So, how did we get here? And why are we in this hand basket? Book publishing and selling wise?
Ah, young one, you’ve asked the right question. Pull up a rock, as I limp up to explain once more.
It seems that I have become an Old One of Science Fiction, having jumped there directly from new, young, vibrant and wet between the ears, without stopping in the intervening stage of “experienced, at ease in my position, and knowledgeable.”
This is partly because by the time I came in the industry was even more messed up than it had always been, and partly because though I have my beginning in traditional publishing, I have been aware of indie from the beginning, and am now mid-transitioning to indie.
So, I have a view of both worlds and the things in between, the way few people do.
More importantly, because I was never a trad pub success or an utter failure — I.e. in my own inimitable style I managed to do what should have been impossible for someone who broke in in 2001 — and had a long career in the midlist that no longer existed. Which means I thought a lot about what was going on, why the midlist didn’t exist and I had to keep inventing it anew every two months, and why this wasn’t working great for publishers.
This is known in the industry — as I found when older writers started introducing me to newbies this way — as knowing where all the bodies are buried. And yeah, there is knowledge there which could have been parlayed into blackmail and a longer career working for people who resented me and disliked me. Somehow, I found that less than appealing, and supposing I get myself even semi-organized after the three years from hell following the ten years from heck, I shall parlay the fact I know how to write and can write fast into a career in indie instead. Mostly because it allows me to write whatever I want, and not chase someone else’s impressions of me.
Okay, this is going to be a long post. Sorry.
Today I was talking to some of the fans on discord about mid list versus high list, and what the difference is. Let’s start with: it’s not quality of the books. Even the editors/publishers will tell you that’s not it.
Don’t believe me? Go read the bestsellers. Other than Baen (for various reasons) most people in the top tier are…. oh, hum. (There are exceptions. There are always exceptions. I’m a fan of Jim Butcher and half a dozens others.) You read them, and they’re okay, but they’re not …. the stuff that sets the world on fire. Neither are most of the midlist, admittedly. Mostly because there’s no longer any mid list.
However, it used to be different. Back when there was a solid midlist, they had their own fans, and a large fandom sometimes. They made decent, if not spectacular money — decent defined as making a living — and they had enduring careers. Sometimes they — even by surprise — broke out of the midlist into the bestseller ranks, ten or twenty years down the road.
Arguably, Heinlein was midlist till Stranger, which hit the zeitgeist of the time, and caught fire. Publishers assumed Dune would be low list, which is why it was first published by a small, oddball publisher. But it caught fire.
So, what was catching fire, how did it work and how did it generate bestsellers?
Well, we’re not going to tell you every bestseller happened organically. I think we can all assume it didn’t. There would always be a book that would come in and hit the publisher’s imagined sweet spot, and have all the bells and whistles, and therefore get all the push. And if for once in ten times the publisher was right, it would also catch fire and go huge. I can’t off the top of my head think of an example, even if I’m sure I know of a 100. I just am not dragging one up. I mean, to an extent Stranger was one of those, getting all the push, and hitting it big. It just happened to a mid lister (until then) writer.
However, until the late eighties/mid nineties there was the possibility of a bestseller happening spontaneously, usually — though not always — out of a midlist book.
If a hundred bookstore managers — usually book nuts themselves — read the book and loved it, and started hand selling it, the readers would then, by word of mouth drive the book to bestsellerdom. The book would suddenly be everywhere and on everyone’s lips.
Now, this took three things: managers with the ability to stock the shelves; managers who were readers; time.
By the time I came in in the late nineties/early two thousands, none of those were in operation anymore.
What happened was, as seems to be a normal failure mode of the late 20th century, computers and a bright idea.
So a company — Borders — had a brilliant idea. They no longer, by this time, by and large hired book nerds. They hired “retail managers” because “someone who can sell can sell anything.” So, in possession of computers, Borders realized they could track books in lay down — on the shelves — and books that sold. And thereby order more “sure things.”
Here I should point out this might almost be a cautionary tale for the use of AI, because “the computer can do this easily” is a trap people fall into when they forget that the context in which the calculations are being done matters. IOW sure, cold equations are real, but the world isn’t all cold equations.
So, Borders started doing this thing called ordering to the net. Say they ordered 100 books and sold 50. They figured that was the author’s top reach (this was being tracked by author) and his next book they ordered fifty.
