6 ms·
The stagnancy of publishing and the disappearance of the midlist
- kurthr 7mo agoI'll offer a hopeful rejoinder. Perhaps, when AISlop generates enough of the same old story "guaranteed" hits for the mass market (and book covers to go with same), the editors will switch back to something that is novel and unlikely to be generated. Think about what happens when you feed the first few books of a series into long context llm, along with their audience interests, pitch lines, plot summaries and character guides. When each element is multi-shot rather than zero-shot.
- raldi 7mo agoThe clickbait title refers to a day in fall 1995 when a Random House editor was told by his boss that the business could no longer afford to publish modestly-selling books (~10,000-40,000 copies), marking the moment when corporate scale killed the old risk-taking culture of publishing.
- comrade1234 7mo agoInteresting history but what's going on now is so crazy as a reader. Amazon kindle publishes 7500 new books daily. There's no longer gatekeepers like in the article. About two years ago I was searching for a new sci-fi book to read - I routinely rotate genres. I did my research in goodreads and started reading a trilogy that was highly rated. Holy crap it was so bad a quit about halfway through the second book. I went back to goodreads and the rating since my last visit had dropped drastically. A bot campaign or something fooled me, I guess. I've since just started reading older stuff, before the 2000s. I'd try to find a gatekeeper to filter newer stuff for me but everything seems corrupt - even the Hugo awards gets scammed by influence campaigns.
- pavel_lishin 7mo ago> I'd try to find a gatekeeper to filter newer stuff for me but everything seems corrupt Word of mouth is the best way to do this, among friends who read similar things to you. Even if you're recommended something you end up not liking, it's not because they're malicious, their tastes are just not the same as yours - and after awhile, you learn to adapt. Friend A recommends a space opera? Great, you have very similar tastes. They recommend a horror novel? Eh, you know that what they consider to be good horror isn't what you do, so you skip that one.
- comrade1234 7mo agoI actually do do that and we all recommend each other older stuff we read years ago. :) These are some of my most recent conversations: "try Raymond Feist's Magician series" "I'm reading the Book of the New Sun series now" "I read the Pendragon Cycle (she's English and obsessed with King Arthur stories) in high school and liked it but now it's a weird right-wing tv show" These are all old books but still super enjoyable. (Except maybe book of the new sun - kind if a bummer)
- rznicolet 7mo agoYeah... for new stuff, I follow authors I already like on social media and see what they recommend from other folks (and why). I've had a miss or two, but that's generally a good start.
- PNewling 7mo agoNot that this is the perfect fix, but at least for sci-fi books you can usually look the Hugo Award winners[0] for ones that are solid. Not all of them are my cup of tea, but I have found that I definitely love some of the series that are found there. I'm sure there are other award types per genre that could help point you to some as well. Not that these can't be gamed, or sponsored or whatever, but at least it is a good starting point that is (¿maybe?) less prone to bot bias campaigns. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel
- nomdep 7mo agoThat was true until 10 or 15 years ago. They have been riddled with (accusations of) bias and fraud since then
- exmadscientist 7mo agoThe Hugo and Nebula winners (and shortlists, do not forget those) aren't perfect, but they're almost always worth a look. Pretending that they're total garbage is doing yourself a disservice.
- megmogandog 7mo agoWow, I hadn't heard about the fraud in 2024, which I looked up in response to your comment. That's troubling to say the least. Bias, though, is going to be inevitable and the Hugos are going to represent the taste of the Worldcon voters. It seems like overall there's been a happy confluence for awhile now between their taste and general sf taste. I've discovered three of my favorite contemporary sf authors through recent Hugos: Ann Leckie, Arkady Martine, and Tamsyn Muir. I've read other recent nominees where I was unmoved or even questioned their inclusion. I've also read a decent selection of historical winners, by no means exhaustive or even the majority, and the worst was without a doubt Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer.
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- moffkalast 7mo agoPeople who don't see any issue with writing novels with LLMs probably correlate heavily with those that also don't see any issue using a botnet of them to promote it. So it's always the worst slop that ends up being pushed the most. We could call this "the Openclaw effect".
