Penguin Random House and Simon and Schuster are trying to merge. The government is blocking it due to concerns of the new enormous publisher monopolizing the marketplace. We’ve received several questions about the particulars of the testimony, but the ones about this quote stand out:
Is this a lie? Yes and no. Yes, a publisher can make most books into best sellers. What they can’t do is make a book profitable. Publicity costs money. However, money is very loud, and publishers certainly will try to use it to make some books profitable. This doesn’t always turn out well for the author.
Suppose a publisher purchases a book from a debut author and drops an massive chunk of money as an advance. Let’s say $1,000,000. This signals that they expect this book to be a major bestseller. The audio companies see this and rush in with their own offers. The foreign rights agents follow. German, Taiwanese, Spanish, French, Korean rights are sold. It’s a feeding frenzy. A film company jumps in and buys the rights on an off chance that the book will blow up and become a valuable commodity. ARCs, advance reader copies, are sent in the thousands to every reviewer. People talk about receiving them. They are excited. Everywhere you turn online, you see the book mentioned. It is in Waiting on Wednesday lists and Must Have lists and Buy This or Miss Out Forever lists. A controversy occurs because someone found something problematic, and the Book Tok community splits into two camps: pro-book and anti-book. This only ratchets up the book’s visibility.
Then the book comes out finally, and it’s meh. It still charts on the bestseller lists simply because enough people heard about it to buy it, but it doesn’t really make that much money in sales, certainly not enough to recoup the publisher costs. However, the publisher also received audio and foreign rights payouts. They didn’t just break even, they made a slight profit. So the publisher is fine. The author? Not so much. The author is now a failure because their sales are nowhere near to earning out their advance. Even though they are sitting on a pile of money, that pile will not last and nobody wants to buy the next book because the sales show they are a risky investment.
I have seen this happen and more than once. So they can make you an “artificial” bestseller. The question is, do you want to be?
The most profitable books to the publisher are the ones that are by unknown authors with small or average advances that unexpectedly explode. Twilight. Throne of Glass. In film terms, the best book is like the first Paranormal Activity movie. It cost $15,000 to make and earned 193 million worldwide.
We are all writers and readers here. We know how things are said is important. Colleen Hoover “does not take up most of S&S’s resources.” Authors who take up their resources. Take up. Authors are clearly a burden.
S&S takes 75% of their authors’ earnings. 75% in ebooks! I know we are about capitalism, but there have to be some ethics in business. It is their contractual and ethical obligation to devote their resources to promoting the books they purchase and to not act like we are leeches because we want basic things that would help our books succeed. Quality editing. Quality copyediting. Covers that don’t make people cringe. Advertisement online. Promotional efforts across ebook retailers. Hell, most authors would settle for being treated like they matter and they are part of a team rather than getting petted on the head and told we are pretty every time we try to have some input.
If I have to hire my own publicist, as the following tweets suggest, then I might as well go solo and keep all the money I earn.
It is exactly like that. Exactly. Magic Bites and Magic Burns were sold for $5,000 each. This is not a typo. That is the correct number of zeros. How much promotion do you think they got? That’s right, very little.
Magic Burns actually lucked out. BN was doing one of those cardboard displays and they already had two titles in there. They needed a third, so our editor suggested Magic Burns and that was amazing. Thank you, Anne!
We didn’t see that level of promotion again for a bit, even though the book series accelerated in sales. They didn’t wake up to the fact we were selling until we hit #1 on NYT. I remember when “online promotion” in your marketing and publicity summary meant the publisher mentioned your book was coming out on Twitter.
We have never gotten a publisher-provided billboard at Times Square. Those of you who are writers, have you? I bet 99.99999% of you haven’t. Here is your paper plate.
To be fair, it is questionable how much a billboard at Times Square would contribute to sales, but it is the simplest way to illustrate the disparity without going into deep and confusing detail. Also, we can buy our own ads at Times Square now. It costs an arm and a leg, but it can be done.