Now, track where the program was already stupid: Books aren’t the same. Because one author’s book sells like rotten fish, doesn’t mean the next won’t catch fire because it hits something in the zeitgeist, or is a break through work. Things that influence how a book sells are, for instance, cover and presentation, which can be drastically different book to book. How the book is shelved of if it is (my first book largely wasn’t, because no one had any idea where to shelve it. And when it was shelved, it was often wrong.)
This leaves aside the most important factor: the initial laydown. If you have a laydown of 100 you’re likely to sell at least fifty. If you have a laydown of 2 — which was average for midlist, btw, or new authors — you are likely to sell none, because they won’t be seen except for the true book-bugs who read ten books a day and are desperately seeking a book they haven’t read yet.
This “worked” when Borders was a single bookstore doing it. It allowed them to order more of the sure things, and ignore the flies under radar. Which is part of the reason Borders became a chain. And the other chains copied it.
Which means, in turn, they started influencing publishing.
What this order-to-the-net (of what you have sold before) did was put power of career life or death in the publishing house’s hands. If they wanted you to go big, they ordered a big print and lie down. This meant you would sell at least a “big enough amount” to have a career. (Notable exceptions, like the last Dan Brown book were rare.) If they lay down one or two books per store, which meant you were under the “Shrug, you can also take these books” you’d end up having a two/three book career. because you sold one book of the two if you were lucky, just by law of being/not being found.
After that, you had to either change names, or gracefully retire.
If you managed to buck the trend, you’d go five books or so — which is what I managed with the musketeers.
Publishing houses liked this, because it meant they got to pick winners and losers, and could choose not to work with anyone they didn’t like. And if someone made it to publication but offended them, they were easily got rid of.
Oh, and as the indie bookstores got eaten by the chains, there was less and less chance for a sudden come from behind bestseller. For one, because the managers rarely were readers anymore. However, just to increase corporate control they had a tri-state manager who determined what went on the shelves over three states. If you’re a book reader and are screaming…. yeah. I remember being flabbergasted at the idiocy, since for instance, Colorado Springs and Denver were not the same market, much less Colorado, Idaho and…. Kansas? I think.
EVERYTHING was now under control of the publishing houses, and they could make winner and losers.
Inexplicably, the sell-through rate fell. And fell and fell. Ahem “Unexpectedly.” As happens every time a central system dictates production. Because no one can be sure what sells or why.
By the time I came in the “death of the midlist” was on everyone’s lips because the new heads of the rapidly floundering publishing houses had no clue how to fix the mess except they looked at the list and decided the bestsellers were the only ones making money.
Were they? Well… Kind of. Except the bestsellers were also the ones COSTING money. Even now, the only people who get publicity are bestsellers who don’t need it. (As a friend put it, because then you can’t fail by publicizing them.) I worked for three publishing companies. I accidentally had a publicist as ONE — Prime Crime, which is why I went 5 books on the musketeers. She was an intern, and loved the books and took me as her special project. I’m fairly sure she got fired for it. — I didn’t even know the other houses HAD publicists. However, publicists, cover designers and event planers got charged to all books equally, which made the net of bestsellers seem gynormous, and everyone else seem like drains. Which accellerated the rate of hiring/firing authors from three books to… one.
That’s right: face with an industry in which they were sure they were doing all the right things and picking the right “winners” the people at the top of trad pub had no explanation for why printruns kept falling. or rather, they did. “People are ignorant.” “People don’t read anymore” “It’s the gaming/movies/etc.”
And somehow, they became convinced that writers were lottery tickets. They gave you one book. If you didn’t become a world-busting bestseller in one book, you were done.
This was despite whatever laydown they ASSIGNED you, etc, etc, etc.
And if you somehow managed to stay on, but you had 3 so so selling books? You were never going to be a bestseller. It was OBVIOUS you weren’t a winning lottery ticket. More than three and not a bestseller. Well, you were obviously trash. All very well to write schlock, but you were never going anywhere.
So, now trad pub finds itself with some aging bestsellers, no seed corn, and people deserting to indie.
Their best bet — and G-d they’re trying it — is to pick up lottery tickets from indie.
Sometimes this works: A house picks up a writer who is doing well in indie, gives him money, a free rein and all the support, and the author flourishes. We know one, all of us who read this blog.
