I've always loved the image of the shoal: many small fish swimming together, emulating a bigger fish to deter prey. I imagine it's companionable, insofar as fish enjoy company, everyone making their own way in the water, but choosing to swim together to achieve something that would be impossible on their own.

"Shoal" also can mean an area of shallow water, a navigational hazard, a hidden challenge or difficulty. This sounds a lot like book publishing, a field where sometimes (often?) things are very hard, for reasons completely outside of our control.

In the 1950s and earlier, the book publishing field used to be myriad small fish, swimming around and doing their own thing. But after decades of mergers and acquisitions, which I imagine as one fish eating a smaller fish while itself being sized up by a larger one, the field looks like a few whales taking up most of the space in the water, harried by a couple of monopolistic mega-sharks like Amazon. The most astounding and illuminating image of what that looks like is this flow chart designed by Ali Almossawi, which shows so many once-independent presses that have been swallowed up by the major corporate publishers.

I've been noticing something about how outlets report publishing sales levels that troubles me. The most frequent way a media outlet or publisher will publicly talk about sales is by comparing sales made during a certain period to the same period for the previous year. They sometimes refer to this year-over-year or YOY. Year-over-year comparisons are problematic because they don't take into account unusual circumstances or outlier activity, and can present a rosier or more negative picture of reality than is accurate.

I noticed it a few weeks ago in this Publishers Weekly article:

For the second consecutive week, unit sales of print books were down across all categories, leading to a 6.1% drop in total sales last week from the week ended July 23, 2022...It was also the second straight week in which sales fell in the adult fiction category, with comparisons to last year, when the segment was enjoying solid weekly sales, growing more difficult. In last week’s case, adult fiction sales couldn’t keep pace with the big sales numbers turned in by Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, which sold more than 123,000 copies around the release of the movie based on the novel.

At least this article acknowledged the outlier that was likely driving a major divergence in numbers, but not all of them do.

Watching everyone launch Substack newsletters over the past months as the ground under Twitter has shifted due to Elon Musk's takeover and summary destruction of Twitter has made me frustrated and deeply concerned. See, there's already been a wave of Substack early adopters (myself included) who have left the platform based on its leadership's problematic choices. And I haven't seen any signs that they have learned from those choices and made changes. This will probably come too late to change any minds, since dozens of writers I admire and respect have launched newsletters on Substack in the past eight months, but I feel like it's important to share the context about why I left the platform.

A few years ago, I was a HUGE fan of Substack. I'd already been a big proponent of writers and other creative people building and owning their own email lists, rather than investing in platforms that keep the audience one builds locked up in a walled garden that's impossible to export. What's more, Substack was a new model, a platform that allowed a writer to write long-form and be paid by readers for that writing. I launched my own (free) newsletter there, and praised the model during The Next Page, the virtual conference I ran at Kickstarter.

A feminist cis woman and a trans guy, who made their names in the “feminist blogger” subculture of the ‘00s and early ’10s, as I did; those were the marquee names at Substack in 2018, and that’s why they reached out to me. I was sold on this platform with the idea that our values and core audiences were in sync. - Jude Doyle

I was concerned when I saw that Substack had raised $15.3M in funding in July 2019 and even more concerned when they raised another $65M in 2021. Prior to 2019, they'd only raised around $2M. Raising a substantial chunk of money like that meant that they would have to pay it back somehow, with interest. And the way that typically happens in tech is that a company looks for "an exit" which is either selling to a bigger company or doing an IPO (initial public offering) and listing itself on the stock exchange. Either of those things forces a company to act in very specific ways, prioritizing looking good on paper in the short term over creating a solid sustainable company that's good for its users—in this case, writers and readers. Tech Crunch questioned whether the $650M valuation in the Series B funding round was realistic.

On the back of these two ~$80M funding rounds, Substack started paying select writers a sort of advance to launch newsletters, calling it Substack Pro. To me, this gave off echoes of Medium launching and changing business models and pivoting til they'd come full circle a few times. Ultimately, with Medium, journalists got hurt and some great publications got their funding yanked out from under them.

But beyond my historically-informed suspicion any time a company does something that seems too good to be true, there was something else at play.

Substack has become famous for giving massive advances — the kind that were never once offered to me or my colleagues, not up front and not after the platform took off — to people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.

