Book Expo America, 2018!
What the State of the U.S. Book Business Can Tell Us About Our Bookish Future
Book Expo America, the annual gathering of people with vested interest in the U.S. book publishing business, convenes this week at New York’s Javits Center, which has all the ambience of an airport hangar crossed with a downtown Sheraton. But BEA is fun, in a loud, spasmodic way, and a great excuse to ponder one of our favorite topics at StreetLib, and that’s the future of books, or why seemingly rational people remain so devoted to the book, whatever form it takes.
This will be a statistic-heavy post, so prepare to absorb some numbers.
First, the U.S. book industry. Combined book and journal publishing, U.S. only, is a $28 billion a year business. Although the Brits publish more books per capita, we Americans have them beat size-wise—our book industry being some 4x larger — simply because there are 325.7 million of us to their 65.6 million. Each year in the U.S. approx. 305,000 new books are traditionally published, that is, not self-published.
Obviously this number of books keeps many people in jobs, though stats on the number of people employed in the U.S. book business are hard to come by. Some say 716,000 as of 2017. More reliable figures could probably be obtained by adding up the figures for distinct job categories within the book business; here the U.S. Dept. of Labor claims that there are 127,400 editing jobs in the U.S., though it’s unclear if they include magazine editing jobs in that total as well.
Another reason that good numbers are hard to come by is that many book publishing professionals have joined what is euphemistically called the “non-traditional workforce,” i.e. they may have been publishing house staffers in the past but now work for themselves. U.S. publishers increasingly rely on non-employees to get books ready for publication and to market them once they are.
This reflects a much broader trend in the U.S. labor market more generally. The gig economy is here and eating all the jobs. According to a 2016 study by Intuit/FreshBooks, the number of self-employed Americans will triple by 2020. (Granted, it should be footnoted here that Intuit sells expense-tracking software to small businesses and independent workers, so they stand to make a lot of money if they’re right on this front.) The next year Intuit doubled down on that projection, putting it in different terms: the percentage of U.S. workers that by 2020 would be doing gig work was 43%. Others say more than 50% of U.S. workers will have gone freelance by 2027.
It makes sense that many book publishing people would not be threatened by this shift and even embrace it; if you’re a book editor, you need a desk and silence more than you need water cooler conversation or to attend marketing meetings. But not all have left their publishing jobs voluntarily. Some were laid off. That, too, has been a major trend in the U.S. book business on which exact numbers are hard to come by. (On some mythical day when I’ve lots of free time, I’ll round up the Big Five’s annual reports going back 15 years, and bring a calculator.)
Does any of this matter — to readers, or to authors who have stopped caring about traditional publishing and intend to self-publish? I believe it does. Here’s why:
Just 10 years ago, say, if you worked at a traditional publishing house, you’d hear of the occasional freelance editor or book doctor being called in to supplement an in-house editor’s efforts, especially if for some reason the book’s publication date could not be delayed. Wealthier authors would hire freelance publicists to amplify the work of their in-house publicist, giving them two publicists, and boosting their chances of becoming even wealthier. Freelance copy editors would occasionally strut into the office, dropping off heavy stacks of 8.5" x 11" pages they had meticulously marked-up by hand, before taking the subway back to Brooklyn. But they were hired by the publishing house; you, the author, would in most cases not even know the name of the person copy-editing your manuscript.
In other words, there was limited work available for — or shall we say, accessible to — those outside the get-an-agent, get-a-book-deal system, and within that system, there was an emergent class divide. More resources were plowed into books that the publisher expected to sell well, authors who could afford extra help bought it, and everyone else hoped for the best.
Now you don’t necessarily need a book deal to leverage the expertise of seasoned book professionals. An entire team can be assembled online and hired independently. And you can distribute your ebook with just one click, plus print physical books with a few more.
A lot of authors have availed themselves of the opportunity to avoid the get-an-agent, get-a-book-deal system. A lot. 575,000 print books are self-published in the U.S. each year. Count ebooks and we’re talking another 150,000 on top of that. Actually those figures were collected in 2016 and I’ll try to update them soon, but there is ample reason to believe the numbers are rising ever higher. A late 2017 report from Bowker claimed “a total of 786,935 ISBNs were assigned to self-published titles in 2016; in 2011, that number was 247,210.” That’s a 218.33 % climb.
