Notebook: Readers and Writers Finding Each Other

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

Sales of print books fell by 2.6 percent in 2023, less than expected. Publishers have been anticipating that the pandemic swell in book sales, which peaked in 2021, would subside, and the sale of books is still hovering 10 percent above 2019 levels, outperforming general merchandise. Did being stuck at home remind everyone how much they love to read? Are some changes in technology actually benefitting books? Is a younger generation of readers stepping in to redress generational declines in reading? (See my out-of-the-box theory that student-directing reading instruction and classroom libraries have been good for reading.) One set of indicators: adult hardcover nonfiction, which only five years ago was the salvation of the industry, far outpacing what was then seen as a moribund market for fiction, fell 3.1 percent in 2023, after falling 10.3 percent in 2022, buoyed last year by Prince Harry and Britney Spears. What really kept 2023 going for books were boom times for fiction, led by romance and “romantasy” authors who got their start in self-publishing and made their mark on TikTok. Publishing observer Jane Friedman wrote a year ago that “the romance market was the leading growth category and drove overall gains in the adult fiction market” and “recently, romance surpassed the more general, catch-all category of ‘literature and fiction’ to become the highest-selling category in the Kindle store,” where, under the auspices of Amazon, most self-publishing goes on. Romance was once a rare sight in a bookstore; five hundred bookstores participated in 2023’s “Bookstore Romance Day” last August, and at least fifteen new romance-only bookstores have opened in the last five years in the US.

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This represents a triumphant homecoming for authors who just a few years ago fled an industry that had lost interest in them, pursuing the presumed other tastes of the more lucrative hardcover reader. As I wrote back in 2022, when Jeff Bezos invented the Kindle and opened it up as a publishing and distribution platform for anyone who cared to use it, he was perhaps unknowingly providing a refuge for a whole class of writers: those who once sated the appetites of the avid readers who bought so called “mass market” paperbacks, often in the “genres” of romance, science fiction, and mystery, by the dozens off racks in drugstores and bus stations, distributed through magazine jobbers. Agent Howard Yoon noted in a panel on the aftermath of the Penguin Random House/Simon & Schuster merger trial that “prestige publishing,” the most “glamorous and visible” part of the action, that seems to get a disproportionate share of conglomerated publishing resources and attention, is not “the backbone of the business.” Publishing observer Mark Williams wrote in 2022 “self-publishing is eating into print market share no matter how many times (then Penguin Random House CEO) Markus Dohle tells us otherwise.” Publishers Weekly: “Mass market paperback all but disappeared last year, with sales falling 15.6 percent and accounting for just 3.4 percent of all units sold.” Publishing has organized itself around an expensive product—a socially costly, if necessary (?) strategy. As publishing market analyst Andrew Rhomberg has written, “In many ways hardbacks are becoming mass-market luxury objects for the bibliophile.”

Buz and Janet Teacher’s new omnibus of mini publishing memoirs, Among Friends: An Illustrated Oral History of American Book Publishing and Bookselling in the Twentieth Century (its name aptly reflects the smallish social circle involved), shows at many layers how the convergence of rising literacy in the postwar years and newly cheap publishing methods created an efflorescence in books and reading that many now look back on with nostalgia. Before corporate consolidation began in the eighties, American publishing was a wonderfully rickety Rube Goldberg device in which unlikely means (frying an egg, setting off an alarm clock) produced many kinds of books for many kinds of readers. Quite a few of the outfits represented in Among Friends started up just for the hell of it, to put out a book or two about building geodesic domes (the influence of The Whole Earth Catalog is pervasive), and wound up thriving, if eccentric enterprises. People everywhere were reading, the established publisher-printer-distributor distribution channel was the sole way to serve the audience, and would-be publishers needed only to step into the boisterous currents and be born along.

Feeding the demand unleashed among relatively affluent, sometimes experience-starved yet sexually liberated American women in the seventies with readily available mass-market romantic fiction mobilized as writers many of their fellow homebound women, looking both for diversion and some income of their own. Yet even in the heyday of mass market, romance (and other genre) authors faced constraining prejudices within traditional publishing: a pioneering Black romance editor was told there was no audience for Black characters, steamy plots were carefully lidded, and nothing but heterosexual love between two people born to their expressed genders was countenanced. When Amazon threw open the doors to authors ready to meet the (in retrospect) obviously much more diverse erotic appetites of the American reader, a thousand flowers bloomed. With social media at their command, and a laser-like appreciation of their individual readers, self-published romance authors adeptly cultivated new followings and created new vehicles to market a genre that by its nature lent itself to a targeted pitch: hockey romance has its own enthusiasts, as does spicy paranormal, and so on. TikTok, whose irresistible algorithm and intimate phone video format proved exquisitely sensitive to the inherently repeatable emotional appeals of the genre, proved its dream vehicle. Self-published (or nearly so), TikTok-friendly authors Colleen Hoover and Rebecca Yarros and Sarah Maas sold millions of books in 2023 and have recently been triumphantly welcomed back into the fold of traditional publishing, with lucrative mainstream deals giving them unprecedented control over how they are published. In spite, or because of these successes, self-published authors courted by mainstream presses tend to keep both careers going, availing themselves of the better returns and personalized process of self-publishing as well as the global reach of the conglomerates.