Increasingly, Substack is tolerating and funding extreme trans-eliminationist rhetoric: They host Jesse Singal, a high-profile supporter of anti-trans conversion therapy who is also widely known to fixate on and stalk trans women in and around the media industry. I would list Jesse’s targets, but at this point, I don’t know a trans woman in media who doesn’t have a story. Graham Lineham is a transphobic bigot so extreme and abhorrent that he’s been permanently banned from Twitter, Medium, and basically every platform but the one I’m using to talk to you right now. He reportedly considers Substack a major source of income. -Jude Doyle

Reminder: this was all happening in 2021, before Substack raised $65M additional dollars, and before Elon Musk bought Twitter and the current Substack influx happened. We all knew. There were numerous high profile posts and articles about it.

So I have a choice to make, a choice that neither I nor any gender-marginalized person should ever have to make: Either I walk away from a necessary income stream and creative outlet, or I stay and allow my work to fund abuse, harassment, misogyny, and a movement that wants trans people silenced, impoverished, invisible and dead.  -Jude Doyle

So back in 2021, trans and feminist authors like like Sarah Gailey, and Annalee Newitz moved to other platforms, such as Ghost.io (like Jude Doyle) and Buttondown, which is the platform I ultimately chose.

And Substack's leadership have made it clear that they are totally fine with how things are.

Substack didn't just hold firm, it doubled down. When Netflix got slammed for a Dave Chappelle comedy special with transphobic material, Best declared at a Wall Street Journal conference, “Dave, if you’re listening, come to Substack.” —Vanity Fair

Carr, McKenzie’s former PandoDaily editor, shared a series of emails he exchanged with McKenzie last year after Carr discontinued his Substack. “I get the free speech argument but there has to be a line. Surely,” Carr wrote. “I think you’ve hit upon the dilemma that’s at the center of everything right now: anti-vaxxing, violent sedition, abortion, gun control, trans rights and of course tech. At what point does someone’s right to free speech outweigh another’s right to live without fearing for their lives? At what point do people like you and me have a moral responsibility to protect the vulnerable from violent bullies?” —Vanity Fair

I realized I couldn't in good conscience put my (free) labor into something that benefited an organization that harmed vulnerable people as a business practice and editorial policy.

I've been trying out Buttondown for the past year, and one thing I really appreciate about the platform is that their business model is oriented around providing value. I can't find the exact quote anymore, since Buttondown has upgraded a lot since I started using it, but when I began, there was a quote on the pricing page about why they use a flat fee rather than taking a percentage of newsletter subscriptions, and the gist was that charging for the service aligns their incentives the right way, so they continue providing a good service to the people who use it. Substack's incentives are definitely tilted toward bringing on and highlighting people whose words are likely to go viral, which means some inflammatory rhetoric is good for business.

Buttondown is not as slick as Substack, but I'm not looking for slick, I'm looking for the best platform that fits my needs at the intersection of functional and ethical.

Additional reading

Why We’re Freaking Out About Substack — NYT

Report: Substack, the highly hyped newsletter platform, has ditched plans for a Series C — Tech Crunch

Substack’s Growth Spurt Brings Growing Pains — NYT

I was asked to give a talk at Digital Book World this month, and had a lot more latitude about what to discuss than I normally have when I’m asked to speak, which was both extremely freeing and kind of overwhelming. The last time I gave a talk with that much freedom was 2019, when I made five predictions for the future of publishing, which Ron Hogan wrote about in his newsletter at the time.

I spent months reflecting on what I might say that would be interesting and meaningful, and tried approaching from a few different directions, but I kept returning to some of the points in an essay I’ve been writing about the terrifying state of our country for queer and trans people right now. Digital Book World is a very Book Tech business-oriented conference, so ultimately, the framework I went with was one about five areas I’m watching in publishing in 2023. I wanted to share these five areas more broadly than just with conference-goers, so I’ve abridged and adapted the talk for this newsletter.

#1: Consolidation and Monopolization

The story of the Penguin RandomHouse & Simon & Schuster merger isn’t over yet. According to The Guardian, Simon & Schuster’s owner, Paramount, said that the publisher was a “non-core asset” to the media behemoth, and “does not fit strategically within Paramount’s broader portfolio.” I made some predictions about that last year after the DOJ’s decision came down, including speculating about who might be next to make an offer for S&S. I fully anticipate that the next chapters will unfold over the next twelve months.