- transcriptase 7mo ago7500 books a day… what percentage are AI slop? Half the non-fiction and children’s books I see are clearly just free tier ChatGPT with poorly generated AI imagery.
- boznz 7mo agotrue, but what percentage a ghost-written fodder?, what percentage are best-sellers milking their fan=base with derivatives of the same slop? It has always been the problem for the reader to sort out the good stuff from the rubbish, it has just gotten a hundred times harder as the bar for writing is now a lot lower. When I meet a new person who I get on with I ask them what are their favourite books and why, it has opened my eyes to some great books I would not otherwise have found, I really wish I had kept a proper book/reading diary so I could pass these on myself, hindsight it great!
- boznz 7mo agoInfluencers, and people with zero talent, but who have a public audience, are the new target for publishers, so expect a fuck-tonne more rubbish to be pushed by the usual channels and algorithms. This is not a good time to be an indie author (I should know) writing the book is only the start of the journey, if you want people to now read it you have to fight a system dead set against your success. Word of mouth eventually gets you a few readers, or sales (thankfully) but there are plenty of really good indie authors out there, and you will never find them in the normal algorithms or book recommendation sites.
- righthand 7mo agoWhat about finding indie authors on traditional recommendation systems such as Gnod?[0] The less utilized and forgotten parts of the internet are probably a good set of places to push. [0] https://www.gnod.com/ https://www.gnod.com/
- groby_b 7mo agoPushing by any chance your own project? And forgetting to mention gnod is yet another midwit AI recommendation system for bland averaged out taste for the masses?
- righthand 7mo agoI have no idea I barely use it but has been around for ages, just figured it was a forgotten part of the net. If you read my comments you will see I am skeptical towards AI and for the record I beleive that Gnod is algorithmic not necessarily the AI of “today”. I wish gnod was a project I could pimp but the truth is that I got nothing. Go after the nerds who post their start up in comments. Me, I have never done so and I am too young to be the gnod creator.
- frm88 7mo agoI'm always on the hunt for good reads (hah). I just tried gnod with K. J. Parker, Ishiguro and Iain M. Banks. The recommendations were Alighieri (Dante), Cervantes, some more 17th century authors and Tom Holt, who is K. J. Parker and the last rec was K. J. Parker. Complete fail.
- Spooky23 7mo agoPublishers served a really valuable purpose of curation and keeping good authors productive. Now we have the double whammy of a consolidated publishing system pumping out whatever James Patterson’s assistants churn out and and a long tail of drivel, both AI and regular slop.
- frm88 7mo agoAnd to make this worse: these days even the blurb are written by LLMs, some of them pure word salad. Just last week I left comments with two authors to see to it that the blurb at least resembles English even if the content still doesn't make sense. We're being completely dehumanised and treated like NPCs, just a lubricant to keep the machine going.
- Aurornis 7mo ago> I did my research in goodreads and started reading a trilogy that was highly rated. Holy crap it was so bad a quit about halfway through the second book. I went back to goodreads and the rating since my last visit had dropped drastically. A bot campaign or something fooled me, I guess. Sites like Goodreads and Rotten Tomatoes are targeted by marketing firms. Every popular outlet that become a proxy for reviews gets targeted. The New York Times best seller list has been gamed for decades by publishers who will mass-purchase their own books to get on to the list. When getting a high score on Product Hunt was viewed as impressive it was standard practice for startups to have all of their friends and family register accounts and then have everyone spam their LinkedIn to beg for Product Hunt upvotes in a coordinated campaign. Now you can just buy Product Hunt upvotes for negligible prices from people in other countries who maintain hoards of sock puppet accounts. Anyone who posts to Product Hunt gets DMs from these companies offering their services. Nobody takes Product Hunt seriously now.
- chuckadams 7mo ago> Nobody takes Product Hunt seriously now. That's putting it mildly. I'm not normally about doing this sort of thing, but I went out of my way to find and install an extension to block google results for producthunt and alternative.to specifically.
- ekianjo 7mo agoWas Product Hunt ever taken seriously by anyone? Since day1 it was an obvious target for influence hacking
- Aurornis 7mo agoIn some domains a big Product Hunt launch was a serious achievement. VCs would look at it, journalists would take notice, and you’d get a little burst of signups from a user base known to have a lot of influencers. Everyone knew it was gamed a little, but there was some organic traffic. Then it steadily got worse and worse until the front page was just random products that nobody actually used.