Jane Friedman had a great feature in her newsletter last week with Dominique Raccah, founder and CEO of Sourcebooks (independent but 53 percent owned by Penguin Random House) about their imprint Bloom Books, which was created to lure in Fifty Shades of Gray author E. L. James in 2021. Dominique Raccah, who got her own start as a self-published author, described how Bloom, under E. L. James’s tutelage, learned to build publishing plans around authors’ own ideas and strategies. It had an announced focus on “entrepreneurial women authors,” allowing them “to take greater control in the creation, development, and marketing of their books.” As science-fiction self-publishing phenomenon Brandon Sanderson has said, “I tried for years to get New York publishers to do things differently, and they just weren’t willing to. So I’m doing it my way, and if it works, I’ll show them it works.” In 2022 Brandon Sanderson made $42 million in a Kickstarter campaign selling four new books directly to his readers.

“The individual book buyer is now the most important customer by far,” book market analyst Peter Hildick-Smith told Jane Friedman, as 70 percent of books are sold directly to consumers through online channels. No publisher can fully support the plethora of books available to the online buyer, and authors are increasingly using tools like Shopify and Kickstarter to sell books directly to readers. Big Five publisher Hachette in January launched a new direct-to-consumer website; Simon and Schuster appointed a new board with expertise in tech, multimedia, and consumer behavior.  “The fandom that romance authors are creating is unparalleled in the industry,” says Dominique Raccah. Publisher Jackie Dinas told Publishers Weekly, “Publishers are no longer the tastemakers or driving trends in romance. It’s coming entirely from the consumers.” Publishers Weekly reported in January that Sourcebooks, which has absorbed a lot of its imprint Bloom’s methods, dominated the 2023 paperback bestseller list, accounting for 20.5 percent of all paperback trade bestseller slots, making it one of the fastest growing imprints ever, according to Jane Friedman.

In a fascinating new look at the history of the genre, Love in the Time of Self-Publishing, to be published in June, Christine Larson argues that romance’s early solo producers, initially working in isolation but eventually banding together in the absence of support from the publishing industry, drew on historically female economies of mutual aid and mentorship to create a robust model for collective enterprise and direct engagement with readers, even before digitization. This infrastructure became the foundation of the romance boom.

There’s a parallel here between what’s going on in legacy publishing and what’s going on in legacy journalism. In both cases, institutions that had long benefited from a monopoly on distribution failed to adapt to new technology and tech companies stepped into the breach, presenting authors (“creators”) with a choice between scrambling for limited opportunities within the diminished behemoths of the past or going it alone, with a slice going to tech rather than legacy media. The tech companies’ interest in being fed written work (“content”) coalesced with writers’ (and readers’) need for written work to be distributed in an increasingly digital reading environment. The tech companies benefit from absorbing the creators’ voluntarily submitted content without having much in the way of obligation to support its creation, to the point of arguing that “fair use” in written works entitles the “large language” artificial AI models they are developing to reprocesses written work available to their platforms as their own material.

Going it alone with one or another of these new tools produces fantastic outcomes for some writers, passive benefits for tech, and a question of how broadly these mechanisms can serve the whole reading ecology. The grail in post-social-media journalism is “cultivating your own audience,” as journalists do when they build a roster of paying newsletter readers—and do not when someone clicks past a free, ad-supported article they’ve written because of a viral social media post. Cultivating an audience is exactly what romance writers have been doing since the seventies: newsletters, for instance, have been going out to romance readers for decades. Bloom speaks of being in the business of finding audiences rather than selling units. And certainly one thing we all need to be thinking about is growing the audience for reading, rather than just fighting over it. (“We’re a ‘books change lives’ organization. Our job is to put books in the hands of readers. It’s about more readers, not more books,” says Dominique Raccah.)