The news broke last week that the Department of Justice is blocking the Penguin RandomHouse purchase of Big Five rival Simon & Schuster. My initial response was surprise and admiration, since I do believe that that merger would have been bad for authors and the overall book publishing landscape. PRH's assertion that they could pay authors more if they merged with S&S felt deeply disingenuous to me, since they've had record profits in 2021, and that doesn't seem to have dramatically increased the level of advances or royalty rates they're offering authors. That said, ultimately, I don't think it will matter that much unless this represents a SUBSTANTIAL, permanent shift in how the DOJ approaches antitrust enforcement.

For one thing, HarperCollins has ALREADY said they want to buy Simon & Schuster. Will the DOJ block that deal too? And if that deal doesn't go through, will the next company to make an offer be Elliot Management, the firm that owns Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, among its $55.7 BILLION in "managed assets" and "distressed securities"?

And in a world where somehow, the DOJ is active in preventing any of those major acts of consolidation, Simon & Schuster could just...stop publishing books and close down. That's another way that harmful consolidation happens in an industry.

We saw that situation when Baker & Taylor, a wholesaler that used to serve a major portion of the trade book market just...stopped, leaving Ingram as the only major game in town.

This email is about what it takes to sustain independent presses and media. It's about what it means to sustain an independent feminist organization that centers marginalized people and provides support, economically and professionally, to people thinking insurgent thoughts and writing them down and working to share them with others, so that one mind touches another like a match and ignites it with a new idea.

This email is about asking you to click on this link and give Feminist Press a few bucks, if you've got them to spare, or share the link with a friend or on your social media.

This email is about saying a fond and heartbroken farewell to Bitch Media, an independent feminist media organization that survived for 25 years in this deeply problematic country and publishing landscape. Bitch helped shape my idea of what feminism was, and without it, I might not be the Executive Director and Publisher of Feminist Press. I'm sad for all the kids who will never experience the lightning bolt strike of seeing a magazine with the word BITCH on it at a Borders Books (lol), and discovering that maybe it was ok to be a girl or woman who didn't quite fit into the mold of what was expected of her.

In 2021, I didn't care about NFTs.

As the year went on, it felt harder and harder to avoid learning what they were, or forming some sort of opinion on them. I lumped them in with banana duct tape, something partway between art, concept, finance, and troll: funny and curious but mostly irrelevant. But as a Very Online person, I kept absorbing more knowledge and others' opinions by osmosis.

At the end of the year, my (now former) employer, Kickstarter, announced that it was planning to fund a new blockchain protocol and integrate it with Kickstarter.com.

To say that the announcement went poorly is a dramatic understatement. Literally overnight, I had to learn about blockchain, NFTs, Web3, and more, because I managed the creator outreach team, aka the folks with some of the most public-facing roles at the company. Not only did I have to learn about these things, but I had to understand all of it well enough to be able to talk about it with creative people I respected and cared about, whose livelihoods were at least partly dependent on Kickstarter as a platform continuing to exist, and work.

This week, Jenny Bhat tweeted about a NYT piece that was making the rounds, "Food Businesses Lose Faith in Instagram after Algorithm Changes." She pulled out this quote: "Ultimately, the success of small businesses on social media is in the hands of a few corporations. These platforms don’t belong to us, they belong to tech companies"

For years, I've been beating a drum about creative people - writers, artists, musicians, chefs, and more - owning their own communities, for exactly this reason. I tweeted some quick thoughts about it, but I wanted to dig in deeper here and expand on what I've already written.

My absolute best advice for any creative person or small business is to build direct relationships with their community. That means building at least one channel to connect with followers and fans that is owned by you and within your control. Email lists are the best thing I've found so far, even though those come with their own set of challenges. Building your own channel might start slow; it will probably take years of consistent connection and building. But at the end of those years, you will have a reliable way to get in touch with people who want to hear about what you're doing.

A bit of history

*You might notice this newsletter is on a new platform, Buttondown. For more info, scroll to the end.*

In case you missed it, prolific bestselling fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson launched a Kickstarter project two weeks ago and blasted past his already lofty $1M goal to become the most funded Kickstarter project of all time. As I write this, his project has passed $31M pledged by 133,000 readers with 11 days left in the campaign. Some of you expressed interest in understanding WHY this project blew up so much. My former colleagues at Kickstarter asked if they could publish the piece I wrote, so it lives here: How Brandon Sanderson's Kickstarter Project Broke the Bookish Internet

In the piece, I talk about the elements of this campaign, and the unique attributes of Brandon Sanderson himself, that made this such a big deal. A few of these elements include a good campaign, trust, a strong promotional plan, fun, and excitement. I'm sure you've noticed that none of the things I've just listed are unique to Brandon Sanderson.