- qsera 7mo agoWhat I am surprised is the fact that people expect everything to be an exception to Goodhart's law, by default.
- bombcar 7mo agoI used to (years ago) find new sci-fi and other fiction by going to the library and looking inside at the cards and seeing which had been checked out the most, and grabbing one. Unfortunately that's all digital now and so you kind of have to go by how worn the copy is.
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- m463 7mo agoI don't think he's talking about "gatekeepers" per se, I think he's talking about the publishing model being incomprehensible if you're in it. I think the old publishing model is dying. self-publishing is routing around it. As a reader, it is sort of amazing. I've been reading more than I ever have before in my life. If I like a book, I can read the next in the series, and there's a good chance there are 8 other books in the series. When I was younger, scifi novels would rarely have follow-on books, and if they did, maybe max 3 at that. The hard one for me is continuing a book after I see a typo.
- aardvark179 7mo agoI recommend actual human reviewers who you can stick with over time and who do not just say that a book is good or bad but something about why. Those don’t have to be professional reviewers, they can just be people you know or follow who talk about what they read. Looking at award shortlists and nomination lists is also a good filter providing you know a little about the award (I wouldn’t go to the Clarke Award shortlist for mil sf stuff, for example).
- BrenBarn 7mo agoThis is not specific to publishing. The diagram tells the story: it's consolidation. Consolidation is bad. Giant companies are bad. In publishing as in other domains.
- idle_zealot 7mo agoCorrect. That's why even though the specific complaint from the article no longer applies, and small-volume books are easier than ever to publish, things are still shit, only in different ways. Consolidation in a market is just about the worst way to run anything; all the worst elements of a government agency and a profit-seeking business with none of the moderating factors of democracy or competition.
- encrypted_bird 7mo agoIt's almost like competition is critical for a healthy marketplace! (Seriously, I _don't_ understand why this is such a hard concept for a lot of people to understand...)
- conception 7mo agoIt is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. Upton Sinclair
- jomohke 7mo agoI'm curious how much this is the cause or effect, though? The publishers have been saying that their ability to promote books has drastically reduced with the internet, along with changes in reading and information habits. It seems like a book needs a far bigger push today to rise above the noise of the internet (and people's over-abundance of content to consume), and this unfortunately meant that small publishers struggled unless they "joined together" to make a bigger push. There's extremely small (self published) books and extremely large hits, but the middle is increasingly less viable, it seems. Similar to films.
- rznicolet 7mo agoAnd, with publishers, you can get both monopoly _and_ monopsony problems. The latter is, I believe, one reason the attempt to consolidate from Big Five to Big Four failed -- I'm forgetting which two publishers were trying to merge, but angry authors talking about having difficulty selling books, and reduced pay for them, was a key argument.
- jbellis 7mo agoThe 90s aren't coming back to publishing. The audience who reads multiple books a month is going the way of the classical symphony attendee.
- comrade1234 7mo agoThe opera, symphony, and ballet sell out every performance where I live. Me, my friends, wife, etc all read multiple books per month. To me it feels like the problem is in the supply-side - there's just endless content being constantly published - more than could ever be read.
- righthand 7mo agoOne medium where this isn’t really true is video games. Why hasn’t Steam or Itch fallen in this trap? Because they are honest stewards? Or because the software plane isn’t as large? Only news publishing and written word and movies. In fact movies even have a set number of prestige “risk” directors so they never have to reach too far out of the norm, see Yorgos Lanthimos.
- cal_dent 7mo agoIt's the same point though. Steam/Itch haven't fallen into the trap, which I think is because the friction and barriers tonentry in video games are less of an issue than other mediums. But video games in general have fallen into that trap. There were certainly more variety in the mainstream/AAA scene in the 90s and 00s than there is now. No more major publisher really is in that mid tier wacky but interesting 6-7.5/10 game space anymore. It goes back to the point that consolidation long term ends up being bad and the smaller/indie press is good for culture (and that is a big part of what Steam is, and I'd argue where the most interesting things in gaming have come from lately
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- ThrowawayR2 7mo agoThe article doesn't apply to Steam because Steam is a marketplace, not a publisher. Valve takes on no financial risk in accepting a new game into Steam. And there has been a fair bit of consolidation going on among publishers. IIRC there are only about a dozen giant corporations left that finance AAA games and they have been losing appetite for risk over the past year, cancelling many games in development and shuttering many game studios.
