Checking facts with players who are still in the game

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2024-11-25 07:00:03

It is four years since Covid and eight years since I have had staff helping me serve consulting clients. My insight into the commercial world of book publishing is no longer informed by daily contact with people making their living in it. In fact, a big chunk of my “professional” activity these days is helping authors decide how to bring their book to market, with “through a regular publisher with an advance-against-royalties deal” being among the least likely of the possible options.

More has changed in the past eight years than any like period in my prior 50 years of experience. You don’t have to be an insider to know that there were 500,000 titles in English available in 1990 and that more than 20 million are available from Ingram (thanks to print-on-demand) today. And that everything that was ever made available remains on sale through “normal channels” (which is “online”, not “in store”) forever. It doesn’t take a math genius to reckon that a pretty stable total book purchasing and readership constituency will result in dramatic reductions in sales per title.

One source of insight is a new book, “The Untold Story of Books”, by Michael Castleman. (I was gifted an advance reading copy that tells me the book will be published on July 2, 2024.) Castleman sees three “eras” of book publishing: Gutenberg hand-style presses (1450-1870), industrial printing (1870-2000), and digital publishing (since 2000.) An interpretation of his telling of the story would be that authors steered book publishing until the early 1900s, publishers were in control for most of the 20th century, and that digital technology has once again decentralized the commercial decisions and efforts so that publishers’ power has been diminishing for the past two decades.