Notebook: Books Are Dead! Long Live Books!

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

A piece made the rounds week or so ago about the incipient end of traditional publishing and naturally we seized on it with relish! End times, don’t we know it! The grain of sand at the heart of the pearl was the perennial observation that most of the books for sale do not make much money and the publishing industry is floated by the biggest sellers. The red-meat headline—“No One Buys Books”—seems belied by the obtrusive fact of those very bestsellers: the title might rather have been, No one will buy your book.

A happy outcome of this latest salvo was a set of thoughtful ripostes that in the aggregate make a useful primer on contemporary book economics: Lincoln Michel (who wrote for us about Caleb Crain), Freddie deBoer, and Jane Friedman, among I’m sure many others. Readers, we were roiled. I’ll leave the fine points to them but I’d like to back up a little bit more and ask the question “No One Buys Books” author Elle Griffin proposes in a more general way: Is the system working?

As Lincoln Michel, Freddie deBoer, and Jane Friedman neatly show, it is working in the sense that book sales are holding steady in a moment when digitization has wreaked havoc on other cultural and media industries, and, as Freddie deBoer spells out, it is still possible to write and disseminate and even earn something from a traditionally published book of significant ambition and cultural heft without being a pop star. But is our book business set up as it needs to be to make the most good ideas available to the most people?

Since the collapse of general-interest local journalism and so-called linear television, “midlist” books—which I’ll use as shorthand for books by people you may not already have heard of—rely on independent bookselling for people to learn about them (with an exception that I’ll take up below). Independent bookselling operates on razor-thin margins, struggles to make rent in neighborhoods where people can afford books or to operate at all in neighborhoods where people have less disposable income, and relies on passionate, well educated people contributing time and often herculean effort for well below living wage. (Even corporate publishing relies heavily on under-compensated, highly committed workers.) Smaller publishers, who are often applauded in these accounts for taking up the challenging books left behind by the increasingly bestseller-focused Big Five, are not able to break even making these books available to these bookstores because of the high cost of distribution. Many have become nonprofits in order to publish the books they value, obliging them to devote staff to development and to triangulate their purposes to the satisfaction of donors. Lacking the corporate reserves that the Big Five can bring to bear, small publishers can rarely offer author advances on a scale that can release a writer from other work to focus on a book. (The Big Five can draw on corporate resources to dangle a big advance, setting them up for a bigger payoff when a finished book scores, but they are also obliged to meet shareholder expectations, making a thing of the past the old work culture in which a few mega-bestsellers underwrote more literary or challenging authors—their fame likely decades off—who were a once a serious house’s cherished projects.) One never knows where the ball of returns is under all the cups of publishing: do people buying books spend enough money to support people writing them and the mechanisms for distributing them? Almost not quite, it seems.

Elle Griffin is urging authors to dump traditional publishing and embrace platforms like (her choice, and this one) Substack but also book self-publishing through Amazon and other platforms and reader-supported online writing services like Wattpad, Vella, and Radish. The enormous recent success of some once-self-published authors in the genres, particularly romance and “romantasy” (read more in Book Post here) has encouraged some corners of traditional publishing to embrace more author-centric models, giving the authors a bigger share of returns while off-loading responsibility for marketing and other decision-making onto them. Such approaches seem to admit that traditional publishing struggles to add value these days when it comes to reaching readers in a media-fractured world. (“We’ve lost the power to uniquely influence the consumer,” wrote former Penguin Random House CEO Madeline McIntosh in an announcement of her own new business. “In a world without mass media, there’s no longer a set formula for making a book successful.” One questions whether there ever was; perhaps she’s underselling the old playbook a bit.)

I am fascinated by these models and wonder if they offer a way for other forms of writing to reach readers. Certainly since Facebook and X/Twitter became less hospitable to journalism, and platforms that don’t link out like Instagram and TikTok have overtaken them in popularity, it has been the mantra in newsrooms to “cultivate a direct relationship with audiences.” The downside though is that such cultivation as practiced by self-published authors draws on the nectar of virality that we have learned to have good reason to suspect. The reliance of visual culture on servicing the emotions rather than argument has been good for books whose appeal is primarily to the heart—the meme of the weeping BookToker was widespread during BookTok’s pandemic ascendance. But the strong feelings that are BookTokers’ oxygen also fuel messages that stoke rage and tribal fear. As Neil Postman said of an earlier generation of image-based communication, it “empties itself of … information, so it can do its psychological work.”

Genre writers are able to build huge personal followings because they produce work at a rapid clip and can generate sweeteners—personal encounters with fans, releases of exclusive material, behind-the-scenes intel, bespoke swag—to satisfy their enthusiasts on a daily or weekly basis. Can a historian or social scientist or even novelist whose work takes years and who doesn’t have the bandwidth to keep a following engaged make use of such precedents? The science fiction writer John Scalzi was compelling a few years ago on the occasion of his colleague Brian Sanderson’s record-breaking series launch on Kickstarter describing how he was sticking with traditional publishing because cultivating his brand was not something he was prepared, or even equipped, to do.