- righthand 7mo agoBut even if Microsoft buys out all the major studios, and Nintendo and Sony, there would still be a healthy counter-culture indie market, which is what the article discusses as a solution to the crisis in the other mediums. So again what makes video games special that it can nurture a healthy market across many (locked-in even) platforms? Arguably it might be the many available distribution channels (miniclip.com vs Steam vs Itch vs random website).
- like_any_other 7mo agoI deeply empathize with his complaint about book covers, but that's just what "design" is these days. This is Peter and Wendy, 1st edition: https://mflibra.com/products/1911-rare-peter-pan-first-edition-peter-and-wendy-by-j-m-barrie-illustrated-by-f-d-bedford-2 https://mflibra.com/products/1911-rare-peter-pan-first-editi... This is a modern edition: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Peter-Wendy-AmazonClassics-J-Barrie-ebook/dp/B077D9MCMN https://www.amazon.co.uk/Peter-Wendy-AmazonClassics-J-Barrie... They could have just left it alone - "fired the design team". But no - they spent time and money to vandalize it. Look at the Museum of Modern Art (conveniently also in New York): https://museumsexplorer.com/museum-of-modern-art-moma-in-new-york/ https://museumsexplorer.com/museum-of-modern-art-moma-in-new... https://loving-newyork.com/museum-of-modern-art-new-york/ https://loving-newyork.com/museum-of-modern-art-new-york/ The paintings in the most lauded modern art museum in the world are indistinguishable from those garish book covers. That's what gets recognition in the "art" world.
- groby_b 7mo agoIf they are "indistinguishable" from those book covers, I strongly suggest visiting an optometrist. You may not enjoy modern art, and that's fine - but most of it runs circles around modern book covers. The latter are optimized to grab attention, without any artistic merit. They're the equivalent of shouting loudly. Modern art may be the equivalent of speaking in esperanto or lojban to you, but at least it's still trying to say something.
- like_any_other 7mo agoNo, luminism and romanticism are the equivalent of esperanto or lojban. Modern art is pre-verbal vocalizations, after it had deconstructed language because having syntax and pronunciation are unoriginal and "academic", and fooled itself that higher language is no longer worth exploring. What is it trying to say - how severely language can be mutilated while still sparking some semblance of an idea in a sufficiently imaginative listener? Glorified Rorschach blots. I'll let MoMA make my case for me: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79892 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79892 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/101471 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/101471 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81527 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81527 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/35054 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/35054 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79816 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79816 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/35548 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/35548 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80712 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80712 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/32293 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/32293 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/232 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/232
- djoldman 7mo agoI don't understand what the problem is. TFA makes many references to "literary culture" degrading.. does he mean that readers were better off when the big 5 or 6 controlled the mast majority of new books? The number of new books available exploded after 2000 (yes, way way before AI). Readers are arguably better off than they ever have been in terms of variety.
- KittenInABox 7mo agoExtremely weird cover selection. Books like Stag Dance, Project: Hail Mary, The Emperor of Gladness, etc. None of them have that. Some of the books listed there are several years old (The Death of Vivek Oji was published in 2020). A Map Is Only One Story isn't even fiction?? I think its very cherrypicked of a complaint. Not to mention the author doesn't talk at all about the rise of romantasy and finding bets like Alchemised and Fourth Wing (neither of which have these covers complained about).
- rznicolet 7mo agoAs somebody whose first book came out last month from a (very) small indie press... yeah. In trad publishing, once you've got an agent (not an insignificant step), you only have a handful of shots at the Big Five publishers with your manuscript. If they don't want it? It's small press or self-pub, and good luck getting your book above the sea of mediocrity. The novel I've got out is urban fantasy, but what I _really_ want to get out there is the hard science fiction series entirely from the aliens' points of view... which is very much not a fit with the current zeitgeist. Because that's unlikely to be a blockbuster, if I ever want to see it in print, I'll probably have to do it myself, with a proportionately diminished chance of finding readers. (And all this is one reason why writers have day jobs. I'll be pleasantly surprised if my novel income hits even 1% of my tech job salary this year.)
