6 ms·

Can't help but feel for the publishing industry considering how shafted they got by tech. You distribute books all over the country? Amazon can do it better an

• Turing_Machine 3y ago
  > Can't help but feel for the publishing industry considering how shafted they got by tech. Publishers have been shafting authors for centuries. I'll shed no tears on their behalf.
  • Spivak 3y ago
    Prior to the digital age where it's possible for the author to self-publish the publisher was handling 99% of the actual business of selling books and giving authors 15%. So while I think it's been hard to make a living as an author I don't think it's necessarily the publisher's fault. Better to be the one's selling shovels than the ones mining for gold.
    • thfuran 3y ago
      >the publisher was handling 99% of the actual business of selling books It seems to me that you're rather underestimating the importance of having something to put in the book.
      • vidarh 3y ago
        Having written two novels, I will tell you it's far less work for a lot of writers to write the thing than getting decent sales. It varies - some do slave over their manuscripts for years, while others churn them out in a week, but selling books is hard work.
• mcphage 3y ago
  > You distribute books all over the country? Amazon can do it better and cheaper. That just makes it Easter for publishers. The major problem with Amazon is monopsony, not easier distribution. > You print books? Well we have e-books now. Which have to be purchased ultimately from the publishers, so again, they’re still there making money, they just don’t need to bother printing books anymore. You’ll note they’re not any cheaper. > You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly. I think this is confusing cause and effect. Authors turned to social media because publishers weren’t doing a great job marketing, not because it makes publishers unnecessary.
• NegativeLatency 3y ago
  IMO there are still quality publishers, but they are small and tend to focus on specific topics. Two that I'm aware of, although I'm sure there are more out there: - https://lostartpress.com https://lostartpress.com - https://tinhouse.com https://tinhouse.com
  • atombender 3y ago
    New York Review Books [1] is another significant one. It's the publishing divison of the confusingly named The New York Review of Books, which is an amazing magazine (it's not really book reviews). [1] https://www.nyrb.com/ https://www.nyrb.com/
  • vram22 3y ago
    Another one is Other India Press. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_India_Press https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_India_Press https://www.otherindiabookstore.com/about https://www.otherindiabookstore.com/about I got to know about them through coming across the book Tending the Earth, by Winin Pereira. https://www.banyantreebookstore.com/product-page/tending-the-earth https://www.banyantreebookstore.com/product-page/tending-the... I have some background in organic gardening, and think it is a very good book. It is about more than just organic gardening, though.
    • atlasunshrugged 3y ago
      I would add Stripe Press to this list. https://press.stripe.com/ https://press.stripe.com/
  • tazu 3y ago
    https://www.foliosociety.com/ https://www.foliosociety.com/ is one of my favorites, the books are works of art.
• Anon4Now 3y ago
  Businesses that remain stagnant don't get shafted so much as outmaneuvered. Instead of investing and pivoting, they cling to the old business model. Short term, their decisions make financial sense, but long term, it's a death sentence. Meanwhile, Amazon is looked at as the behemoth in the industry, yet it probably isn't thought of as an online book store / publisher by most people. I think of so many things before I get to, "Oh yeah, they also sell books." The one piece of information that I wish the article had mentioned is the age demographics of avid book readers. My gut tells me the market has dropped significantly in the last ~25 years, but I'd like to see the data.
  • bigthymer 3y ago
    The best survey data I've found for this information is linked here [1]. It breaks data down by age range for those who read at least one book in the prior year. It defines avid readers as having read 50 books/year but doesn't do an age breakdown for this subset. 1 - National Endowment for the Arts - "U.S. Patterns of Arts Participation: A Full Report from the 2017 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts" - <https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/US_Patterns_of_Arts_ParticipationRevised.pdf https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/US_Patterns_of_Arts...>, page 44
  • treflop 3y ago
    I don't think a company that publishes books is going to be able to pivot to building an online book selling platform that easily. They just don't have anyone with the knowledge nor the capital to hire the people who then know who else to hire. Just like I don't see someone working in construction picking up programming or some software engineer picking up construction. It happens, but generally both are just not built the same.