My job for 6 years was to help writers, publishers, and others in the literary world use Kickstarter to fund their literary projects. I even ran three of my own campaigns to make books and art prints. And now that I don't work at Kickstarter anymore, I think it might mean even more when I tell you that Kickstarter is a very effective platform for writers and publishers to launch books and more, even if they aren't at the scale of Brandon Sanderson. A few of the reasons for this:

If you’re on writing or publishing Twitter, you probably saw news of Brandon Sanderson’s astoundingly successful Kickstarter project, which launched at 11 AM Eastern time yesterday, and less than 24 hours later, has passed $14 million pledged by over 50,000 readers.

I drafted this post over a year ago, but seeing the wild success of Sanderson’s new project made me dig it back up and finish it.

I worked with Brandon Sanderson and his team on their first Kickstarter project back in 2020 when I was Head of Publishing at Kickstarter. I even got a chance to interview him about his writing process and his amazing fan community for The Creative Independent. I just left Kickstarter after eight years this past Friday — what a time to leave!

The success of books and writers on platforms such as Kickstarter, Patreon, Ko-Fi, Substack, and others proves that there is slack in the system. Readers and consumers of creative content are WILLING TO PAY MORE FOR CREATIVE WORK than publishers are currently receiving. But fans want to pay this money so the writer or artist gets a fair share.

With a book, it’s clear where it begins and ends. You open the cover and begin reading with an Introduction, or Once upon a time, which is just a different kind of introduction. And even if it doesn’t say the end, it’s clear when the book is over. There aren’t any more pages. Typically there’s a neat conclusion or a happily ever after which is not precisely an end to the story, but it’s a strong signal that now it is time for you, the reader, to leave. The book runs out of pages, there’s a back cover mirroring the front, and then you’re back on the street, blinking and looking around you.

I have never been terribly good at endings. I tend to remain steadfastly, doggedly loyal to things, people, jobs, hobbies, cities, apartments. I find myself still holding strong, trying to start up a dance party at 2 AM when it’s been clear to others for a while that the party is over, and they’ve all gone home or moved on to other things. (This is both a metaphor and a literal thing that has happened, more than once.)

And because I don’t traffic much in endings, I don’t have very much practice with beginnings, either. If you never stop doing anything you start, eventually you run out of time in your day, week, year, and you can’t add anything else to the stack.

The past two years haven’t gone to plan for me. That’s probably the understatement of this cursed decade. But even holding COVID aside, some choices I made haven’t really panned out. I found myself realizing last year that it was 2 am, and it wasn’t time for a dance party, it was time for a rest and a fresh start.

Today is May Day, a date with a long history in the labor movement. As COVID-19 has revealed even more than usual the deep inequality and injustice that underlies our entire capitalist experiment, it has also put the most vulnerable workers and humans at incredible risk. And companies such as Amazon, Target, Instacart, Trader Joe’s, and others are continuing to prioritize profit over people, as they always do.

A lot of people in the book industry are very aware of the issues and challenges that administrative and office workers face: low pay, long hours, lack of diversity and inclusion, concentration in expensive cities, and many more. But there are divisions between editors and booksellers, publicists and warehouse workers, that obscure how the system we’re in harms all of us.

I’ve spent a LOT of time researching Amazon for the book I’m writing, Don’t Steal This Book, about how money works in publishing and solutions for how to make change. What is clear to me, and so many others, is that the creation of Amazon was cynical, bullying, and exploitative, and those qualities have been encoded into the very DNA of the company.

From Don’t Steal This Book:

Recently HarperCollins UK announced that it will be making some of its backlist titles available via Kindle Unlimited.

“The publisher confirmed that as of today (1st October) 100s of backlist titles had been released as part of what was described as a ‘strategic and tactical’ push…HarperCollins UK is the first of the big corporate UK publishers to participate in the subscription scheme, first launched in 2014.” [The Bookseller, paywall]

To be included in the Kindle Unlimited program, self-published authors must make their titles available exclusively through Amazon’s program. The article does not clarify whether this is part of the terms of HarperCollins’ arrangement.

