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[DIGEST] Do books make money?
Your weekly stackable roundup
Hi friends,
The main publishing story this week is about whether books actually make money…which I can’t believe we are having this debate in 2024. There are a ton of think pieces on both sides, so I’m just pulling them all up here to the top. I had a lovely piece here until yesterday, when everything spiraled out of control and I scrapped it for this frenetic chaos demon.
It was all kicked off by an article by Elle Griffin pulling data from the failed RH/SS merger to show that nobody buy books. It sure did use a lot of real data to draw exactly the wrong conclusions. She made some good points about how the industry gives too much money to celebrities and influencers, but her argument breaks down when trying to generalize it to the whole industry circling the drain.
There are plenty of reasons to think the publishing industry is circling the drain. Elle just somehow managed to swerve around all of them and run straight into nonsense.
That said, Elle did have her champions, namely Seth Godin, a writer who made their living publishing books that sold to humans, presumably, and thus should know better. He used data to confirm that both the Power Law Curve and Pareto Principle exist in publishing which I think is really a really neat, though useless, exercise.
Publishing is hard and most books do not break even is easily the coldest take to come out of this whole fiasco. I already covered that one, Seth.
On the other side, uses other data to show that people buy over a billion books a year and wowie that sure seems like a lot. I’m just a simple author, and it will take a lot of fingers to count that high, but 1,000,000,000 seems like quite a bit more than 0.
, who has worked in publishing for decades, uses all that experience to provide a different way to look at book sales, which includes something Seth and Elle ignored…acknowledgement that books sell after the first year.
The simple fact is that books can and should sell for years and years beyond their publication date. A book that sells a few thousand units its first year can sell tens of thousands of copies during its lifetime. I’m not a big time publisher or anything, but our titles can sell 10-100x more during their lifetime than they did their first year.
Not always. Most of our books break even at launch and vanish, but some of them keep selling far into the future. Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter has been selling for close to 15 years!
Kathleen also wants writers to stop bashing the publishing industry and yes, I agree. If you want to work in an industry you shouldn’t be gleefully awaiting its demise. If you don’t want to work in publishing, you can just…not do that.
Did you know you can not write things? I don’t personally know what that’s about, but I know people go about their whole day not writing stuff all the time.
Indie publisher made some additional good points, like how publishers make a lot of money from subsidiary and foreign rights, and how Elle seems to blow past the fact that both Kindle Unlimited and libraries pretty much already allow you to read as many books as you want for cheap as free.
Even got into the mix to remind us that book sales look healthier now than they did five years ago. According to Statista, there were 697.31 million print book sales in 2019 compared to 767.36 million in 2023, an increase of 10% and 70 million books, so yes, I would say that’s just a bit healthier than pre-pandemic levels.
Finally, picks apart why publishing is designed to make us all feel like losers. Mainly, they argue that traditional publishing is an easy scapegoat since almost every author has bitterness and resentment inside them from not getting what they wanted out of a book deal, if they even got one at all.
What I love is that people on both sides used a ton of data to make their points. The interpretation of that data was suspect in some cases, but I appreciate a good deep dive on data.
At the end of the day, I’m a huge fan of self-publishing, but I’ve also signed over 50 publishing deals in my career because there are no absolutes. Maybe you haven’t gotten a publishing deal yet, but you might next year, or you might never, or you might start your own company, and boy will it be nice to have the infrastructure available if you do.
If you cut off your nose to spite your face, you’re gonna look ridiculous, unless you like that Walton Goggins look from Fallout.
Elle didn’t even write a hit piece on traditional publishing. She wrote a piece perfectly designed to cause debate and get her attention. It does the thing that many performatively erudite people do, which is to use objective data to draw subjective conclusions that feel good but don’t actually make sense.
This is not the first time Elle has stoked the fires of drama. Late last year she penned an article begging Substack to let Nazis stay on their platform because free speech or some other bullshit. It was co-signed by many of the most terrible humans on Substack (and several others I’m still disappointed in who joined her), but it did get a lot of attention, and that’s what matters in this economy, right?