    • Ray20 3y ago
      >They just don't have anyone with the knowledge nor the capital to hire the people who then know who else to hire. Doesn't seem to be true. They pay celebrities (for their boring bs books that no one read) enough to build a dozen online platforms
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• vram22 3y ago
  I saw the second part of your comment coming, while reading the first part - in my mind's eye :) Uncanny valley, or maybe I just read the signals and interpreted them right.
• makeitdouble 3y ago
  When you say "publishing industry" you're really saying "paper book industry", right ? Nothing stops a publisher from being an ebook publisher, and that's a tried and true successful model adopted all around the world. You'd have made the same argument for vinyl record publishers saying they're cornered into a niche, but no, as you point put artists will still want editorial power and support, so digital music is thrieving.
  • kasey_junk 3y ago
    > Nothing stops a publisher from being an ebook publisher Except that the biggest platform for ebooks (by a big stretch, they own ~70% of the market) is a company that you have a direct adversarial relationship with in most other parts of your business.
    • makeitdouble 3y ago
      Business is business. If a publisher is refraining from going into ebooks altogether because of Amazon, when they get the option to direct sell and also access the other ebook platforms as well, I feel they're not long for this world either way.
      • kasey_junk 3y ago
        Im not suggesting they are refraining from going into ebooks due to Amazon I’m suggesting it’s not a tried and true business model the world over. It’s mostly not a going business model outside of the profits Amazon brings in from it.
        • makeitdouble 3y ago
          It's difficult to prove a negative. Ebooks are a growing market in the US, the EU and SEA (though TBH I have no idea about China amd India) It's been more than a decade that it's mainstream and takes about 10~20% of book sales depending on the country. Amwzon's profits are still split with the publishers and publishers have their own venues + competitors (in particular outside of the US) so I'm not sure why Amazon's presence is a blow against the industry as a whole. What more would be needed to see it as a validated business area?
• joe5150 3y ago
  I can't think of any publishers that are also in the business of printing and distribution. Those are entirely separate industries. There is almost no way for publishers to lose money because of tech that makes it cheaper and easier than ever to get books to consumers while retaining unprecedented control over pricing (fixed, never discounted or remaindered), resale (prohibited), and lending (also prohibited). Publishers sell eBooks for the same price as print books but pay almost nothing to produce them. That's a big bump in profits. I don't see how any publisher is losing money on their back catalog due to scanning by Google, either. Google doesn't sell or even offer access to the full text of most books they scan, certainly not any that are under copyright and still being sold by publishers. Out of print books are by definition not earning money for publishers, so it wouldn't make any difference there.
  • TheCoelacanth 3y ago
    If you think that publishers spend almost nothing on producing ebooks, then you clearly understand nothing about the publishing industry.
    • joe5150 3y ago
      Notwithstanding what I understand about the publishing industry, I'm talking about the marginal cost of distributing a .mobi or whatever versus manufacturing a printed book, not the entire cost of publishing an eBook.
      • TheCoelacanth 3y ago
        That's only a dollar or two of difference per unit in costs to the publisher. The majority of their costs are exactly the same for ebooks and printed books.
        • joe5150 3y ago
          Sure, I never said they weren't.
  • 3y ago
• AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  Copyright law is ridiculous and abusive (thank you supreme court). There is some role for domain knowledge, curation, and editing, but the article shows that's not what they make bucjs on: celebrity drivel, bibles, sat prep, and the copyright monopoly. It's just a cartel, just like the music labels are.
  • tryptophan 3y ago
    Man can we just kill these industries? Copyright law is so annoying and its supposed to promote quality...which we get none of. Free youtube tutorials are the best learning resource these days. The GDP hit would be insignificant too, like <.1%.
    • avar 3y ago
      Are you under the impression that those YouTube tutorials aren't copyrighted?
• zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  Aren’t print books still the vast majority of sales?
  • paxys 3y ago
    Ebooks are touching or have crossed 50% of sales in certain combinations of markets and genres. Overall they make up 30-50% of all book sales. So no, print books aren't still the vast majority.
