between the argument being theoretically able to work on its own terms, or not.
Huh. No, no there is not. This is why a few rich people don't consume 100x as much toilet paper as you do. The cap isn't how much of the good we can make, the cap is human time and attention, of which time is fixed and attention is a highly competitive market. Simply put people are not buying infinite books and immediately throwing them in infinite fires.
1. All goods have capped consumption. There are no goods without this feature.
2. The cap might be very high.
3. If you want to argue that one good differs from another good by virtue of capped consumption...
3(a). It is not enough to show that a cap exists;
3(b). Instead, you must show that the cap is actually achieved.
4. The reason for this is that the cap exists for all goods.
5. Books do not come anywhere close to reaching their consumption cap. The consumption of books is just as unbounded as the consumption of immortality pills.
The best way to discover books is when they are mentioned in other good books, but this does nothing for new books.
A book recommendation system will need to have access to full-text search within the books to work well. That will solve the problem.
Audible says "You liked this John Scalzi book? Here's every other Scalzi book as a recommendation! Also a few other very popular books which are almost exactly the same as the one you just read!"
Amazon says "You just bought a hammer, here are 37 more hammers in case you want another one!"
Why yes, I do like books with spaceships in them, but maybe I want to see more than the next 20 most popular books with spaceships in them...
Recommendation engines fail by failing to make connections that aren't in the immediate neighborhood.
https://www.literature-map.com/
works well for authors whose books sell well enough to be listed there.
I quit writing books about coding when I wrote one with a team of amazing co-authors about Android programming that was 100 times better than my first book and sold a 10th of the number of copies.
Unless you're Peter Norton, you never made a lot of money writing books even when it was profitable to do so. And I suspect a lot of Peter Norton books had ghost writers.
All he was saying is that when the market for technical books was new (because that was really the only way to get to speed on something) you didn't need to have Knuth-levels of knowledge and writing skill (Knuth is both incredibly knowledgeable and an exceptionally good writer) to make a decent living.
> There's so many high quality books being published each day. It's overwhelming!
Thousands of new releases a day could mean as many as two or three in high quality. That's more than you can read, but not enough to overwhelm anyone. What's overwhelming is the several thousand that are garbage.
Job-hunting is a brutal, humiliating slog, because of the thousands of junk CVs even the most obscure job posting gets.
Selling high-quality stuff (software, hardware, widgets, literature, etc.) is a nightmare, because you have to tread water above the deluge of junk.
It's really depressing.
Having been on the hiring end, I can assure you that it is not true that even the most obscure posting gets thousands of applicants. Sometimes you put out a job and get very few bites. So it depends, as always, on the specifics of the posting (what industry, where it is, etc).
I will say that companies use the tsunami of junk, as justification for the nastiness of the interview process.
Books, music, films, games, basically all creative things. Because everyone can just watch/read/listen to the best of the best. It's not like restaurants where the consumer actually consumes the product.
It's the result of global scale distribution networks. Long ago you could be okay-famous by being the best guitarist in the village and people would appreciate you. Or you could be the local history buff. But if you write enter the global arena, you'll compete with everyone else. There's no limit to how many books the famous author can sell, or how many times a famous singer's song can be streamed on Spotify. There's simply very little demand for mediocre stuff. Also, people want to be able to talk to each other about cultural things. Even if it's a bit more fragmented today, people still want to belong together through liking the same things.
Media takes time to consume, which means that many products won’t be consumed at all even if they are good, much less be consumed enough to reach the point where word of mouth can achieve virality.
The reality is that the best winner is usually a product good enough to not be laughed at (though not usually best in class), with some characteristics that make it marketable, and with strong backing behind (money, connections or both).
One funny effect is that you end up with artists talking about viral topics like social justice and discrimination like it’s first hand experience, but a quick check will show they come from immensely privileged backgrounds.
I assume the parent comment's last paragraph is why every fantasy novel I've read in the last decade has a five-page-long lesbian romance; the author has to play ball with the publisher in order to get marketed.
I think all disciplines start “hard” and objective, getting into the subjective at a more advanced stage - at the very least it is easy for a knowledgeable reader to know when an author is actively choosing to disregard an established rule and when it is incapable of following it.
Saramago, the novelist, is famous for writing unconventionally, with long phrases and sparse punctuation, but nobody doubts he could have written conventionally. Same for Picasso rejecting realism.
Many famous authors right now would clearly have a hard time following the “base” rules, and that for me warrants judging them by hard rules. If they could, and got into the twisting rules phase, then I agree it becomes a far more subjective matter.
There is, of course. The book is interesting within a particular range of cultures, and depends on good translations to be popular outside its native language area.
So, for a hyper-successful book, like "Harry Potter", the potentially interested audience is "merely" a few billion people, and "merely" a few hundred million are potential buyers of the book. 600M books sold worldwide, counting all the books in the series.
Selling 2x as much is highly unlikely, and 10x as much, completely unrealistic. The number of New Testament copies printed since 1450s is estimated to be below 7 billion.
This is different from in-person performances, where again giving more concerts is more effort, though giving the concert in a bigger stadium for 5x as many people is again not more effort.
The point is the scalability, or in other words low marginal cost of sales. It becomes a commodity.
Most regular jobs that people do also don't scale. Even in software, custom one-off software for a particular company is still the rule, not the shrinkwrap or public SaaS.
In a more profane context, it's like the difference between a prostitute and an OnlyFans performer. The prostitute with the most clients won't have 100x as many as the average, while orders of magnitude difference in subscribers is common on OnlyFans.
There used to be a market for writing that could supply some kind of a decent-ish living to quite a few authors, not just a handful of super-stars. That world is gone and it’s not coming back. TV killed it, and smartphones carved up the body and buried it in several unmarked graves at crossroads. Not even the dark arts can bring it back now. It’s over.
The shrinking market is also why YA and YA-like books have taken over, even for adults. You can’t afford to exclude much of the market, so the “reading level” on mass market fiction for adults has been slipping downward fast for the last couple decades. Readers willing to put in effort are too small a market for commercial success. Rarely, maybe, but not like things used to be.
Hilary Mantel's historical fiction being picked up is a good example of this in recent times in Western Europe. Wolf Hall, the BBC adaptation, was a surprise hit given its somewhat dry subject matter as a fictionalised biography documenting the life of Thomas Cromwell.
> It feels the incentives to pursue writing full-time are increasingly diminishing.
Seems like this is the market working as it should? Maybe we as a society could stand to have fewer people writing full-time.
It seems interesting to me the one of the highest paying professions- software engineer and the lowest- author are both that way because of scalability.
You can even find it in serialized writings of some of the "greats" of yore - if you real everything Dickens or Chesterton or Wodehouse wrote, you start to see some serious echos, if not direct repetition.
I've gotten a lot of BattleTech novels and Fantasy Flight Games universe novelas there. There a bunch of comics as well. A lot of entering reading material for flights. Dark Horse comics as well.
""" From his own experiences, Chardonne concluded: "Any good book will sell 3,000 copies, no more, no less. We used to publish every year translations of some forty foreign novels. Invariably, one of these would suddenly sell 100,000 copies (which would pay for all our other publications)--and we never knew why. """
Earlier in the paragraph, Leys refers to Chardonne's then boss as "a notorious gambler."