I won’t lie. The only reason I’m even writing about this is because I still have a burning, white-hot rage at that letter. If it was anyone else, I would have probably written it off as nonsense. Actually, I did, until everyone else started talking about it.
Elle has a skill, I’ll give her that.
For somebody who claims to want people to stop fighting on the internet, she sure ends up in the middle of a lot of controversy, especially for Substack, which is kind of known for being low drama. This is the most contentious event since the last time Elle caused chaos.
In the middle of all this, my friend emailed and asked if she could comment on this whole thing for The Author Stack. One thing I know is that if talented writers want to use your platform to get their point across, let them.
She made a beautiful case for traditional publishing which is a great counterbalance to all this nonsense, including mine.
If you want to share how you are doing this week, then there are two ways to interact with this post.
1 - If you don’t want to say anything, or bristle at identifying yourself, then you can reply with this nifty poll.
2 - If you’re feeling very brave, then reply below and tell us how you are doing right now on a scale from 1-5.
WHAT WE WROTE ON SUBSTACK: This week, I wrote about how to build a sustainable and profitable subscription into your author business.
Plus, delivered part one of their two part Substack growth breakdown and goes beyond bestsellers to show that yes, people still buy books.
Finally, wrote about what writers can learn from Taylor Swift lyrics.
Dis was nothing like I had imagined. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was a happy place, but the monsters living there certainly didn’t seem any more miserable than they did on Earth. I even saw several of them laughing and smiling. It was a complete and utter mind screw.
Blezor must have felt the same way. “How can these monsters be…happy?” he said as we followed Charlie through the city.
“What’s not to be happy about?” Charlie answered. “They get to punish the same humans that hunted them to extinction. They get a place to live. They get friends. They have steady work. It’s kind of a paradise if you think about it the right way.”
“I never want to think that way,” Bob said as the street widened into a city square. A high wall served as a backdrop while monsters streamed in and out of the gate cut into it. Huge piles of black muck swayed back and forth across the horizon, blocking my view of anything past them.
“What is that?” I pointed to the wobbling black towers.
“Souls,” Charlie said. “You all have been breeding like rabbits out there, and we’re running out of places to put you, so we end up just shoveling you into big piles while you wait. It’s becoming a problem, and it’s getting worse.”
All chapters of The Godsverse Chronicles are now free for all subscribers. You can read the whole series from the beginning right here.
You still only get access to a bunch of free books and stories from my back catalog by becoming a paid member. You can start your membership with a 7-day free trial.
JOIN US FOR A FREE VIRTUAL CONFERENCE: Do you have FOMO from missing our Future of Publishing Mastermind? Then I have good news. You can join us virtually from May 22-24 for free and relive the experience with us.
We’ll have tons of speakers talking about how to take advantage of the future of publishing…starting now.
If you want to know where the publishing industry is going in the next 3-5 years, and how to take advantage of it NOW, then The Future of Publishing Virtual Summit is perfect for you.
This is an event curated for forward-thinking, self-starters who want to be at the leading edge of the publishing industry for years to come. Publishing is shifting faster than ever. Do you want to help chart where it's going?
UPCOMING ARTICLE: Next week, I show you how to compile your blog into a book.
I’ve released three solo non-fiction books up to this point in my career, all of which paid members can read for free:
Since I talk about them often, you might know they exist, but did you know that the last two books on this list were compiled almost exclusively through repurposing blog articles and Facebook posts?
Additionally, I’m working on a book called How to Survive as a Writer in a Capitalist Dystopia, which will be mostly comprised of bits I worked out on this publication, too.
Even Direct Sales Mastery for Authors was mainly compiled from bits from The Author Stack, at least my portion of it, although for that book I knew what we needed and was just writing the pieces we needed in public.
For the other four books, though, I didn’t quite know there would be a book, or what that book would be when I set out to write the content for them.
