6 ms·

Maybe not entirely a bad thing, if one plumber says that this other plumber is good I assume he knows what he's talking about. The flipside, of course, is that

Maybe not entirely a bad thing, if one plumber says that this other plumber is good I assume he knows what he's talking about. The flipside, of course, is that a mutual appreciation society excludes interesting outsiders.

21723 5y ago
The biggest issue is that there are lots of writers and wannabe writers, but not very many readers in the US, not compared to other countries. (On the other hand, the US book market is huge, so we have that to our advantage.) And, for an ugly secret, most of the people who make the big decisions in the literary world don't really read more than the casual reader (who still reads more than 97% of the population, but that's another topic.) If you actually become a lead title, you're going to get lots of interviews with famous people who didn't actually read your book, but who had interns skim it and prepare questions. (Jon Stewart was a notable exception; he did try to read all the guest books.) Editors and literary agents do generally read the works they select and produce, but not in the same way--it's more like 200-page-per-hour skimming--and it's not because they're lazy--far from it--but because they're overworked. Which is why the difference between a dead-end deal with a four-digit advance and no marketing and a seven-figure balls-out launch is based on Hollywood-style four-quadrant analyses and favor-trading rather than the quality of the work itself. The good news is that so much of these things authors get worked up about don't actually matter all that much. It might be infuriating to learn that you're not getting a book tour, but typical book tours don't actually drive that many sales relative to the effort they require of the author. It's very hard to predict what will drive sales; I know people who've had national TV spots and only sold ~20 copies from them.
- mbg721 5y ago
  How is the book market huge, if there aren't any readers? Do you mean that books produced in the US are widely exported?
  - 21723 5y ago
    330 million people, plus 38 more in a neighboring country who speak the same language (and are, therefore, arguably part of the same market). Plus, people still buy books even if the readership rate is low. Mostly, though, it's our population. If you're a Hungarian-language novelist and you sell to 0.1% of the total market (this is hard to do) you've made food money for a couple years. If you can find a way to get 0.1% of Americans to buy your book, you're a millionaire. Of course, even getting people to hear about you at all is difficult, especially with "book buzz" hype machines [1] sucking up so much oxygen while delivering disappointing or forgettable books. ---- [1] This is the part of traditional publishing I don't like. When bad books get so 7-figure advances and huge marketing campaigns, they cause reader attrition at a population level and this makes the world scarcer for serious writers. Trade publishing still does far more good than harm to society, but the "book buzz" people who run Manhattan could all stop showing up to work and we'd be better off.
    - mbg721 5y ago
      What makes the US a single market with 330M people and not a bunch of smaller markets? Is it just that somewhere like Europe has barriers to entry through language and differences in countries' regulation that don't come up in the US?
      - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        National identity, culture and distribution. I can relate to a story set in places in the Deep South and Midwest, places I have barely been, because the author speaks to common motifs, assumptions and subtext. (This also lets them play with implication, something lost if one must be explicit about what may lost outside one’s culture.)
      - spoonjim 5y ago
        The White Anglosphere (UK, Ireland, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) has a somewhat shared cultural identity.
        5y ago
SeanLuke 5y ago
But plumbing is largely a zero sum game. Book sales are not: this makes an enormous difference.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  Plumbing is not entirely a zero sum game, and referrals are a big part of exploiting division of labor. If two plumbers are good at different aspects of plumbing, giving referrals to each other when they're called to jobs for which the other one is better suited has positive dividends - better plumbing gets done and customers are happier. A plumber passing on work this way is passing up the immediate benefit of a contract in hand, but presumably trades that for a better contract in the future that he might otherwise not have gotten, not for nothing at all.
  - wardedVibe 5y ago
    relative advantage is a wonderful thing
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      Perhaps, but it's not relevant to the situation I described, which relied on each plumber having an absolute advantage over the other one. For relative advantage to come into play, there would have to be some kind of limit to the total amount of work one plumber could do.
  - SeanLuke 5y ago
    Sure, yes, coalitions form in even unlikely places. But even so, come on. Plumbing is largely a zero sum game, or at least far more so than book sales.