All this to say that self-publishing in the U.S. has overtaken traditional publishing in volume. Fine, some say, but that’s a function of prodigious output — as well as the unsustainably low, low prices of many self-published titles; $1.99 ebooks are common, while traditional publishers are more likely to charge $9.99 and up. This is not even factoring all of the ebooks that indie authors are advised to give away for free. See, some say, self-publishing will never overtake traditional publishing in revenue, barring some sort of catastrophic meteorite strike that hits traditional publishers’ warehouses only.
I don’t know. I think it will soon. A few things would have to happen first — and lo and behold those things are happening. The traditional publishing houses would have to keep laying people off. (Check.) Self-publishers start raising their prices. (Pro tip: Don’t put all your eggs in Amazon’s basket.)
Then, on the micro level, individual independent authors now have the kinds of opportunities formerly reserved for formally published authors. Andy Weir’s self-published The Martian turned into a $630M-grossing Ridley Scott film, for instance.
And I mention The Martian (and wrote a short paragraph on Fifty Shades of Grey then deleted it) not because having your novel made into a Hollywood film is a particularly interesting marker of success, though the money must be nice. I mention it because it demonstrates that regardless of how they come to market, books are still a primary incubation space for stories that world audiences want to see (and listen to: the U.S. audiobook market is the world’s largest, with sales of over $2.5 billion last year.)
But sure, some looking at those tallies for self-published novels and the spate of break-out successes might think, including some dear friends of mine still employed at Penguin Random House, who if history is any guide, will have one of the largest if not the very largest footprint at BEA: That’s all fine and good if your idea of the book business is just genre fiction — sci-fi, thrillers, mystery, erotica, romance, vampire romance. But what about producing a work of serious nonfiction? That costs so much freaking time and money. You need publishers if you want to publish works that take several years of research and writing to make. In other words, if you want The Emperor of All Maladies, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, or The Warmth of Other Suns, you need publishers deep-pocketed enough to pay authors up to hundreds of thousands of dollars several months, even years, before they see a cent of return on their investment.
This assertion gives me pause. Because they have a point. And yet…“no publisher, no serious, important books” was undeniably true given the technologies and financing structures that were readily available in early 2015. We have yet to see a “Big Think” (as we called them in-house) book self-published. But I believe it’s possible today — or rather, that if you were to start such a project today, you could succeed.
Crowdfunding platforms are helping to obviate the need for a publishers’ advance. There’s Kickstarter and, for authors with a particular kind of high-output, live-online method, Patreon makes sense.
Then enter blockchain, and outfits like Publica, which just launched its first book ICO. Publica’s tagline is “Fund your book project without signing with a publisher,” and what they’re promising is that authors will be able to presell tokens for their book before it’s written, and thereby get they funds they need to finish the project.
StreetLib is investing in blockchain but is not yet convinced that book token ICOs are the way forward. We’ll keep you posted.
But my point is: People are working on this. Day in, day out.
Of course you could always put ads in books. At BEA 2007, Chris Anderson, fresh from his success with The Long Tail, said he’d give away his next book, Free, to anyone who’d accept advertisements sprinkled throughout the text.
He didn’t do this, choosing instead to allow free downloads for a limited time. I think that was seen as more palatable than advertising. Anderson’s ad suggestion was regarded as disgusting hucksterism — worse than Fay Weldon’s The Bulgari Connection — even though paperbacks used to contain cigarette ads and we didn’t all descend to hell straightaway.
Honestly, the advertising idea doesn’t bother me much. Aren’t people who post on Facebook letting Facebook sell ads against their words? And do they see any of that cash? No.
But I’m still yammering about commerce and money, not books. Here’s the real reason why it’s inevitable that authors who need support as they write Big Think books will find a way to get it, and eventually, but sooner than you think, you’ll see big, serious nonfiction self-published. It is the same reason big, serious nonfiction is traditionally published: Authors can’t not do it. It has never made economic sense for an author to spend ten years of their life on a book. I mean, it may in hindsight, as in the case of Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, but never in the doing. But authors do it anyway. They find ways.