In fact, it was my intention to only write one non-fiction book in my whole career (ha!), but people kept asking me for more, especially for a book specifically aimed at authors. Since I was writing a daily blog at the time called The Complete Creative, it made logical sense to at least start with the information I had compiled there.
Then, three years later my Facebook account was blinked out of existence. Luckily, I had a backup of all my best posts and could compile another collection of my best work.
From those books, I developed a system for bringing my blog content into book format that might be a good template for you to follow.
ROUNDUP: Here are some of my favorite articles of the week.
Business-y:
innovates through prompting, works like the Olympians, and enters the age of de-bossification.
distributes the new fashion creativity, observes that AI is little more than smoke and mirrors, and “struggles” in early retirement.
and know when to quit, stumps for a women-friendly workplace instead of one designed for and by men, and sees through the illusion of control in business.
replaces dirty fuel with clean, shows why Foxtrot is just another example of careless expansion, and thinks Google should be relieved of its sandbox duties.
and redefine productivity, Nickolas Diaz explains how Gmail's upcoming subscription manager will allows users to unclutter their congested inbox, and shares the most important SaaS metric of all.
Publishing-like:
reveals the hidden trope, gets out of the way of success getting in the way of art, and plans and writes books in Scrivener.
teaches Book Deal 101 and lays out exactly how authors get paid , draws inspiration from everywhere, and gives away something valuable.
writes a paragraph that doesn’t suck, becomes pseudonymous, and Samanth Subramanian talks AI and the end of the human writer.
engages with AI in order to meet the future, Sara Guaglione revamps their newsletter offerings to engage audiences amid threat of AI and declining referral traffic, and write a humor piece from a headline,
publishes a novel that did not change their life, Ryan Broderick finds the AI line, and Clara Aberneithie heats up for The Cool Down.
sold their book, feels enTITLEed to a great book launch, and finds the horror in a white picket fence.
rethinks creativity, goes through a fallow period, and uses a spreadsheet to improve their writing.
writes and draws, Meredith Maran highlights the independent publisher making a business of celebrity book imprints, and builds a Bloomberg for “X”.
Substack-esque:
stops feels awkward asking readers to pay them, lists 11 ways a newsletter can make you rich, shows how making $74 on Substack will replace the book industry, and pens a personal essay about the peaks and valleys of personal essays.
leads mermaids into battle against AI, reveals the fremium strategy that netted 6 paid subscribers in 5 days, tries to write something new after they go viral, and shows how 9 successful Substack writers have grown their publications in 2024.
reflects on their one-year anniversary, deals with plateauing on Substack, and provides a not so normal six-month, update.
Culture-ish:
finds an enemy in resilience, defines a cult, makes the case for midlife being our Tortured Poets era, and highlights Civil War’s growing divide in American culture.
purposely counterbalances invisible wounds and private pain, tracks the confluence of cultures that created western music, details why everything is becoming a game, and silences our cultural obsession with talk.
has a breathrough about TTPD being about a traumatic breakdown, teaches two year olds to read, and gets an early start on Robert Frost’s accidental late start.
Lifestyle-oid:
keeps a naturalist notebook, isn’t for biting, makes less exhausting decisions, and lives and watches friends leave LA.
starts lifting heavy things, has anxiety at work, and feels the unbearable lateness of replying.
studies the alchemization of grief, walks away from a fall, and stops venting when they’re pissed off.
Find anything you loved enough to swoon over or hated enough to make your blood boil? Let me know.
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Rosie is completely average. There is absolutely nothing extraordinary about her in any way.
For most people, that would be a blessing, but Rosie wants nothing more than to have a spark of magic, even if people say that all mages are evil.
She wasn’t born with magic, though. She’s sure of it. After all, she is 17, and magic always presents when you are 13.
Always.
So, when she’s suddenly able to wield magic, Rosie is initially confused, then thrilled…until the soldiers come for her, and she realizes everything she’s about to lose.
There is one place that is truly safe for people like her. The lost city of Toledo – a haven for witches and warlocks since before the war, and the only place Rosie can be free.
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