21723 5y ago

The biggest issue is that there are lots of writers and wannabe writers, but not very many readers in the US, not compared to other countries. (On the other hand, the US book market is huge, so we have that to our advantage.) And, for an ugly secret, most of the people who make the big decisions in the literary world don't really read more than the casual reader (who still reads more than 97% of the population, but that's another topic.) If you actually become a lead title, you're going to get lots of interviews with famous people who didn't actually read your book, but who had interns skim it and prepare questions. (Jon Stewart was a notable exception; he did try to read all the guest books.) Editors and literary agents do generally read the works they select and produce, but not in the same way--it's more like 200-page-per-hour skimming--and it's not because they're lazy--far from it--but because they're overworked. Which is why the difference between a dead-end deal with a four-digit advance and no marketing and a seven-figure balls-out launch is based on Hollywood-style four-quadrant analyses and favor-trading rather than the quality of the work itself. The good news is that so much of these things authors get worked up about don't actually matter all that much. It might be infuriating to learn that you're not getting a book tour, but typical book tours don't actually drive that many sales relative to the effort they require of the author. It's very hard to predict what will drive sales; I know people who've had national TV spots and only sold ~20 copies from them.

mbg721 5y ago
How is the book market huge, if there aren't any readers? Do you mean that books produced in the US are widely exported?
- 21723 5y ago
  330 million people, plus 38 more in a neighboring country who speak the same language (and are, therefore, arguably part of the same market). Plus, people still buy books even if the readership rate is low. Mostly, though, it's our population. If you're a Hungarian-language novelist and you sell to 0.1% of the total market (this is hard to do) you've made food money for a couple years. If you can find a way to get 0.1% of Americans to buy your book, you're a millionaire. Of course, even getting people to hear about you at all is difficult, especially with "book buzz" hype machines [1] sucking up so much oxygen while delivering disappointing or forgettable books. ---- [1] This is the part of traditional publishing I don't like. When bad books get so 7-figure advances and huge marketing campaigns, they cause reader attrition at a population level and this makes the world scarcer for serious writers. Trade publishing still does far more good than harm to society, but the "book buzz" people who run Manhattan could all stop showing up to work and we'd be better off.
  - mbg721 5y ago
    What makes the US a single market with 330M people and not a bunch of smaller markets? Is it just that somewhere like Europe has barriers to entry through language and differences in countries' regulation that don't come up in the US?
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      National identity, culture and distribution. I can relate to a story set in places in the Deep South and Midwest, places I have barely been, because the author speaks to common motifs, assumptions and subtext. (This also lets them play with implication, something lost if one must be explicit about what may lost outside one’s culture.)
    - spoonjim 5y ago
      The White Anglosphere (UK, Ireland, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) has a somewhat shared cultural identity.
      - 5y ago

SeanLuke 5y ago

But plumbing is largely a zero sum game. Book sales are not: this makes an enormous difference.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
Plumbing is not entirely a zero sum game, and referrals are a big part of exploiting division of labor. If two plumbers are good at different aspects of plumbing, giving referrals to each other when they're called to jobs for which the other one is better suited has positive dividends - better plumbing gets done and customers are happier. A plumber passing on work this way is passing up the immediate benefit of a contract in hand, but presumably trades that for a better contract in the future that he might otherwise not have gotten, not for nothing at all.
- wardedVibe 5y ago
  relative advantage is a wonderful thing
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    Perhaps, but it's not relevant to the situation I described, which relied on each plumber having an absolute advantage over the other one. For relative advantage to come into play, there would have to be some kind of limit to the total amount of work one plumber could do.
- SeanLuke 5y ago
  Sure, yes, coalitions form in even unlikely places. But even so, come on. Plumbing is largely a zero sum game, or at least far more so than book sales.