Other times…. most of the time, they pick an indie writer tell him or her what to write — well, if they didn’t know better, why are they the publishers? — tightly control him/her, short him/her on cover, publicity and support, because after all they did all this indie, right?
And then they’re surprised when the lottery ticket is a dud.
To be fair, depending on the house, even the best editor/publisher/writer might have no chance. They’re dependent on a system that’s not only broken but unaware of why it’s broken. They’re faced with a competency crisis of such massive proportions that they no longer even know what competency is. At this point any writer signing on with trad pub is also buying a lottery ticket, and the odds of winning are… low? It can happen, but it has nothing to do with performance or quality. It’s mostly luck.
Note I’m not saying someone who succeeds does that by luck alone. Unless you’re a good writer, you won’t succeed. OTOH if you don’t have luck, you could be the second coming of Terry Pratchett and go nowhere.
Terry Pratchett is a good illustration of how quality has nothing to do with this. He was the World-bestriding genius of our field. He was almost instantly a bestseller in England. I don’t know the business conditions there. However in the US he sold in my niche: 5k to 10k for almost 15 years.
And then suddenly he was a bestseller, with 100K sales on the regular. What happened? Well, he changed his agent and publisher. (Aided by his one visit to a World Fantasy where editors and agents were shocked at his long signing line. A lot of us were by then ordering his books from England, is why.) This is how tightly controlled the market is, from the top down and the center out.
Which works about as well as it did for the Soviet Union.
…. And so… why explain once more?
I know a lot of indies read this blog. I know we’re caught in this weird place where no one knows how to publicize/how to get word of mouth going/ and all of you who’ve never had 6 books out and not one book on a bookstore selves in a given year (yes, it happened. To me.) will think “Oh, I’ll be on the bookshelves. Think how much it will widen the market.”
Go ahead. Buy that lottery ticket. We do, sometimes — literal tickets — for the chance to dream, even though we know the chances are low of winning (to almost non-existent.)
But when you do that: buy sensibly.
- Don’t spend more than you can afford. i.e. give them a book you can stand to abandon. Not part of a standing series, not even far-flung. Trad is weird about giving rights back, and you might never ever get them back. Yes, contract, but often they won’t negotiate on that.
- Make sure you’re not giving away things you need. I swear to you contracts have gotten more and more predatory every years. Don’t sign you r name away if you have a following. Don’t sign away your setting. Your characters. Your ability to ever write in the same world. Don’t. Do not.
- Be aware chances of winning are low. Don’t beat yourself up when it doesn’t win. And don’t keep throwing good money after bad. You had an indie career, go back to it. In fact, never abandon it. Do both.
If you’re going to sup with the devil, use a long spoon.
And if you’re going to sup with potentially good people caught in a devilish system, do the same. AND inspect the spoon for poison.
Because traditional publishing is going to hell in a hand basket, but you’re not tied to your seat. You can jump into the river of indie and swim away.
Mad Genius Club 
24 responses to “The Making Of The Handbasket – by Sarah A. Hoyt”
“You can jump into the river of indie and swim away.”
I suspect this is closer to how you’ll leave…..
Yes. Well, for me.
Then there are the Publishers who see a series that is selling well but take a “disliking” to the series and thus will drop it.
E C Tubb’s Dumarest series was doing good on DAW but the new owner (the founder’s daughter) disliked the series so decided to drop it.
Oh, they pulled a dirty trick on Tubb. The series was about the main Character’s search for Earth and obviously the series would have to end when Dumarest found Earth.
So in the final Dumarest book for DAW, the editors add a line that gave Dumarest the location of Earth.
Tubb managed to write a few new books in the series but not for DAW. 😦
As you know, I’m currently trying to do both. That is, get some trad pubbed work out there.
Part of the problem is that all of the trad pub people think that the indy people, especially the successful indy people, understand how thinks work in tradpub.
We do not.
It’s like comparing apples and a Boeing superstratofortress. These things are not in anyway alike when it comes to the business aspects. Or some of the other aspects as well. The turn around times, the lag times on sooo many things. Indy is a quick turn around with lots of market feedback. Tradpub moves at a snail’s pace.
The times when sales are big for Indy? Yeah, not so much for Trad. They’re on a different schedule. Finding out these things from 2nd and 3rd hand sources is not fun. Because no one at the publisher has realized that you are so wed to your own business model (especially after a decade) that someone needs to explain how it works on the other side of the aisle.