    • nottorp 3y ago
      I remember reading on Charles Stross' blog that the paperback is kind of dead in the US. At least for his niche. I think his last book only went out in hard cover.
      • nottorp 3y ago
        > I think his last book only went out in hard cover. And ebook instead of paperback, of course.
    • kaedroho 3y ago
      Also worth mentioning that there are some genres that will never make sense as ebooks. When was the last time someone bought you an ebook as a gift? This is is the main market for cookbooks, for example.
• huytersd 3y ago
  There are very few people go this is by Simon and Schuster etc. Most Americans don’t read and the ones that do read a bunch of junk.
  • throwaway2037 3y ago
    > Most Americans I would suggest an edit: Most humans
    • kubanczyk 3y ago
      Well, animals, plants, LLMs and the rest of known matter of the Universe also aren't very picky readers.
  • Spivak 3y ago
    [dead]
• nitwit005 3y ago
  > You print books? Well we have e-books now. It's often the same publishers publishing the e-books. They did successfully make that transition. > Instead they went all in on pulp bestsellers and celebrity memoirs at the expense of actual good authors If they're best sellers, as you note, that was clearly a good choice. They were selling what people actually wanted.
  • fragmede 3y ago
    Are they? Mark Dawson was caught buying 400 copies of his own book in 2020, but he's not the first or last author to have done that.
  • paxys 3y ago
    Yes people are buying John Grisham and JK Rowling and the latest celebrity memoir, but eventually (1) interest will run out and people will want the next new thing and (2) these big brands will realize that they don't need the publishers to market for them (and this is already happening, as the article says). What then?
    • nitwit005 3y ago
      Regardless of them struggling in the future, publishing books that sell is clearly superior to publishing one's that don't.
• Aeolun 3y ago
  I don’t think it would have been possible for publishers to deal with the absolutely massive amount of books they’d have to vet to do what you’re saying. That works if the absolute number of books written is very small, so everyone interested in books pulls from that pool. The publishers could try to find a bunch of good books and get absolutely nothing.
  • yunohn 3y ago
    Curation is a multi-stage filtering pipeline. Such brands do not look at a firehose of content - they rely on existing networks and markers of quality before even considering content.
• greenie_beans 3y ago
  > Imagine a world where you wanted something good to read, and among all the garbage out there saw a title and went "this one is by Simon & Schuster, it has to be good". this still exists, but the presses are harder to find and mostly independent. FSG books are always good. also, books these indie presses are always good: - tyrant (rip) - graywolf - new directions - NYRB and some more, but idk your taste so not gonna recommend them.
• devjab 3y ago
  I can. Book publishers are terrible and they always have been. At least that is the case here in Denmark. They game our library system, so that books they know won’t sell well but will be lent a lot at the libraries, like a lot of children books are priced ridiculously. These books are never actually put in stores, because why bother? But our libraries, have, to buy them and then pay fees to the publishing houses based on the individual book prices. I guess part of the blame goes to our politicians though. The worst part is how they pay artists. Authors are paid poorly as touched upon in this article. But illustrators are paid criminally low rates. A children book with 50 pages of breathtaking art can earn you as little as $500 for months for work. Publishers pay your royalties by the size of your printed name on the front of the book. If your name isn’t there you get 0 royalties. If your name is smaller than the other names you get significantly less royalties. If your name is smaller, and, italic, you get almost no royalties and so on. In general the model has never really worked for anyone except a few authors. There are the famous ones who sell a lot of books and then there are the ones who write a billion children’s books who actually don’t get the majority of their money from publishers but from the government compensation programs. But for the most part publishers have always run a business model akin to music streaming services where only a handful of Danish authors can actually make a living just by selling books. Mean while our publishing houses have been able to employ thousands and keep investors happy. What a lot of artists and authors have done instead is to form smaller independent publishers. Which means you get 0 advertising and 0 product placement and so on, but ironically often will make you far more money than using the big publishers. These smaller indie publishers, and other creative ways of publishing like the article mentions, aren’t doing poorly. The big publishers are suffering. Thanks to the digital age. But I won’t miss them when they are gone.
