There's no money in publishing

Or, an introduction to thinking in systems

It took me a long time to fully understand and accept this, but once I did, life became a lot easier. If you’re reading news about the publishing industry, you may have a vague sense of this via various symptoms:

1. Publishing houses going under, sometimes disappearing without notifying authors, paying out their royalties or returning their copyright.

2. Agents leaving the industry, sometimes without a succession plan for their clients, or dropping current clients.

3. Smaller advances, and limited support for book launches, marketing campaigns or author events, even at the biggest publishers.

But these are just news stories until they happen to you. And if/when they do happen to you, you might see it as a personal attack or failing (Why is this happening to me? Why don’t they like my work? Why does that OTHER author get marketing?) instead of bringing it back to the systemic root-cause: There’s no money in publishing.

I’ll give an example. I once queried an agent who rejected me within 14 minutes, stating: “This word length is too long.” Strictly speaking, they were right: 100,000-120,000 is the expected length for a fantasy novel, especially from an author who isn’t established. At 150k words, I was well over that. On the surface, it can seem as if agents are just looking for a reason to reject you, especially when other authors can publish books at 250,000 words that people will clearly buy and read. But if you dig a little deeper, you’ll discover that:

• An agent only makes money if the book sells.

• The word counts of genres are based on the cost of printing paperback novels.

• The publisher only earns back printing costs by selling several thousand copies (ebooks, priced lower, don’t really offset printing costs).

• Most books by unestablished authors sell fewer than 1000 copies, so authors don’t make royalties.

In summary:

• A long book is not profitable for the publisher, the agent or the author.

If you’re a reader, this line of argument probably makes very little sense to you. If you’re anything like me, you’ve been reading epics that you don’t find satisfying unless they’re at least 100,000 words long. How are you supposed to have a slow burn romance in a book you could finish in a single day?

This takes me to the opportunities available in digital format that simply weren’t available a decade ago. Writers like MXTX and Alice Oseman got their start on Wattpad and Webtoon, and now they’ve got Netflix deals. Yes, it means they had to give away their content for free, for a very long time, to establish the readership that would allow agents and publishers to take notice. The stigma around self-publishing is gone, although given that writers like Stephen King, Virginia Woolf, Dostoyevsky and Brandon Sanderson have all self-published, the stigma should never have been there; it was always about money.

It probably feels unfair that agents and publishers only want you when you’re already successful, but aren’t willing to put in the work to make you successful. My former agent worked with me from the point where Driving by Starlight was a mess of plot holes until it finally was published nearly four years later. Over those four years, she did developmental and line-level edits three separate times, submitted to publishers twice, and negotiated the contracts to get me a great deal. For four years of specialized work, she probably received about $3,000 (or less, given taxes).

So I don’t blame agents for being unwilling to take on clients who need editorial support. But it does mean the bar for writers wanting to be traditionally published is much, much higher than it used to be. Similarly, in the corporate world, the bar for entry-level positions is ridiculous. Everyone wants an employee who’s already trained; but whose job is it to invest in actually training them? Especially if, once you train them, they’re likely to leave for some other manager or company?

Systems thinking allows you to step back and see such patterns of short-term thinking and vicious cycles that you might be caught in, missing the bigger picture. An agent should be invested in your long-term success, not just in selling this particular book. A manager should be invested in growing their people, whether or not they reap the benefits of that growing. But sometimes, incentives aren’t set up that way. If you’re going to make $3000 per client for four years of work, that’s not enough to live on. On high-stakes, high-burnout projects, nobody is likely to stick around for too long, so why would you bother training someone?

When bad things happen, I never assume there’s a single malicious villain running around trying to destroy me personally. Rather, I tell myself: There’s no money in publishing. Sometimes, I mean it literally. More often, I mean it metaphorically, as a reminder that:

(a) following the trail of money and incentive structures often explains why the thing I don’t like is happening, and

(b) the people I might consider “out to get me” might be as caught in the system as I am, or even more so.

Once I see things from this systems lens, I feel more agency. Am I right to expect what I’m asking for from other people, or are they simply unable to give it? For instance, I certainly have more financial freedom than most literary agents / editors. (Not everyone is Felicity Blunt). So, while at first I was annoyed at how little support traditional publishing gives its debut writers, later I asked myself how much of the below I’d be willing to do for someone else, for free, because that was what I’d expected out of traditional publishing:

• Reaching out to your agent’s other clients (agency siblings) so you can boost each other online and champion each other’s work.

• Contacting the agents of famous writers in your genre to request blurbs. They may say no, but you can always ask.

• Posting updates along the way to whet reader appetite.

• Pushing your friends and family to pre-order your book because that boosts its rankings on launch day.

• Hiring a professional to take author photos as publicity materials.

• Taking control of your author page on Amazon and editing it to be compelling (not just the generic blurb). No, your publisher does not do this, because they are not incentivized to help you succeed when Amazon gets a cut.

• Getting as many reviews as possible as fast as possible because they are critical to sales.

• Driving up pre-orders and sales by launching ad campaigns— not always something your publisher will do for you.

• Submitting your book for consideration to various prizes (nope, that doesn’t always happen automatically either).

• Organizing your own book launches, events and readings, and offering signed copies to readers who will spread the word.

• Talking to your school librarian if you’re writing for children or young adults about holding an event at your alma mater and giving them free copies for their library.

• Hiring a publicist or pitching yourself to various magazines and podcasts to give interviews or write articles.

• Hiring artists to draw your characters or scenes from your novel and using those to whet reader appetite on social media.

• Reaching out to influential book reviewers who can champion your book to their audience.

• Establishing a website, newsletter and social media presence.

Maybe I had a distorted sense of what a major publishing house would do for its debut authors, but even otherwise, nobody will love your baby as much as you do.

If you enjoyed this post, Algorithms of Betrayal comes out in two days! *cough* pre-order *cough* More on that book in a special post, coming soon.