3 ms·

Authors were already generally up in arms over the bad faith and contempt displayed by publishing-industry witnesses in the Penguin Random House/Simon & Schuste

Authors were already generally up in arms over the bad faith and contempt displayed by publishing-industry witnesses in the Penguin Random House/Simon & Schuster merger trial, so this was not exactly calculated to smooth over the troubled waters between authors and publishers.

ilamont 4y ago
There were some shockers that came out in the PRH trial, including how little major publishers spend on marketing for the books and (related) stats describing the minuscule number of books that are sold. The DOJ stated that of 58,000 trade titles published annually in the U.S., 1/2 sell fewer than 12 copies. Someone from NPD disputed the DOJ's claim, stating that of 45,571 frontlist ISBNs from the top 10 U.S. publishers, 15% (not 50%) sold less than 12 copies. Another 51% sold between 12 and 999 copies. Still not great. (https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-only-a-dozen/comment/8883524 https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-...) As for marketing, I can't find the figure now, but it transpired that these billion-dollar publishers devoted low-single digit portions of their revenue to marketing.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Honestly, I don't think marketing would move that needle that much at all. It might distribute the sales a bit more evenly, but even so, sales are going to massively dominated by the few titles that are on the best seller lists. So why market books when all it does is cost money and redistribute your revenue a bit, but not increase it?
  - HillRat 4y ago
    That's basically the DoJ's argument -- that consolidation in the publishing world will reduce title diversity, because the incentive is to focus advances and marketing budgets on a small number of potential hits, and the fewer the publishers, the more those hitmaking authors are going to be concentrated into a couple of houses. Alternatively, a larger number of smaller publishers will spread out resources and so more effectively drive a greater number and type of titles. In response, the defendants claimed that, risibly, publishers are just a bunch of idiot hicks who don't have any idea how to market a book successfully and, anyway, wouldn't know a hit if Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald all reached over the transom and slapped them silly with the manuscript -- basically, "we're all so incompetent at our chosen industry that we couldn't even take advantage of our oligopsony if we had it." Which I find ... questionable.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Sadly, I suspect they may be right. If they weren't, you'd expect way more self-published authors to have risen to the level of "published authors" but that number, while it exists, is small.
- bawolff 4y ago
  > The DOJ stated that of 58,000 trade titles published annually in the U.S., 1/2 sell fewer than 12 copies. Someone from NPD disputed the DOJ's claim, stating that of 45,571 frontlist ISBNs from the top 10 U.S. publishers, 15% (not 50%) sold less than 12 copies. Another 51% sold between 12 and 999 copies. Still not great. (https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell- https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-...) And that's a bad thing because? i assume this includes books still in print but first published a while ago. Anyways, long tail is going to long tail. Seems pretty normal to me.
  - Mathnerd314 4y ago
    If it's that few copies and the publisher isn't providing any help marketing, then an author is better off self-publishing with a platform like Lulu or CreateSpace. Per https://blog.lulu.com/self-publishing-vs-traditional-publishing-a-comparison/ https://blog.lulu.com/self-publishing-vs-traditional-publish... traditional publishers take almost all of the profits and also have baroque processes with wait times of months to years.
    - bawolff 4y ago
      That's up to the author. Nobody is forcing them to use a publisher. Making a bad business decision might be bad for the author, but as long as everyone is playing fair (e.g. no fraud or coercion) its not a problem for society. I'm also a bit unclear how those numbers compare per year vs per the entire life time of the book, which seems like an important distinction. However i imagine lots of people go with a publisher in the hopes that their book is a hit. In which case the publisher comes in handy. But you dont know beforehand if you are going to win the book lottery so you have to balance the probabilities.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- elliekelly 4y ago
  I’ve seen several posts and comments claiming the DOJ made the “less than 12 copies” claim but I’ve yet to see any actual evidence the DOJ made that claim. The “source” linked to is always a tweet, or a comment on an article, or occasionally even to an article... that doesn’t even mention the DOJ made the claim in the first place. Where does the DOJ make this assertion?

ilamont 4y ago

There were some shockers that came out in the PRH trial, including how little major publishers spend on marketing for the books and (related) stats describing the minuscule number of books that are sold. The DOJ stated that of 58,000 trade titles published annually in the U.S., 1/2 sell fewer than 12 copies. Someone from NPD disputed the DOJ's claim, stating that of 45,571 frontlist ISBNs from the top 10 U.S. publishers, 15% (not 50%) sold less than 12 copies. Another 51% sold between 12 and 999 copies. Still not great. (https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-only-a-dozen/comment/8883524 https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-...) As for marketing, I can't find the figure now, but it transpired that these billion-dollar publishers devoted low-single digit portions of their revenue to marketing.

bombcar 4y ago
Honestly, I don't think marketing would move that needle that much at all. It might distribute the sales a bit more evenly, but even so, sales are going to massively dominated by the few titles that are on the best seller lists. So why market books when all it does is cost money and redistribute your revenue a bit, but not increase it?
- HillRat 4y ago
  That's basically the DoJ's argument -- that consolidation in the publishing world will reduce title diversity, because the incentive is to focus advances and marketing budgets on a small number of potential hits, and the fewer the publishers, the more those hitmaking authors are going to be concentrated into a couple of houses. Alternatively, a larger number of smaller publishers will spread out resources and so more effectively drive a greater number and type of titles. In response, the defendants claimed that, risibly, publishers are just a bunch of idiot hicks who don't have any idea how to market a book successfully and, anyway, wouldn't know a hit if Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald all reached over the transom and slapped them silly with the manuscript -- basically, "we're all so incompetent at our chosen industry that we couldn't even take advantage of our oligopsony if we had it." Which I find ... questionable.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Sadly, I suspect they may be right. If they weren't, you'd expect way more self-published authors to have risen to the level of "published authors" but that number, while it exists, is small.
bawolff 4y ago
> The DOJ stated that of 58,000 trade titles published annually in the U.S., 1/2 sell fewer than 12 copies. Someone from NPD disputed the DOJ's claim, stating that of 45,571 frontlist ISBNs from the top 10 U.S. publishers, 15% (not 50%) sold less than 12 copies. Another 51% sold between 12 and 999 copies. Still not great. (https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell- https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-...) And that's a bad thing because? i assume this includes books still in print but first published a while ago. Anyways, long tail is going to long tail. Seems pretty normal to me.
- Mathnerd314 4y ago
  If it's that few copies and the publisher isn't providing any help marketing, then an author is better off self-publishing with a platform like Lulu or CreateSpace. Per https://blog.lulu.com/self-publishing-vs-traditional-publishing-a-comparison/ https://blog.lulu.com/self-publishing-vs-traditional-publish... traditional publishers take almost all of the profits and also have baroque processes with wait times of months to years.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    That's up to the author. Nobody is forcing them to use a publisher. Making a bad business decision might be bad for the author, but as long as everyone is playing fair (e.g. no fraud or coercion) its not a problem for society. I'm also a bit unclear how those numbers compare per year vs per the entire life time of the book, which seems like an important distinction. However i imagine lots of people go with a publisher in the hopes that their book is a hit. In which case the publisher comes in handy. But you dont know beforehand if you are going to win the book lottery so you have to balance the probabilities.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
elliekelly 4y ago
I’ve seen several posts and comments claiming the DOJ made the “less than 12 copies” claim but I’ve yet to see any actual evidence the DOJ made that claim. The “source” linked to is always a tweet, or a comment on an article, or occasionally even to an article... that doesn’t even mention the DOJ made the claim in the first place. Where does the DOJ make this assertion?