  • nasmorn 3y ago
    If you can find people that do months of work for 500 in Denmark of all places then clearly this activity is understood to be a high status signal not a business opportunity. People are doing it for recognition or some vague notion of arriving as an artist. You can earn that in a week as a waiter
  • yunohn 3y ago
    > I guess part of the blame goes to our politicians though. There is no universe in which public funds are leeched without political complicity and corruption. Most likely the publishers benefitted are either related to or provided kickbacks to the influential parties.
• elorant 3y ago
  Penguin is that publisher for me. Pretty much everything I've read from them is rock solid.
• GeoAtreides 3y ago
  > there saw a title and went "this one is by Simon & Schuster, it has to be good" Meet Fitzcarraldo, the publisher house with four Nobels so far: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/10/four-nobels-and-counting-fitzcarraldo-the-little-publisher-that-could https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/10/four-nobels-an...
  • cafard 3y ago
    That strikes me as cheating a bit, counting translations. Still, good for Fitzcarraldo.
• tannhaeuser 3y ago
  Rather than feeling for the publishing industry, you should ask yourself what has gone wrong with the web as a medium for self-publishing.
• marcus_holmes 3y ago
  Sorry, but no. Authors have been complaining about publishers for ever. Publishers treated authors like crap when they controlled the market. No sympathy for them at all. If they had any integrity they'd move to be the Spotify of books and serve their customers better. Instead (as the article says) they're spending their efforts trying to bail the sinking boat and resist any such move. The world will be a better place without them.
• vidarh 3y ago
  > You print books? Well we have e-books now. The vast majority of sales is still paper books. > You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly. Some do. Most don't. Especially new authors. Publishers are playing a risky game of trying to figure out the tradeoff of how much to invest in developing an authors brand in the hope that future books will cost less to sell. Too much, and you have a cashflow problem today. Too little, and lose out on future returns. > You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarter give 10x more. Most authors have no fans yet, and most never will - most authors write only a few books in their lifetime. From what I see, most authors (myself included) would rather not deal with most of what publishers do. If anything, most authors would prefer it if publishers did more of the sales effort, but it's not economically viable in most cases.
  • munificent 3y ago
    > The vast majority of sales is still paper books. Do you have numbers for this? I wouldn't be entirely surprised if paper book revenue dwarfed ebook sales, but given that the latter has no marginal cost, I expect that profit from ebooks is still a very large slice of the pie. Anecdotally, with my two self-published books, ebook and PDFs make up a pretty large slice of the pie even though my books are known for prioritizing the print experience (careful layout, lots of illustrations, etc.). > Some do. Most don't. Especially new authors. Publishers are playing a risky game of trying to figure out the tradeoff of how much to invest in developing an authors brand in the hope that future books will cost less to sell. A new author with no established celebrity or audience is basically dead in the water. There was a world where a new author could: 1. Write a book that was good on its own merits. 2. Convince an agent to represent them based on that book's merits. 3. The agent convinces an editor at a well-known publisher to take it. 4. The publisher prints it and gets it on bookshelves in stores everywhere. 5. People looking for books stumble onto it and buy it. That world existed when people had a lot of spare time and attention and relatively few things vying for it. That world no longer exists. You can consume media 24/7 and never come close to running out, all without spending a penny. The days of just having to write a great book and get in front of two people to be successful are dead and gone. > From what I see, most authors (myself included) would rather not deal with most of what publishers do. If anything, most authors would prefer it if publishers did more of the sales effort, but it's not economically viable in most cases. There's a lot of stuff most people would rather not do, but unfortunately, sometimes the economic systems don't enable that.