I have heard the excuse ‘well they/we don’t have the time’. Well, make the time. This is business. I’m a one man show and -I- make the time. I very much want to make for my publisher the kinds of money I’ve already made for myself – because I’m a workaholic and driven by success.
But when I’m sitting there spinning on the chair, yeah, I need some information. I need some feedback. I need to KNOW if this is ‘normal for the business’ or if I should just throw up my hands and move on to other pastures.
There are more than a few people I would love to drag over into Tradpub, because I know they can make a lot of money there for both themselves and the publisher. But again, you can’t manage us like you manage the people who came up via the traditional routes. Because the road we took is just so radically different.
See, you and I need to talk. I’m still learning indie.
And yep.
Feel free to send me any questions you’ve got. I’ll do my best to share with you everything I’ve learned.
Offer her a guest column if you like. . . .
I wouldn’t mind it, from someone who’s been there.
A lot of the other authors in my on-line support group in the late Oughts were refugees from the NY–based Literary Industrial Complex and they had some tales to tell. One of the members was married to a pretty-well-respected author of Chinese descent, and he told us how she was all tied up in knots over the terms of her latest contract – it verged on the abusive, to hear him tell it. There were a lot of excellent regional novels being written by most of the members, and all of us had pretty much given up on getting the attention of the terribly insular NY establishment.
As regards getting an agent, a look-in and a generous contract from the Literary Industrial Complex if you had sold umpty-thousand copies of your own indy-pubbed book … as one of us pointed out – if you had gotten that much in sales of your book all on your own … what on earth did you need them for?
Our local Borders store was great for supporting local authors – evidently, their management were readers. They even went as far as to schedule a Christmas event featuring an extravaganza of all local authors. Unfortunately, Borders went bust before I could get in on that. As for Barnes and Noble? Forget about it. I couldn’t even get the time of day from them, as an indy – or through the local newspaper’s cultural arts page.
Last I looked, the local paper had shrunk to the size of a thin tabloid. Gee, wonder why?
Craigslist killed newspapers. They made most of their money on the basis of selling ads, and that’s what paid for those offices. When Craigslist could do the same thing, but cheaper and quicker and easier…why put a classifed ad in the paper?
The moment they didn’t have the ad money…they started to die.
Um…. not really. They were dying before. It was the big companies not the classifieds that made money.
They started to die when we hit the blogs.
And blogs killed them because it made it obviously how very little they were doing.
It’s one thing to go, “oh, a lot of the newspaper is just an AP or Reuters feed.”
It’s another to have a blogger show it’s identical stories across the country, and show where a typo in one spawns a firestorm of stupid stories that would never happen with even a tiny hint of reporting.
Why pay for work they don’t even do?
They were all taking canned posts from AP, not much local/different perspective. And that killed themw hen competition arrived.
We are very, very lucky that the regional B&N was ignored by Higher Ups. This allowed the manager some wiggle room, and he encouraged local author groups, game nights, and had a decent section for Local History (TX and NM books) and westerns. The buy-out left things alone, aside from getting rid of the fluffy junk that was cluttering up the front of the store (blankets, slippers, that sort of fluffy.)
Alas, they are still tied to the national pushes, and the sci-fi/fantasy section is 95% trad-pub, but it could be worse. I’ve seen worse at other B&N stores.
[…] competency plus inherited factors breaking ability to function in the field. I already did that at Mad Genius Club this morning, and am not unpacking the whole thing […]
There are few theories so unfeasible that some business major will not try to implement them anyway, frequently turning a profitable business into smoking rubble. Some of them even have the talent to change the whole direction of a business and promptly jump ship for another doomed business before the disaster starts to show, because they cranked up short-term profits at the expense of long-term investment. Then when the previous business runs into the ditch and explodes, they get to make sympathetic noises and claim they did not continue to use the clever scheme which he is using in this current business, because if they had, it would have grown instead of crashing. A few dozen of these idiots can destroy an entire country… hm… That would make a good theme for a book, I suppose.
Ah, Borders. You know, the chain that rather spectacularly imploded after 15-20 years of increasingly trying to run a bookstore like anything BUT a bookstore. Like a grocery store, for example, and I’m not kidding on the comparison.