- jaggederest 7mo agoPlease post your books here, rough draft / advance copies welcome, I'd love to read more things from the tiny subset of people who contribute to interesting topics like this on HN
- frm88 7mo agohttps://rznicolet.com/books/the-cloak-and-its-wizard/ https://rznicolet.com/books/the-cloak-and-its-wizard/
- strix_varius 7mo agoUrban fantasy is my jam, what's your book?
- Finnucane 7mo agoI worked in NY publishing in the 1990s and also did some small press stuff, and even then the 'death of the midlist' was already an old topic. And yeah, consolidation had someting to do with it: publishers were owned by bigger businesses that saw them as black boxes to extract value from. Distribution was changing: the big 'superstores' and Amazon/online sales starting to be a thing. Mass-market was getting crushed. Obviously, not everything that got published was a bestseller, or even expected to be, but authors couldn't get the same space to grow a career. If it didn't work, they'd be cut. Now I'm a production editor for a uni press. For a while, it seemed to be a bit of a haven from the madness, but it's coming for us now too.
- droidjj 7mo ago> "Writers win the Pulitzer Prize and sell just [a] few hundred copies." For anyone else who was intrigued by this statement: The essay links to another Medium essay[0] which links to a book critic's blog[1] which links to a 2014 article from Publisher's Weekly[2]. That article reports, e.g., that in the week after winning the Pulitzer for general nonfiction, "Tom's River by Dan Fagin, went from 10 copies to 162 copies sold (6,266 copies sold to date) on BookScan." The poetry winner that year had sold 353 copies at the time the article was published. It came out about six months earlier. So perhaps for some poetry books, an author could win a Pulitzer and "sell just a few hundred copies." But that seems like it would be rare. Anyway, these aren't great numbers, but maybe not as abysmal as the author makes it sound. [0] https://aaronschnoor.medium.com/does-winning-a-pulitzer-prize-actually-matter-39234dac2ea5 https://aaronschnoor.medium.com/does-winning-a-pulitzer-priz... [1] https://malwarwickonbooks.com/how-much-is-a-pulitzer-prize-worth/ https://malwarwickonbooks.com/how-much-is-a-pulitzer-prize-w... [2] https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/awards-and-prizes/article/61988-tartt-s-goldfinch-doubles-sales-following-pulitzer-win.html https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/a...
- zachbee 7mo agoOne thing that people rarely discuss about book publishing is a change to US tax law in the late 70s that meant that publishers couldn't write down the value of unsold inventory, but could write off that inventory by destroying it. That meant that poorly selling books were destroyed to realize a taxable loss, which killed the ability for books to slowly "pick up steam" over a year or two to eventually generate a profit for the publisher. If you didn't make a profit fast, the backlog got destroyed and the book lost its chance to make money.
- didgetmaster 7mo agoThe article mentions music and movies as following a similar route; but why no mention of software? Once upon a time, a small startup could build something and get off the ground by selling a few thousand licenses at $20 apiece. Nowadays, it seems like version 1.0 has to be a bestseller or no one will touch it.
- Tomte 7mo agoBecause Ted Gioia is a musician, not a programmer.
- ggm 7mo agoThe irony of this piece being interrupted by a plea to like and subscribe.
- SpicyLemonZest 7mo agoI never know how to engage with these kind of discussions, where "literary culture" includes only a narrow subset of the books that are published and read. The author posts a collage of litfic novel covers and wonders why they're all so similar, but to me the answer seems obvious: litfic is a genre, whether its devotees want to call it that or not, and so it needs a consistent visual language to guide people's eyes in increasingly genre-ified bookstores. He says "every title I see" is like this, but I strongly suspect he'd agree that this is only true because he spots the romantasy section from a mile away and averts his eyes before he has to learn anything about the adventures of Violet Sorrengail.