• DrBazza 3y ago
  In the UK many years ago, there was the Net Book Agreement, which was price fixing and Amazon, BooksOnline/StreetsOnline comprehensively broke that. Unfortunately, book shops didn't really learn, and we are where we are. Back to the title. I still buy books. I've stopped buying them from Amazon, and just buy them from my LBS. Though one thing still makes me irrationally angry - "SciFi + Fantasy" as "a genre" in bookshops. No. It. Isn't. It's two separate. Two loved-up vampires, isn't sci-fi. At least on Amazon I can filter that. Browse on Amazon, buy in the LBS. Which is the reverse of what I did a decade ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Book_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Book_Agreement
  • pm215 3y ago
    The Wikipedia article suggests that it was not Amazon and online bookselling that broke the Net Book Agreement, but big high street chain bookstores like Dillons. One of the references links to a newspaper article from December 1994 saying the agreement is "on its last legs", and Amazon was only founded in July 1994, so seems unlikely to have been very influential in its demise.
• Hendrikto 3y ago
  > You do marketing? Authors now have their own followings on social media and can reach them directly. > You give cash advances? Fans on Kickstarter give 10x more. Both of those seem very positive to me.
• boringg 3y ago
  And you didn't even bring in LLMs into the equation having hoovered up most books ever written
• ornornor 3y ago
  > Imagine a world where you wanted something good to read, and among all the garbage out there saw a title and went "this one is by Simon & Schuster, it has to be good". I feel this way about DK books although they don’t really do fiction but practical titles.
  • alok-g 3y ago
    +1 for DK.
• pookha 3y ago
  Publishers are going nowhere. Who else is going to pay politicians millions for their ghost-written "memoirs"?
• beezle 3y ago
  Hard to feel sympathy for industry that left to its own devices requires a 50% discount to sell in store, near 40% to get to Amazon/BN etc, and for bricks and mortar, requires you to accept returns that end up as a loss.
• araes 3y ago
  There are responses to every single one of these. Similar to Radioshack (3D printers, drones, Arduino, Raspberry PI), and Intel's (mobile, GPUs, foundries, AI) bankruptcies or "lost decades". Distribute Books - They could have built a competitive distribution system by responding to what was an obvious aggressive threat. Amazon founded in 94', public by 97', buying book sellers by 98'. Four years, and Amazon was going International and buying book sellers. e-books - Great. Sell e-books yourselves. Sell better e-books with Publisher extras. Scanned catalog - Multiple responses. Legally inclined, lawsuits before it was all irreparably scraped (or afterward). Tech inclined, scrape your own stuff and make it available. Culturally or historically inclined, donate the texts to Gutenberg or a museum so the scraping doesn't get them much. Authors have their own followings - Interact. "Hi, this is so-and-so from PRH, that's a neat idea for the author's work, and we'll discuss trying to work it into the next book launch." There's probably authors who follow authors, "Any of you wanna write a book?" Cash advances - The cash advances are broke anyways. One of main points of the article. 70% of spending goes to 1% of authors. Try a slightly less power-law distribution. Maybe something a little less than x^60... PRH alone gave 55% of all advances in $1,000,000+ land. Have your own Kickstarters, or crowdfunding site. Arrange crowdfunding campaigns with marginal authors (for better author %). Work with fans directly so fans can put up the advance with pre-orders. Lots of alternatives to wringing their hands. (If Bates White Economic Consulting is correct, then 95% of money likely goes to 5% of authors). What this article told me was the publishing industry has a bad case of "try to spend zero work, while making infinite $". 'if the platform is there for the advertising, then the spend might be lower.' 'Does the best selling author have the best marketing budget? No. Why? She's the queen of TikTok.' (she does her own marketing) Ideally, the authors get their own loans from the bank, print their own materials, arrange their own distribution, put out their own marketing, and then we collect a vague value-add for putting our logo somewhere.
• hinkley 3y ago
  Martha Wells had a Patreon for a while before Murderbot Diaries blew up. If I have the story right, the short stories she published there are rolled up in a collected short stories book now. My kid likes to remind me that Naomi Novik was one of the founders of a fanfic site called AO3. A number of the books we call classics today started out in serialized form in magazines. Atwood, Capote, Christie, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Doyle, Dumas, Hemingway, Joyce, Sinclair, Verne, Wells, have all done serials that are now bound. And if memory serves Asimov and Clarke as well. The medium may be different but the process is old.