The success that self-published authors of romance and romantasy have been able to leverage through the emotional intimacy of contemporary social media dovetails with the popularity these days of young adult (YA) fiction with not-so-young adults. The Guardian recently reported that 28 percent of the readers of young adult fiction in the UK are over the age of twenty-eight (coincidentally). They quoted a HarperCollins report finding “readers of all ages increasingly turning to YA as a source of comfort, nostalgia, and self-care.” It delights me that in this time when younger people are seen to suffer unprecedented levels of depression and anxiety that they find comfort in reading, and that Instagram and Tiktok (and before that YouTube) seem to be bringing people to reading who were not reading before. This is a good in itself and I don’t mean to challenge it. But I do wonder if the expansion of audience that has accompanied the explosive growth of self-published genre fiction and the durability of YA, drawing on the emotional pull and “community feeling” of social media (Katherine Webber Tsang, author of a successful YA fantasy series, told The Guardian that she thinks it’s important that her readers “have so many opportunities to connect with each other online, and to attend events where they can meet each other and also the authors”), has lessons for other kinds of writing or adjacency effects of bringing people into other sorts of reading. Slate recently had an alarming report about the decline of reading for pleasure at the crucial age of nine, and related declines in sales of “middle grade” books. They partly credited curricular shifts away from making time for self-directed reading (which we wrote about here) and political pressures on teachers to reduce classroom libraries (which we wrote about here). When we looked into school book fairs a few years ago we found many avowals from dedicated readers that exposure to really silly books at this age encouraged them to read. Joy, laughter, comfort, spontaneous affinity—these all have a large place in the life of reading and the arts and snobs minimize them at their (our) peril. But I wonder, as a separate question, how—or whether or when—these avenues to reading feed into the broad informedness that we need as a citizens as well as the expansive intellectual and spiritual horizons of that other kinds of reading, kinds perhaps less served by popularity- and emotion-based appeals, can provide.

One intermediary for so-called discovery on which the industry has increasingly grown to depend is prizes. At the small press level, publishers use prizes to weed through their mountains of submissions with limited staff. At the national level, the industry looks to prizes to draw attention to work of quality that can be overwhelmed by a distribution system that privileges popularity. I dislike prizes. I think constantly designating “the best” of something (or multiple bests) is a silly and meaningless way of identifying merit. Books are good in different ways; prizes are compromises by human juries operating under artificial constraints. Every year does not have exactly one best book. Prize-giving and list-making have become meritocratic substitutes for more delicate instruments of appraisal. This week saw the announcement of the Pulitzers, one of the most august of the prizes, funded by a bequest from publisher Joseph Pulitzer and administered by Columbia Journalism School, and illustrates some of the pitfalls.

The Pulitzers made some welcome ripples, for instance drawing attention to the opinion pieces in The Washington Post by imprisoned Russian intellectual Vladimir Kara-Murza, whose fate hangs by a thread (read Book Post’s Christian Caryl on his case). Nieman Labs founder Joshua Benton pointed out that in the last twenty years the disappearance of local news outlets from among the recipients has been modestly compensated with recognition of the work of small local “online native” outlets. A tiny online journal out of Santa Cruz, only four years old, won this year for their enterprising coverage of local floods. Four nonprofit outlets took awards (Lookout Santa Cruz is a public benefit corporation with a fiscal sponsor), and six of the finalists this year were nonprofits.

But in other ways the awards seemed to reinforce conventional opinion and established interests. Some critics pointed out that, whereas in 2022 the committee commended “the journalists of Ukraine” for “their courage, endurance, and commitment to truthful reporting during Vladimir Putin’s ruthless invasion,” this year the board recognized “journalists and media workers covering the war in Gaza” where “an extraordinary number of journalists have died” “under horrific conditions” (italics mine). Of the ninety-seven journalists who have been killed as of today covering the attack of October 7 and its aftermath, the most journalist casualties of any conflict since the Committee to Protect Journalists began collecting data, ninety-two were Palestinian, two were Israeli, and three were Lebanese. Because very limited access is allowed to non-residents, most reporting on the war is dependent on the work of local journalists. The commendation seems deliberate in blurring their identities and circumstances. (See our post of December 21 for threats to journalists and cultural institutions in the Gaza war. This week the Israeli government shut down and raided the offices of Qatari news network Al Jazeera. In other corridors of the writing establishment, whether the international writers’ advocacy group PEN America is undertaking to investigate these circumstances is at the heart of protests that have shut down their annual prize ceremony and World Voices Festival.)