How much can the model that has enriched Colleen Hoover and Sourcebooks be extended to other forms of writing? Christine Larson argues that all authors, indeed the growing cohort of gig-workers throughout the economy, can benefit from cultivating solidarity within the ranks of worker/creators and with consumers. But writers of genre do have unique advantages. They write very fast and in great volume, and their readers read very fast and in great volume, allowing authors to build and satisfy their committed audiences at a prodigious rate. Investigative journalism, scholarship, literary work can take years and decades to make. Important work may not find its audience for a generation. You may not know the name of the journalist whose indefatigable labor has brought every few years a fact to the surface that changed our understanding of the world. Such work has historically required the attention of a forward-looking sponsor with resources to help bring it into being (on whether the universities too are relinquishing this role to tech’s deep pockets, see our post on the humanities).

In the publishing world portrayed in Among Friends, publishing houses—some run by intense bespectacled readers and some by hucksters enjoying the chase—built businesses that thrived, and used the proceeds to give a chance to something they valued. Bob Abrams for example, having taken over the successful coffee-table imprint Abbeville, founded by his father Harry Abrams, published monumental limited-edition reproductions of the Vatican Frescoes and Audobon’s Birds of America. Mass market romances were part of the whole ecology that brought us, as Dan Sinykin, author of a recent book on fiction and publishing, has described, Cormac McCarthy. As many witnesses have testified, the consolidation and corporatization of publishing, which a lot of the characters in Among Friends welcomed at the time as a boost to business or a welcome payoff, has meant that there is no room in the balance sheet for taking such chances.

But independent publishers also can no longer weight the rewards against the risks as they once did. Dan Sinykin said in an interview recently that independent publishing in America is “flourishing,” which it certainly is from a creative point of view, but does it work economically? This week one of the country’s most visible and determined small publishers, Cleveland’s Belt Publishing, was acquired by the publisher of regional books Arcadia in what looks like a very good deal, but Belt publisher Anne Trubek told Jane Friedman that she had to do it because the costs of distribution simply prevented her from making enough money as an independent, no matter how successful her books were. “I don’t think a press like ours is viable based on sales,” she said. Distribution in America, like publishing, is highly consolidated, overwhelmingly dominated by the giants Ingram for bookstores and Amazon for consumers. Cassie Mannes Murray described in this post the difficulties of working with Ingram for small publishers; razor-tongued agent Andrew Wylie in an interview had a salty description of how Amazon throttles book distribution—again a tech company siphoning off profits for itself in a culturally necessary business with punishing margins. As Dan Sinykin and Anne Trubek note, many small publishers function as nonprofits, dependent for their survival on courting sympathetic donors, a different task from engaging readers and expanding audiences.

I hope there are lessons for journalism, publishing, and other kinds of writing in the dazzling success of self-published authors in finding and growing readers. But I’d like to ask at the same time if there might be benefits worth recovering in the older model—of non-gargantuan publishing businesses that survived on serving varied audiences and knowing their craft—the publishers that, as Farrar, Straus did in my day, makes a boatload publishing a memoir by Sammy Davis, Jr., and spends some of that publishing Derek Walcott, or the newspaper that sells local investigative journalism with recipes and comics. The nearly-last-standing independent, W. W. Norton, has been sheltered this whole time by its durable line of high-quality textbooks. Such businesses are in closer touch with a wider range of readers, not siphoning them off based on disposable income and taste. A publishing industry that respects a broad range of readers as customers one might think would be better equipped to move ideas into a polarized world.

What such businesses need to thrive, as Belt’s example shows, are supportive policies and working conditions: competitive distribution and manufacturing (the US paper and printing industries have also contracted and consolidated and are becoming unaffordable); manageable commercial rents; support with employee benefits like health care and retirement. Part of Belt’s story, like other smaller houses that are setting the literary agenda these days, is that being housed in less-expensive Cleveland both helped the bottom line and fed the mission. Minneapolis-St. Paul is home to a blossoming ecosystem of independent publishers and bookstores, as now-retired Graywolf publisher Fiona McCrae told Canadian publisher Ken Whyte, because of “the largesse of the Minnesota State Arts Board.” (Dan Sinykin has more on this history.)

It seems writers could with profit band together and seek out and reward the readers who value them, and the romance world has much to teach on that score, not least the advantages of setting aside our long cultivated, lone-wolf competitive instincts for more cooperative practices. But not every author we need to read has the skills to helm a promotional shop. What the history of the romance boom teaches us is that the country has many people eager to contribute to a flourishing reading landscape, and it’s not hard for existing institutions to shut them out, even when including them would be to everyone’s gain.  

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Ann Kjellberg is the founder and editor of Book Post.

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