[Link] After a Splashy Book Deal, I Got Dropped By My Publisher, But I Kept On Writing

Why stubbornness is the most fundamental skill an author can have

by Rob Hart

This is the thing I’m probably not supposed to write. But I tried to write it six different ways without telling the truth, and I couldn’t do it, so here goes:

My career has not been the success people think it is.

My first book came out from a small press in 2015. The advance was just enough for a fancy steak dinner after taxes. I wrote four more books in that series, and while I was getting some solid acclaim in the crime fiction community, I wasn’t anywhere close to quitting my day job.

And that was fine. I was doing the thing I loved.

Then I wrote a book called The Warehouse, which was pre-empted by a Big Five publisher for a ridiculous amount of money. I thought the book was unpublishable because it was essentially a fuck-you to Amazon. Then I thought it would never appeal to foreign markets, but we sold it in twenty languages. It generated enough heat to be optioned for film by an A-list director.

All told I made enough money off that book to become a full-time writer.

And I thought: This is it, I made it through the door; the rest of my career is going to be sunshine and smooth sailing.

It was not.

Read the full article: https://opensecretsmag.substack.com/p/rob-hart-writing-career-publishing-struggles

[Link] No one buys books

Everything we learned about the publishing industry from Penguin vs. DOJ.

By Elle Griffen

In 2022, Penguin Random House wanted to buy Simon & Schuster. The two publishing houses made up 37 percent and 11 percent of the market share, according to the filing, and combined they would have condensed the Big Five publishing houses into the Big Four. But the government intervened and brought an antitrust case against Penguin to determine whether that would create a monopoly. 

The judge ultimately ruled that the merger would create a monopoly and blocked the $2.2 billion purchase. But during the trial, the head of every major publishing house and literary agency got up on the stand to speak about the publishing industry and give numbers, giving us an eye-opening account of the industry from the inside. 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).

But let’s dig into everything they said in detail.

Read the full article: https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books

For a response to this article, check out this link: https://countercraft.substack.com/p/yes-people-do-buy-books

[Link] The Inevitable Direct Market Implosion

by Augie De Blieck Jr.

The Winds of Change

We’re in the middle of the retail apocalypse.  Or, perhaps worse, we’re at its beginning.  You all know the list of the big ones. It includes J.C. Penney, Sears, Toys R Us, Macys, Sports Authority, Radio Shack, Borders.

Retail debt is piling up and going unpaid.  Fewer people are going out to stores. Amazon is eating everyone’s lunch on-line, while Walmart squashes the brick-and-mortars.

And even Walmart is closing stores.

Change happens.  Nostalgia never wins.  The cold, hard reality of business always wins, and that’s prompted by what the consumers wants.  If not enough of them are spending enough money, the business model fails.

Change the model or give up the business.

The entertainment industry is filled with well-known examples of this. These are lessons other industries learned the hard way.

You don’t need me to run them all down, but look at the worlds of books, television, movies, and music.  Not one of those hasn’t had its entire business model upended in the last twenty years. They’ve all changed to provide easy access at any time to a larger catalog of titles at a more reasonable price.

Easy access. Instant access. Vast catalog. Reasonable price.

I’m sorry, but that’s not the Direct Market.

The Inevitable Death of the Direct Market

Business models change.  Businesses change.  It’s inevitable.

Comic books started as a magazine business distributed on newsstands until that distribution model failed to support it.  Then, it moved to the Direct Market, a smaller collection of hobby shops where the books had a lower profile but a built-in market willing to keep it going.

Over the course of the last 30 or 40 years, we’ve seen that built-in audience shrink in size drastically.

Is the business model for comics about to change again?

In the internet age, everything speeds up.  It’s difficult to keep up with the changes, but if you don’t, you will surely die.

Industries may survive, but often at the cost of large chunks of infrastructure.  You can still buy a movie or an album or a book, but the way you get it today — and the way you WANT to get it today — is vastly different from what it was 10 or 20 years ago.

What makes you think the comic book industry is immune to this?  Why does the Direct Market deserve to live?

It’s inevitable.  It won’t be this year.   It might take another five or ten years. But why do we all pretend otherwise?

The Direct Market as it exists today is doomed.  Just look around.

Read the full article: https://www.pipelinecomics.com/the-inevitable-direct-market-implosion/