no one buys books except the people who buy books

or, some thoughts on publishing

Things go viral not because they’re accurate or reflect reality but because they give an audience exactly what they want. The bigger the audience for that perspective, the more viral something goes. If you claim to have insider knowledge about the terrors of journalism (this kind of thing goes viral often), you can expect the audience (people who hate journalists or find them annoying or just plain wrong) to be fairly large.

The same is also true if you write something revealing the diabolical nature of university professors or activists or anything related to the production of what we call culture. So when Elle Griffin wrote her piece with the provocatively incorrect headline No one buys books, it went viral among the chattering classes. Those chattering classes are the power users on social media (especially twitter) because of their proximity to cultural production, and because they all probably have a book that’s been rejected by a press or agent, they were primed to send this out into the world. More than that, there are millions of English language speakers who have written a book or simply think books in general used to be better 20 or 50 or 100 years ago, so all these people were also primed to share this sort of thing because the essay told them what they wanted to hear: publishing is broken.

Lincoln Michel wrote a nice rebuttal and it, too, went semi-viral. Just using the metrics in substack, Griffin’s piece was shared over 3x as many times, with 3x as many likes but over 8x as many comments.

This, at the very least, tells you something about substack users (more specifically, substack users who use their social media Notes). But we should understand that the audience for bad news about publishing is at least 3x the size of the audience for the more boring news that publishing is doing pretty well (there are, of course, other factors, like the relative sizes of Griffin and Michel’s subscriber base). And this doesn’t account for the traction either piece picked up on other platforms (Michel’s piece was reshared by Publishers Weekly on twitter, for example) or how they may have been disseminated via email, texts, etc etc etc.

But I would say it’s safe to assume that Griffin’s piece had a much greater reach, in part because it confirmed what people already wanted to believe about publishing. Michel’s piece is more grounded in facts, especially when you consider—as Michel does—that Simon & Schuster and Penguin Randomhouse were trying to make a case for why they needed to merge. And so they gave the FTC the bleakest picture they could reasonably drum up (without outright lying) for why the merger would save publishing.

That dozens of authors—including Stephen King, one of the most successful authors in history—spoke out about how consolidation has negatively impacted their careers and ability to profit off their own labor should tell you that the publishing industry was very specifically not interested in authors when it came to the merger. They were interested in the amount of money they, as executives and board members, would make off the further consolidation of the industry.

But that, too, is not as sexy as saying PUBLISHING IS DYING AND I CAN SELL YOU THE FUTURE. Especially since Griffin’s subsequent pitch is basically that Substack is our potential savior here. That’s not to say that I even disagree with what Griffin says in that Substack piece, but you should be very leery when the solution to a problem with a multibillion dollar industry is to have a tech firm save us. Especially when you consider what kind of writing does best on the platform.

This is one of those cases that I’d say is similar to when a news story goes viral but then needs to be corrected because it’s incorrect and that correction gets seen by almost no one.

Now, I don’t think Griffin is trying to lie or even mislead anyone. I think she simply took the publishing industry’s word for it.

Children, never take a multibillion dollar industry’s word for anything without further scrutiny. The scrutiny, in this case, was done by the FTC and it led them to reject the merger!

Seems like an important piece in all this.

Anyway, here’s where I take a bit of a left turn.

Because even if the publishing industry is doing just fine and making a pretty solid profit on every single book sold (and there are about a billion books sold per year), authors are making less money, seeing shrinking advances, and being booted out of traditional publishing when they don’t meet arbitrary market expectations for their books. The testimony of people like Stephen King highlighted this and were part of the reason the FTC rejected further consolidation in this sector.

The general advice for new authors right now is to simply build an audience. You’re meant to do this before you have a book out and probably before an agent even looks at your book. There’s a reason why, when querying to agents or publishers, they often ask for your social media accounts—they want to see if you already have a built-in audience who might buy your book.

Gone are the days when a debut author’s debut is meant to build that audience!

Rather, the publishing industry from the Big Five on down to the One Person in a Bedroom presses, want to make a bet on someone who will succeed without them needing to spend any money on advertising. Advertising is expensive and marketing professionals really don’t know what will make your book succeed and so the hope is that your audience of tens of thousands will just do the work for them. This may sound kind of bleak, especially if you’re not active on any social media and don’t have an email list, but when we consider publishing as an industry, it makes perfect sense.

