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The stagnancy of publishing and the disappearance of the midlist

95 points by wallflower

by comrade1234

12 subcomments

Interesting 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.

by zachbee

0 subcomment

One 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.

by droidjj

0 subcomment

> "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-priz...
[1] https://malwarwickonbooks.com/how-much-is-a-pulitzer-prize-w...
[2] https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/a...

by BrenBarn

6 subcomments

This 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.

by raldi

0 subcomment

The 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.

by jbellis

1 subcomments

The 90s aren't coming back to publishing. The audience who reads multiple books a month is going the way of the classical symphony attendee.

by kurthr

0 subcomment

I'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.

by rznicolet

2 subcomments

As 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.)

by didgetmaster

1 subcomments

The 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.

by ggm

0 subcomment

The irony of this piece being interrupted by a plea to like and subscribe.

by djoldman

0 subcomment

I 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.

by like_any_other

1 subcomments

I 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-editi...
This is a modern edition: 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...
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.

by SpicyLemonZest

0 subcomment

I 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.

by KittenInABox

0 subcomment

Extremely 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).

by righthand

3 subcomments

One 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.

by Finnucane

0 subcomment

I 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.