Four days before the scheduled announcement of the prizes, the Board put out a statement “to recognize the tireless efforts of student journalists across our nation’s college campuses, who are covering protests and unrest in the face of great personal and academic risk,” acknowledging specifically “the extraordinary real-time reporting of student journalists at Columbia University, where the Pulitzer Prizes are administered, as the New York Police Department was called onto campus on Tuesday night.” (Read the account of these events by Columbia Daily Spectator student journalists in New York magazine two days later.) Then on May 7, as the selections were being announced, student journalists reported that they were being barred from the campus of the university administering the prize. The New York Times was awarded the Pulitzer for international reporting for its coverage of Gaza, specifically seven pieces published between October and December (pieces for consideration are submitted by the outlet), raising in some readers’ minds the question of whether all The Times’s coverage of the war rose to this standard and whether in a news environment in which only one or two outlets can have the resources to survive and finance and set the terms for international coverage such a distinction is meaningful. Perhaps we could recognize the prize as an honor for the writers themselves, nineteen of them, not named in the citation, out of many who have written about the war for the Times, rather than for the institution, without qualification. New York tabloid veteran Nolan Hicks lamented that “there used to be a beat reporting Pulitzer, and it should be brought back. Showing up day-in and day-out can drive as much change—and often more change—as a celebrated investigative series.” The National Magazine Awards, announced last month, also showed the benefits of either being The New York Times or having a stable external source of funding, with seven of the thirteen awards for writing going to either the Times or The Atlantic. (An aside: book worker alert, the Pulitzers included an award for illustrated series to Medar de la Cruz’s “The Diary of a Rikers Island Library Worker” in The New Yorker and for drama to the play Primary Trust, by Eboni Booth, which features a bookseller.)

I keep hearing, though, that only a few distinctions sell a book any more: not coverage in the New York Times Book Review, barely even cherished old gigs like an appearance on NPR’s Fresh Air or even Oprah, or a major prize like the National Book Award, England’s Booker, or a Pulitzer. Maybe a Nobel. At least for the moment Elle Griffin’s world, in which getting one’s books into readers’ hands is dependent on either being a traditionally published bestseller or a dedicated self-hawker, seems to leave much of the reading we need in the wilds: some of it gets published and distributed, but not as published and distributed perhaps as it could be to be widely visible to most Americans, and its visibility relies on near-volunteers. If one removes printed books from the equation, the fate of books becomes even more intimately tied to algorithmic distribution. Lots of authors whose works we need produce them in solitude and research and cannot envision participating in a public-facing way in maintaining reading audiences and helping them find their way.

I am less interested in the question of how easy it is for someone who wants to write a book to be published and promoted than what America is receiving in the way of reading and information. One can argue that too many books are published, certainly too many to be carefully promoted, and the firehose, as we often describe the internet, is inhibiting readers’ access to books that might make a difference in our spiritual and civic and intellectual life. (Postman again: “we have less to fear from government restraint than from [corporate] glut.”) I hope that the expansion of readers is bringing new people into reading and teaching publishers to encourage new people to read books. I wonder if traditional publishing embraced more of the authors who are now self publishing (once the authors of cheap mass-market paperbacks) this would (1) support the industry and (2) give publishing a broader understanding of the reading public and (3) make well-made inexpensive books more widely available.

The system does work in some senses: Publishing continues to survive and grow and diversify modestly; it does distribute significantly meaningful numbers of culturally and socially salient books; Americans have more access to books (online) and bookstores than ever; smaller publishers have an opportunity to publish more substantial books and to be a cultural force; those who want to publish their own books have rich opportunities to find an audience, modest or pretty big. It does not work in the sense that the system as a whole depresses books that are challenging or outside the norm; it places huge stressors on people not working squarely in the commercial stream; and it fails to make visible and accessible to many Americans a broad range of ideas. One can say as the bosses of old like Roger Straus and Alfred Knopf did that publishing is a business and books have to sell, but I think our publishing superstructure goes beyond this imperative in the extent to which it subordinates books with other than outsized sales potential. If we believe that what people read (and that they read at all) has something to do with the kind of nation we are, we need systems to maintain financially the work and infrastructure of writing and distributing what the culture produces at the highest level. (Not even to mention access to higher education, protection for the humanities, so many aspects of maintaining a civilization.) Otherwise our fund of ideas remains reliant on technologies that are not designed to nurture the complex or the challenging, and seem increasingly engineeered to absorb and coopt human thought for their own encoded commercial ends.

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Ann Kjellberg is the founder and editor of Book Post.

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Rachel Cohen, whose post “A Chance Meeting: Sarah Orne Jewett” we published a few weeks ago, is holding a series of online seminars on the theme of literary chance meetings, talking with writers about books with which they have a personal connection, including Colm Tóibín on Henry James, Brenda Wineapple on Walt Whitman, Merve Emre on Willa Cather, Saidiya Hartman on W.E.B. Du Bois, Daphne A. Brooks on Zora Neale Hurston, and Langdon Hammer on Elizabeth Bishop. Sponsored by the Author’s Guild, beginning Wednesday, May 22. Register here.

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Image: William Verplanck Birney, The Reader (1912)