Going Forward
And this brings me to present day, which is an interesting point in publishing. We have our print run numbers for Ruby Fever. For the first time ever, our mass market print run numbers for Ruby Fever are less than our very first print run of Magic Bites.
The preorders are up across ebooks and audio, so it’s not that there is no demand or there will be a drop in sales because the readers have cooled on the series. It’s not because Avon is not promoting it. They are and they are working very hard on it. No, the print run cut is driven by the shrinking retailer space. Drug stores no longer stock books. The shelf space at BN is contracting. Do you want to know how many books BN ordered? 3,312. That’s it.
Mass market was always a bargain hunter’s format. It was the cheapest way to read a book. I feel like I am beating a dead horse here, because I’ve been saying it for literally years, but ebooks have overtaken that particular format. Yes, there are some diehards who hold on to mass market, so the need for it will never disappear, but the days of 250,000 mass market print runs are behind most of us.
However, print sales are up. They are driven by trade paperback and hardcovers. Again, I have been saying it for years, because I’m a mother of two now adults who read everything they could get their hands on when they were teenagers. Ten years ago I knew they liked to have a large pretty printed book in their hands. Printed books make for the best social media photos and videos. Teenagers also like trading books. A lot of them become more passionate about reading as they grow older. We all know it’s addicting.
Going forward, we will be looking for a publishing partner willing to experiment in that space. We want pretty printed hardcovers or trade paperbacks and a publicity and marketing package that makes sense.
So –and I’m sorry if this is a common knowledge thing, but I don’t know–is there a particular format that is best for the author? I will buy anything you write, and I like paper books for feel, but e-books for convenience and space-saving…so, the deciding factor would be if either gives you, the author(s) a better return on your product. After all, I want to make it easy for y’all to continue to write 🙂
House Andrews spoke about this a few times, and they want the fans to get the books whichever way is most accessible. Only please do not pirate.
“ Bottom line: I am not going to prescribe to the readers how to buy our books. If you buy in paper, thank you. If you buy it in ebook, thank you. If you borrow it from the library, thank you. We want you to buy it in the most convenient and easiest way for you. Just don’t pirate them. That’s all we ask.”
This was a great read, and very enlightening about the struggles most traditionally published authors are up against. Major publishing companies appear to be fine expecting new authors to build a platform before publishing their first book. Then they must spend their own time and money publicizing their work instead of focusing on writing the next book when they get the mouse’s share of the profits.
So bizarre!
I do almost the opposite of most people these days. I love to buy physical copies of books. I just love the feel of them and if I want to reread a particular scene I feel like it’s so much easier to find in a physical copy.
But I do use kindle from time to time like at night when putting the kids to bed so I can read without a light on.
I don’t use a kindle on vacation- i just bring one paperback because w young kids I don’t get the time to read more than that and see the sights haha.
And when I don’t have space on shelves I go thru my collection from time to time and get rid of ones I won’t read again. Yes I wish I could keep everything I read but I just don’t need that. And I can’t and don’t want to reread everything I’ve read. Only the special ones get a reread anyway like everything House Andrews! 🙂
I wish I could buy a physical book easily. Unfortunately it is really hard in Sydney to find American authors. There are lots of regulations here to basically do with color vs colour and so we get British versions if we’re lucky. So a lot of publishing for us goes through the UK- and of course there’s a premium on that.
I also want to buy from an Australian book store
That’s why I buy e books. I can’t buy here. I do buy audio as well
But I’d love a physical book
Thanks for educating me on the knitty gritty. It is easy to lose sight of what authors face when I am ordering book after book. Readers do not think of this while we becoming immersed in character and story. Thank you for putting up with it.
Although there are several advantages to e readers for me vs dead tree books, the number one reason that trumps all the rest is adjustable font sizes. As I’ve gotten older my eyesight has been failing, and the ability to increase the font size has become invaluable to me. It has become very difficult (if not impossible) to read a dead tree book. I really don’t know what I’d do without my e reader.
