There’s a common assumption that if readers were not purchasing a particular kind of book, publishers would not be publishing them, and book stores would not be stocking them. Ergo, the reason there are so many lame books is that there are so many lame readers. At least, that’s the argument that’s often made. But what happens when ideology begins to trump business sense? When publishers become far more interested in pushing certain narratives than they are in getting a return on their investments? When they are so blinded by their own self-righteousness that they vastly overestimate the public’s interest in the stories they are hellbent on selling?
That is the subject of this piece that just came out from the Free Press by Alex Perez, The Fight for the Future of Publishing. I recommend everyone interested in the current state of publishing to read it. But I just want to share some numbers here from the article that are quite astounding. It’s no secret that the Big 5 publishing houses have been losing money. Yes, book sells are down, yada yada. But also, editors are putting big sums of money down on books with an ideological bent that it turns out the public is just not interested in. The refrain that if people didn’t want to read these kinds of books, publishers wouldn’t publish them, is no longer true. This is likely for one of two reasons. Either the editors that purchase these books have their heads up their asses and have no idea what is going to sell, which is fair enough. Or, some of the more ideological among them simply don’t care if it’s going to sell or not, as long as the book promotes the narrative that editor is interested in getting behind.
This is from the article—
With the new editors came new books by mostly untested, “diverse” writers whose stories featured characters struggling to overcome the shackles of whiteness or the patriarchy.
These include Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me, which was published in 2022 and has been described by its publisher, Flatiron, as “an exhilarating, fast-paced coming-of-age story” about a gay, black man.
Nadxieli Nieto, an editor who joined Flatiron in the wake of the American Dirt fiasco, bought the book for $250,000. So far, according to the sales tracker BookScan, it has sold nearly 4,500 copies—not nearly enough to cover the advance. (BookScan, the book industry site from which sales-copy figures come, does not include digital book sales.)
Similarly, in 2022, Flatiron bought Elliot Page’s book—a memoir that revolves around the actor’s gender transition—for more than $3 million. So far, it has sold south of 68,000 copies, according to BookScan.
In 2021, Dial Press, a Random House imprint, bought Lucky Red—described as “a genre-bending queer feminist Western. . . following a young woman’s transformation from forlorn orphan to successful prostitute to revenge-seeking gunfighter”—for more than $500,000. So far, it’s sold about 3,500 copies.
Then there’s Carolyn Ferrell’s Dear Miss Metropolitan, described by The New York Times as “a story of three young girls, Black and biracial, who are kidnapped and thrown into the basement of a decaying house in Queens.” Ferrell’s book was acquired in a “significant deal” (a.k.a. more than $250K), but has so far sold 3,163 copies since it was published in 2021.
“The rule of thumb,” one editor said about book advances, “is that if you paid $7 per book sold, you paid the right amount.” The editor added: “You can pay $1 million for something and have it be a bestseller and still lose hundreds of thousands of dollars,” even if you sell tens of thousands of books.
All the while, according to some prominent writers and editors, these publishing houses appeared to be discriminating against white male writers. In June 2022, best-selling author James Patterson called the difficulty white male authors were facing “just another form of racism.” After a backlash, he quickly apologized and said: “I absolutely do not believe that racism is practiced against white writers. Please know that I strongly support a diversity of voices being heard—in literature, in Hollywood, everywhere.” But one month later, acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates made a similar point. In a tweet, she wrote: “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested.”
A senior editor at one of the major publishing houses echoed these thoughts, telling The Free Press: “We flat-out decided we weren’t going to look at certain white male authors, because we didn’t want to be seen as acquiring that stuff.”
When asked whether editors openly acknowledged that they were discriminating against writers because of their skin color, this editor replied: “I don’t think it was worded quite as blatantly as that. It was worded more like, ‘Is this the right time to be championing authors of more traditional backgrounds?’ Often, the language was a bit opaque.”
Adam Bellow, who spent many years at HarperCollins and St. Martin’s Press, a Macmillan imprint, before moving to Post Hill Press, a conservative publishing company in Nashville, acknowledged “generational change” is a fact of life.
“It just so happens that, in this case, the new generation is a generation of ideological fanatics,” Bellow said.
These “fanatics” have led the industry to lose sight of its market, he added.
“People within the business who want to work on books that fall outside of the boundaries of what’s publicly treated as acceptable have to be willing to deal with interpersonal discomfort, being treated as marginal, or looked on with suspicion by their colleagues,” an editor at a major publishing house told me.
I really don’t sympathize with their predicament, especially since it’s opened up so much space in the marketplace for smaller, independent publishers to gain some ground. Personally, I have no qualms about grabbing a bucket of popcorn and watching the Big Five eat themselves alive.
Thoughts? Share in the comments.