I worked there for a few years in the early aughts. That handselling thing? Our GM was genius at that. He liked one author’s book so much that he got free copies for any employee that wanted one, and caused such an anomalous spike in sales that the author himself came through and had a pre-opening brunch with us on his next book tour. (Which is how I discovered that Christopher Moore wanted to be a horror writer, but pivoted to comedy when his beta readers kept laughing hysterically at his descriptions of blood and gore.)
Our GM scheduled his own author events. Our GM had me draw custom characters for non-book product that also drove sales. Our GM listened when an employee wanted to have a monthly game night, which increased the sales of our gaming and fantasy sections.
And shortly before I moved, certain dictates came down from Corporate. No more custom signs. No more scheduling our own author events. No more ordering books that our GM knew would sell well.
I heard he left a year or two later, hamstrung by the things that made the job no longer effective. And went to work for the city’s Chamber of Commerce, where he could still make a difference. He got out before Push Books (“we’re going to tell everyone what to hand-sell”) and several of the other outright idiocies.
It’s a real pity. I was in early enough to see what Borders had been, but late enough to see the decline.
And since they went bankrupt, the closest thing my city of 170,000 has seen to a bookstore is a mini-mall storefront with a decided POV. I have to go to visit my in-laws in order to hit up a bookstore—and TBH, the thrift store up there is already better than most of the used stores within 50 miles!
I worked at an independent bookstore that had just been taken over by a corporation in the 90’s. The job application included questions about books and characters from various genres as well as listing the last 3 books you had read and why you did or did not like them.
As a Bookseller I could go to the buyers and say “I like this author, can we get some of his earlier stuff on the shelf?” and they’d put an order in. (one example was earlier books in the Hammers Slammers series when the latest came out).
The atmosphere changed slowly (we had a reputation of subverting the Corporate types they sent up to manage the store), but by the 2000’s I gave up even my part time IT support as my favorite manager quit, and the atmosphere changed rapidly to a deep discount bargain bin. And e-books were becoming a thing so I didn’t depend on the employee discount as much.
Our local “indie” bookstores are trying to be Borders/B&N writ small. Suggest you want something that isn’t popular with the Manhattan publishing crowd and they look at you very funny.
(And this is from someone who loved Borders back in the day when it was really the only way you could get manga. Or sci-fi.)
But it’s all wallpaper paste books. Stories told-and told badly-in ways that better authors did in worse books. (John Scalzi’s career seems to be made up of these kinds of stories.)
It’s frustrating. I want more physical copies, but I can’t get them.
If I had won the lottery recently, I would be figuring out how to establish a mid-list publishing house where THAT is what we do. Mid-list books. Find indies and support them with the things they’re not good at-the marketing, the cover creation, the editing, and the accounting-and get the pressure off them so they’ll write more and write often.
Stay out of Manhattan (and New York in general).
Publish by alternate channels.
Maybe, just maybe, make bank.
And I’ve seen the destruction of industries by the hiring of people that were “product managers” in one way or another. Video games is a big one-they didn’t hire people who liked games, they hired people who were good at selling large amounts of bulk products (like packaged food and such). And the industry changed all around them…
(Including the love of microtransactions, the AAA sandbox games, and the mobile game dopamine cyclers that make all the money, because one or two games were extremely successful.)
Publishers figured out how to make losers and thought that let them make winners.
Instead, they just shrank the pie until there wasn’t one.
The zero sum fallacy writ in writing.
Yep.
Someone I know developed an idea for a children’s series of books. She writes about religion in each 15 degree slice of the globe so ultimately there will/would have been 24 books. After she published 11 of these books herself, and had serious ministers of the gospel helping her, a book corporation of some sort signed some sort of contract with her. Although she handed them the manuscript for her next book, and has since given them two more completed manuscripts, there have been no new books in the last year. She herself was publishing two a year. Also, to add insult to injury, the books are available on Amazon for a lot more than she was charging. She just couldn’t believe that she was better off without a “publisher”.
Add in the fact that publishers never respect even their bestsellers, from the 1980s onward.
Dean Koontz left Putnam after being told by his editor or publisher, after his sixth or seventh bestseller in a row, that he wasn’t “really” a bestseller, and it was a fluke every time it happened.
Stephen King sold more books than all the rest of the authors at Viking Press put together, but the executives held him in disdain and mocked him behind his back. Until he found out and took his books and money with him.
So even if you are single-handedly keeping the publisher afloat, it’s not like they’re going to respect you as an author or as a person.