Someone plowed through the transcripts of the Penguin Random House/Simon & Schuster projected merger antitrust trial, and extracted a lot of details about the publishing industry:https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books(1) The overwhelming majority of books published by major publishing houses generate little or no money for anyone, and in particular their authors.(2) Books that sell more than [incredibly depressing number] copies are very rare. The DOJ collected data on more than 58,000 titles published in a year, and found that 90% sold fewer than 2,000 copies, and that the median number of sales was ... 12.(3) The overwhelming bulk of book sales come from three classes of writers: celebrities, franchise authors (Stephen King, John Grisham, Colleen Hoover etc.,) and the backlist, that is, The Lord of the Rings, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the Bible, etc. If you're not an author who is already in one of these three categories, your chances of making a living by publishing books are infinitesimal.(4) The big publishing houses now spend almost all their money on a tiny number of gigantic advances. Even authors who get these get almost no money spent on publicity efforts by their publishers, because the giant advances go to people with a million TikTok followers.(5) The Obamas sell so many books that they had to be taken out of the data analysis as distorting outliers.(6) If/when book publishing goes to a Netflix/Spotify subscription model, where you pay $10 a month to read as many books as you want, traditional publishing will be destroyed, since 20% of book buyers spend 80% of the money spent on books (this is the ratio for basically everything).(7) It's not unusual for a celebrity author to get a million dollar advance and then put their name on a book that doesn't sell any copies. Big publishing is a boom or bust/lottery ticket/VC investment model, which is increasingly untenable.
>>23316743good when the market comes to a halt i will finally be able to catch up.
>>23316743very interesting! thanks for the synopsis
>>23316743>The Obamas sell so many books that they had to be taken out of the data analysis as distorting outliers.Don't people realize that they're black? What the fuck would they even write? Bix nood bananas and shit?
>>23316743My favourite part of all this is that it renders the antitrust trial meaningless The big publishers already have buyer power vis a vis authors and can make them do whatever It is not competition among publishers that drives book prices either So what's the point? The big five already have collective dominance (EU concept but still), stopping them from merging achieves nothing
Start practicing short form screenwriting, bros. Novels are pretty much only for yourself.
>>23316743Publishers are really retarded. Someone should fund and start a new one that doesn’t only sell dei slop and Gordon Ramsey ‘authored’ auto biographies
>>23316813>Don't people realize that they're black? What the fuck would they even write? Bix nood bananas and shit?
>>23316743This is banal and only tells us that nothing has changed. Publishing industry let's the current fads subsidize the rest and has done this for over a century now.