Authors who include their books as part of this program aren’t paid a fixed rate, but receive a share of the Amazon global fund, a pool of money worth $25.8M in September 2019, according to Amazon communications. Amazon sets the amount of money in this pool, and portions it out based on an author’s share of the total pages read in that month. It is not clear whether HC is being compensated this way or whether they have struck a different arrangement for inclusion of their titles.

An essay is making the rounds on publishing twitter right now that talks about how an author found herself completely up a creek, financially, after being paid $350,000 for her first few books.

“If just one person had sat me down when I signed my first book contract and explained how publishing works, how nothing is guaranteed, and how it often feels like playing Russian Roulette with words, I would have made much sounder financial and creative decisions. I would have set a foundation for a healthy life as an artist, laying the groundwork to thrive in uncertainty, to avoid desperation, panic, and bad decisions that would affect me for years to come.”

How to lose a third of a million dollars without really trying by Heather Demetrios

Chuck Wendig responded with advice:

I recently published a very transparent look at the costs and financial realities of self-publishing my book, Derby Life, after running a successful Kickstarter campaign. Trying to pull the numbers together for what I had spent on pre-production, production, and marketing, and the financial figures for sales and more was very eye-opening for me.

Financial transparency in publishing is something I care a lot about. If we don’t publicly talk about costs and payments, that leaves a lot of power in the hands of platforms and big entities, and makes it much harder for writers and small outlets to make ends meet. So I encourage folks to share information about what we earn and what we spend in relation to writing and publishing, to help create a better picture of what is normal for other writers.

This week, my agent, Dawn Frederick of Red Sofa Literary, will start the process of pitching my book proposal for Don’t Steal This Book: Why Paying for Words is Radical and Necessary to publishers. [Edit: I stopped working with Dawn Frederick in summer 2020.] I have so frequently been on another side of this process—as an agent’s assistant, an acquiring editor, or a freelance editor; as a semi-self-published or totally self-published author, but this is the first time I’m doing things the “traditional” way.

James Daunt of Waterstones (and the new CEO of Barnes & Noble) announced “a company-wide 4% bonus for Waterstones employees, following a "pretty good" financial year "driven above all by better book sales"

“The bonus comes three months after more than 9,000 Waterstones employees delivered a petition calling for the real living wage. At the time, Daunt said the chain could not afford to shell out for the real living wage, which stands at £10.55 an hour for the Greater London area and £9 an hour for the rest of the UK. The Bookseller understands that many of the booksellers who attended a two-hour meeting with Daunt to discuss the issue have since left the chain.” [The Bookseller]

“President Trump announced yesterday afternoon that he is prepared to impose 10% tariffs on $300 billion worth of goods.” It’s still unclear whether books will be excluded from this. [Publishers Weekly]

Last month, I was pleased to be invited to give a talk at the New School Publishing Institute, a weeklong introduction to the publishing industry led by John Oakes. In the wake of The Next Page, I’ve been thinking more about who gets access to information in publishing, so I have decided that as much as possible, if there’s interest, I’m going to start recording and sharing my talks.

At the New School, I gave a talk on how I got into publishing, the career path that led me to Kickstarter, how Kickstarter works for publishing, and specifically how I used it to fund and publish two books, and a few other thoughts about publishing. You can hear the talk here if I haven’t somehow botched the link.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my first Kickstarter project recently, which was to fund Derby Life: A Crash Course in the Incredible Sport of Roller Derby, which I published almost exactly four years ago. It’s pretty unusual in book publishing to get to do a book exactly the way you want to, and be beholden only to yourself (and your readers!) for the choices you make. I’m incredibly proud of the work I did on that project, and I’ve been thrilled to see that the book seems to have become what I set out to make, which is the book I wished had existed when I first discovered roller derby.

“Prime Day” is a “holiday” made up by Amazon to juice their bottom line by encouraging shoppers to lock themselves into the Amazon ecosystem by paying $119 a year for membership in a club that gets them fast free shipping on purchases made from the website, along with access to certain shows, movies, music, and other media for no incremental cost.

If you’re considering shopping at Amazon on Prime Day, here are five reasons to reconsider:

1: Workers in Minnesota are striking on July 15th, aka Prime Day

I encourage you to read this whole Vox piece, but here’s the crux in two quotes:
“Warehouse employees, who have long complained about punishing work conditions at Amazon’s fulfillment centers, are upset about the company’s recent decision to offer one-day shipping to Prime customers — putting unrealistic pressure on warehouse workers.”

