Is book publishing doomed? Point and counterpoint

Is book publishing doomed? Some conversations lately brought some extra doom and gloom to this question, for sure. In a detailed analysis of this question on her Substack, Elle Griffin read the trial notes from Penguin vs. DOJ in very earnest detail. Her conclusion: “No one buys books”:

All of the transcripts from the trial were compiled into a book called The Trial. It took me a year to read, but I’ve finally summarized my findings and pulled out all the compelling highlights.

I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies)…

The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.

Okay, so this sounds awfully discouraging, but Griffin’s analysis does not take certain issues into account: most important, as several people with publishing experience noted in response, this analysis doesn’t differentiate between self-published books and those published by an actual press.

Joel J. Miller, a writer and prolific book reviewer who has worked in publishing, has a nuanced response to Griffin. Here is a taste from his response, including some additional figures:

What’s more, Kristen McLean, BookScan’s lead industry analyst, crunched the numbers herself and shared her findings in the comments on Michel’s post. She found less than 15 percent—not half—sold fewer than twelve copies. Pulling sales data for nearly 46,000 unique frontlist (new) titles from the Big Five publishing companies (PRH, S&S, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Macmillan), along with several others (Scholastic, Disney, Abrams, Sourcebooks, and Wiley), McLean looked at the last year’s worth of sales. Her findings:

• 0.4% or 163 books sold 100,000 copies or more
• 0.7% or 320 books sold between 50,000–99,999 copies
• 2.2% or 1,015 books sold between 20,000–49,999 copies
• 3.4% or 1,572 books sold between 10,000–19,999 copies
• 5.5% or 2,518 books sold between 5,000–9,999 copies
• 21.6% or 9,863 books sold between 1,000–4,999 copies
• 51.4% or 23,419 sold between 12–999 copies
• 14.7% or 6,701 books sold under 12 copies

Those are sobering figures, but hardly dire news—especially when you recall that the numbers represent only frontlist titles over a twelve-month period, not the total number that books sell over their lives. Those numbers are significant. Backlist sales account for about 70 percent of publisher revenues, according to McLean.

So, my own takeaways from all of the above:

1. Self-publishing: this is a really bad idea for many reasons (ahem, quality!), but self-publishing usually also means very low sales. When Griffin talks about outrageously low sales for some books, this describes largely self-published titles. Unless you’re Bronze Age Pervert, whose self-published book, which came out in 2018, outsold every other work of Greek history for the past decade or so. (No, real ancient historians and classicists aren’t salty about this. Why do you ask?)

2. Academic publishing vs. popular: I haven’t seen this addressed sufficiently perhaps because the focus in the analyses has been on the Big Five. But keep in mind that many of the numbers that are being bandied about are for ALL books sold, not just the Big Five publishers. This includes self-published books, but it also includes some very niche academic books.

Did you know some academic books even from the very top university publishers barely crack 100 copies sold? The reason academic publishing (university presses) have traditionally been designated as non-profits is precisely because they are designed to publish cutting-edge scholarship that promotes knowledge in the discipline, but may not be of interest for the vast majority of the population. They really are non-profits, publishing a lot of titles at a loss—to the press, at least.

3. Best-sellers are not the only books worth writing and reading: My own experience so far with Christian publishers confirms that a book really doesn’t have to sell 100,000+ copies to reach its intended audience and promote good conversations. We all know this at some level, and it is useful to be reminded of this truth. There is a happy (and, for the publishers and authors, productive!) medium between bestsellers and books that don’t sell at all.

4. Frontlist vs backlist: Last but not least, since frontlist vs backlist sales are mentioned, keep in mind that the definition of “backlist” is a book that has been on the market for at least one year. But one year isn’t very long. Books that, for instance, become adopted for class use, usually become adopted after they’ve become “backlist,” simply because of time concerns for professors who must read a book before adopting it for a class. That is one example of how such books can quietly keep selling year after year. And sometimes a particular book speaks to a moment in a way that it didn’t when it was initially published. This is all good news for authors.

I suppose we all have a little bit of Thucydides in us–with a desire to write something that is “a possession for all time.”