Print books don’t make sense for me as a consumer. I quit buying hard copy books more than a decade ago, likewise magazines. They take up too much space. Ebooks are great. I know they don’t have same texture and feel as a print book but with extremely few exceptions (auto repair manual, etc.) I simply DON’T buy paper books any more. It really doesn’t matter whose they are because then at some point I have to get rid of it. My local library won’t even take them anymore.
Hi,
I find this discussion very interesting. I would love to get another Innkeeper hardcover from Subterranean Press, but they appear to be very busy. I know of the other subscription hardcover services, like Illumicrate or Fairyloot, but the subscription process seems complicated. I would just like to buy a good quality hardcover.
Is there any talk about rereleasing Katie Daniels books in Trade Paper back or Hardcover for the early ones? I like how they look on my shelf. Lol. But seriously I will rebuy a book I loved from ebook or mass market print to keep in ky meager library. I reread books I live. I am currently am buying certain books second hand because its better for the environment but would buy my favorites new if they were released.
Oh my godddd yes I want you to have pretty hardcovers too ????
I’m almost completely an e reader now. Introduced to it on a mom’s trip when I finished the one book I brought and had a huge layover. But since then I’ve become a huge fan, for random pockets of time, middle of the night nursing without glasses or lights, and now simply because the larger fonts are a boon. Instant gratification for the next installment is also amazing.
If I’m paying for an ebook I will pay up to the same as a paperback (not sure ebooks can or should be comparable in cost to a hardcover.)
I was an early adopter of ebooks because I have arthritis in my wrists, findgers and hands. But I also had a first gen iPad Pro (12.9”) and a very strong willingness to use reading apps!
Kindle and other EPUB, Mobi, AZW, Apple Books, IBA, etc., etc., were my salvation.
Right now, my biggest library is with A *you know who* and it’s somewhere around 4,000 books.
A good chunk of my first book purchases were by unknown indie authors whose books were selling for 99¢.
I discovered a lot of fantastic authors — and some who really needed a good editor. And I believe Ilona Andrews was one of those authors because I keep looking for new Ilona Andrews books on my “Upcoming” and “Soon to Publish” lists.
Now, at the last, here is my question:
If the merger is allowed to happen, how will it affect book pricing and availability?
Some indie authors have proved to be outstanding in their field. I don’t want to see them stifled by “Big Publishing” if at all possible.
Thank you for your blog space!
My first e-book reader was actually a PDA called a Zoomer which was released back in the 80’s. I picked my 2 Zoomers up in the early 90’s via Yahoo Auctions. The e-books I had was all hand scanned by me or others and most of them was older books that was hard if not impossible to find. Most of them was out of print Sci-Fi books from has early has the 40’s. We would carefully scan them then run the scans though an OCR program and saved them on a computer for reading. A lot of them was also very fragile due to their age, another reason why we scanned them since handling them to much was risky and forget carrying them around. The others was all of my RPG books. Made it a lot easier to carry them around to games. Also made it easier to search though them for specific information. I miss my Zoomers.
I remember when drug Stores and other Department stores and grocery stores had big sections devoted to books and magaizines. Back in the early 90’s WalMart devoted a large space to book racks full of printed books of all generes at the front of the store. Now there is one isle back by the electronics section with maybe a 10th of what they use to carry, and I feel I am being generious with that 10% rating. I don’t remember when the last time I even tried looking for a book rack in a drug store. I love my e-books but I really love printed books best. Kicking back in a chair next to the window, reading while it rain or snowed outside. Carring one with me to read while on break or eating lunch, or even while waiting for an appointment.
Billye
The Great Nation of Texas
This is a fascinating read! Thanks for letting us know. Good to hear a writer’s side of the story with everything that is going on!