My question, often, when this all comes up, is: Should publishing be an industry?

I mean, to some extent, it’s unavoidable. Most people don’t have the capital to publish and distribute their own books. And we honestly don’t want publishing to be left up to the whims of random rich people.

Oops.

One could say that we’re basically already at this point. We want to believe that the publishing industry cares about art or history or science. They want beautiful, moving, invigorating fiction that manages to provide comfort reads and challenging reads. They want nonfiction that is well written, well researched, and argues towards truth, or at least some semblance of it.

And to be sure, publishing is full of people who do care about all that. They’ve spent their whole lives on this project.

But their bosses upstairs really just care about the profit.

You may have written the best book of the 21st century, but if the MBAs at the boardroom don’t think it’ll sell or turn into a movie, they may tell the dorks downstairs who are so jazzed about this book to fuck off and bring them the next Harry Potter instead. This can often mean that even successful authors will have their books rejected because they wrote the wrong book or because their last book wasn’t successful enough.

And the consolidation happening is not just within industries, but across industries. The news you read and watch, the movies you watch, the books you read, the newspapers and magazines you subscribe to, the internet provider who allows you to have all of this on your phone, in your home—all of these are owned by the same few companies. On top of that, the algorithm that feeds you all of these things you spend your life scrolling through are also consolidated in just a few companies that make discovering new voices actively difficult.

Which means that most of culture is produced and owned by a very small number of billionaires.

Great news!

Complicating everything is the trillion dollar megamonopoly in the room: Amazon. Amazon has been instrumental in driving down profits for the publishing industry but also for authors. Yes, they’ll boast about the incredibly small fraction of authors who have made millions selfpublishing directly through them, but Amazon is not the friend of the author in this fight.

Then you add in the consolidation of distribution and things just keep getting worse.

But so what can you do, as an aspiring or new or even longtime author?

I suppose the only real path forward is to take a more punk, DIY approach to all this.

Focus on your audience and cultivate them. Because your audience may follow you wherever you go. They don’t care if you’re published by Penguin Randomhouse or Simon & Shuster or Hachette or any of their subsidiaries. They care about your writing (ideally, anyway). They bought your book because they bought into you and your words at some point.

While getting a book on a major press may not be the shot in the arm it once was where you could quit your dayjob and become a fulltime author, it does provide you a big opportunity.

The biggest obstacle to any artist is name recognition or even just getting your name out there. Maybe you have a decent audience on twitter or instagram or tiktok or through a newsletter. A modest size. Maybe a few thousand. Maybe only a few hundred.

What getting on a major press will do for you is broadcast your name to thousands of new people who may become potential audience members. Maybe they google you and find your social media or newsletter and subscribe because the pitch for your book sounded pretty near or your book cover looked cool as heck.

These are people who may have never heard of you otherwise.

Now let’s say your major label debut only sells a thousand copies, which would be seen as a huge failure for the publisher.

But is that a failure for you?

Remember, before this, maybe your last book only sold a hundred copies or maybe you never had a previous book. So while you failed in the eyes of this industry, you now have potentially a thousand new people who will give your next book a shot, or who are interested enough to see what you’ll be doing next.

If you can keep that thousand, well, that seems like a pretty big success!

The publishing industry is bleak and it’s basically a lottery when it comes to becoming a bestseller. The difference is that losing the lottery isn’t all or nothing in publishing.

At least for you, the writer.

Rather, signing up for the lottery gave you a relatively big boost for your modest career.

Which is why I take all avenues for publishing.

I have a book at a major publisher, a different one with agents, a few different ones with small independent presses, and I have the ones I self publish. I have a few other unwritten novels pitched to places.

Your goal as a writer isn’t to just hope you win the lottery but to dig in the dirt for gold, to seek it out on distant shores, and so on. Take an all of the above approach to publishing.

It’s not as straightforward or easy and it doesn’t come with the sexiness of a New York highrise letterhead, but you’re looking for sustainability here.

So go out, keep writing, and try whatever you can.

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My novels:

• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.

• Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers

• Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.

• Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants

• Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.

• House of Ghosts - Standalone sequel to Libertatia; or, the Onion King