(n.b. In 1941 the English crime writer Dorothy Sayers published a riff on the irrationality of creative expression in book form, in which she essentially imagines the book as having an independent will to come into existence: “But that a work of creation struggles and insistently demands to be brought into being is a fact that no genuine artist would think of denying. Often, the demand may impose itself in defiance of the author’s considered interests and at the most inconvenient moments. Publisher, bank-balance, and even the conscious intellect may argue that the writer should pursue some fruitful and established undertaking; but they will argue in vain against the passionate vitality of a work that insists on manifestation.”)
Today serious nonfiction authors, of all backgrounds, have more ways than ever to involve others in their sweating it out. I have had a front seat to many book launches over the years, and it’s always been my experience that the most successful publications, both critically and commercially, are those wherein a whole team of people felt deeply about the value of publishing this particular book and put their heart and soul into it.
My favorite first-hand example is Julia Scheeres’s Jesus Land, published by Counterpoint, which thanks to sub rights and a UK license was profitable even before it went on sale, and went on to collect great reviews and hordes of fans. As the editor, I loved it. Nicole Caputo, the cover designer (who designed separate covers for hardcover and paperback) loved it. Marty Gosser, who headed up the marketing effort, loved it. So did Jason Brantley, the publicist. Even our CEO, David Steinberger, felt strongly about it.
Which is all to say that publishing a book is a multivariate process, and success unpredictable, but love helps. Every book offers a chance to meet a reader, but before that, when the book is still a manuscript, or even just an inkling, an itch of an idea, you can use it a tool to attract your people — people who will be excited to help you make it happen, whether you can pay them $5 or $5000.
The last reason I’m optimistic is that I believe we’ll see more varied types of book products once we stop seeing digital books just as cheaper, less enjoyable to read versions of print books.
On StreetLib Connect, Nane Cantatore offered these thoughts, which I’ve edited here for length:
“A digital book should be seen as something different altogether from a paper book, connected and variable, possibly with multiple authors and open to interventions and reader contributions. The possibility to produce, distribute, and access books with ease and at unprecedented low prices, as well as new forms of collaborative writing, multimedia linking, and continuous updating, are great opportunities for anyone who loves books, the circulation of knowledge, and the ability to tell stories.”
I have a fantasy involving re-editing books that were fatally lazily edited the first time around, but more on that later.
Future BEAs will likely be less focused on the institutions that surround books than they have in years past, and the booths will get smaller. (Half of us will be working outside of institutions anyway.) Here’s a reality check: A 2007 BEA a panel sponsored by MySpace drew a standing-room-only crowd. A MySpace panel would also draw a crowd today, but for different reasons.
As a result of these changes, the U.S. book business will start to look more like the past, when the scale was smaller and relationships paramount. In a Publishers Lunch email from last week, I found a poignant reminder of why I got into this business in the first place. It’s from Alice Hoffman’s reminiscence of literary agent Elaine Markson, who came of age in old-school New York book publishing and died this month at the age of 87:
“Everyone knows that if Elaine Markson was your agent you had a fierce and loving protector for life. I was Elaine’s second client, back when she was working out of her apartment where the windows faced Washington Square Park and her eleven-year-old son watched TV as we talked about books…. She was pure Greenwich Village with clients like Andrea Dworkin, Abbie Hoffman (I was often billed for advances Elaine loaned him as we were both A. Hoffmans), the great Grace Paley, and the iconic feminist writer Tillie Olsen. Elaine was the one agent in America who didn’t care about making deals. She was there for the authors, and I know that she was always there for me. She was excited to receive any new manuscript and got back to me the following day. She was my coach, my cheerleader, my truest believer. I would not have had the courage to become a writer without her. When Elaine was in your corner you could see yourself through her eyes…. She was generous and kind, but she always let you know when you had more work to do on a book. Writers listened to her. And more, we trusted her. The book business changed, it became about deals and best sellers lists, but Elaine never changed. Till the very end she was in it for the books. We loved her madly and we’ll miss her forever.”
Here’s hoping everything old will be new again. See you at BEA.
Photo courtesy BEA