I read a lot online about publishing, journalism, money, etc., and thought you might be interested in some of what I’m reading. If you’re not interested, feel free to skip the link posts, which I’ll call out in the subject lines.

As I mentioned in my March newsletter, I’m a huge advocate of public funding for writing. It’s heartening to see a policy proposal like this.

“One part of Yang’s plan for journalism is what he calls the American Journalism Fellows program, which would see the government pay for 535 experienced, vetted journalists to be placed in local newsrooms in every corner of the country.” Andrew Yang, the most meme-able 2020 candidate, also wants to save journalism (Josh Wood for Nieman Lab)

Around this time of year, I start hearing from recent graduates hoping to get into the publishing business. While I enjoy meeting with them and am inspired by their enthusiasm for books and the industry, I’m sometimes a little ambivalent about these meetings since I don’t always feel like I have amazingly helpful advice about how they can get into the publishing business while still being able to pay their bills.

People hear that publishing is a poorly paid industry, but cultural taboos around talking about money, which are extremely strong in the publishing world, mean that job searchers might not have a real idea of exactly what “doesn’t pay well” means in dollar terms.

I thought it might be helpful to share some of the facts and figures around what it took me to get into the book publishing industry, and how much (or, really, how little) I was paid along the way. Some of these numbers date back around a decade and a half, so I’ll also include my rent so you can understand what it meant in relative terms. All of these jobs except for the college ones were in New York City.

While still in college, I co-founded and ran a literary magazine for three years, which I worked on for free. I had a work-study job with a literary translation journal at my college for a semester or so in my senior year, where I was paid around $10/hour. I wasn’t paying rent at the time.

President Trump’s recent announcement that he wants to dramatically hike tariffs (fro 10% to 25%) on a huge range of consumer goods and materials shipped from the US to China could spell a big problem for book publishing.

“For years, U.S. publishers have relied on China for low-cost, high-capacity printing of four-color books, coffee table editions, Bibles and other standards of the trade and education market. The new tariff would almost surely result in higher prices, with publishers saying a hike of 50 cents or more is possible for a given book.” Book Sales are Steady, But Tariffs are on Publishers Minds, AP

Publishers Weekly is also writing about it here.

One thing I noticed when I looked at the list of items impacted by the proposed tariffs (screenshot below) is that it actually doesn’t seem to be books printed in China that will be impacted by the tariff, but the raw materials to produce our own books. (It’s totally possible that I’m wrong, but I haven’t been able to find anything that listed full printed books aside from diaries and notebooks. Post-send edit: A tip from a knowledgable reader informed me that there are FOUR lists of goods that are impacted, which include printed books, children’s books, dictionaries, and more.)

Over the past few weeks, as I’ve wrapped up The Next Page and prepared for Book Expo America this week, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what makes a great publishing event. I’ve attended a lot of them, especially in the past few years working for Kickstarter. I thought I’d share a short list of my favorite book events and what makes them great, in my opinion. This is not a full list of every event I’ve been to that I’ve enjoyed, which would be a very long list.

London Book Fair - London, England

The London Book Fair is my favorite of the large international rights fairs. It’s best for publishers and agents, since it’s primarily a business-to-business event focused on selling rights and building international partnerships. The size (2300 stands, ~25,000 attendees) means that there’s always something happening, but it’s manageable compared to the Frankfurt Book Fair’s 286,000(!) attendees. The venue, Olympia London, is gorgeous, with beautiful high white arches paned with glass. (see above!)

Livres Canada Books Export Exchange - Montreal, Canada

Baker & Taylor, one of the two major book wholesalers in the US, just announced that they are exiting the retail wholesale business. I believe this is bad news for booksellers, readers, and writers.

First off: what is a wholesaler? The short answer is that it bridges the gap between publishers and bookstores (among other purveyors of books.) It creates scale and simplicity for publishers and for bookstores, so a publisher doesn’t have to sell and ship to and bill thousands of stores for their products, and a store doesn’t have to work with and send money to and keep track of accounts for hundreds or thousands of publishers. It also smoothly and quickly manages the logistics of getting print books from point A (aka a publisher or warehouse) to point B (a store or library). Booksellers such as Greenlight Books in Brooklyn or Barnes & Noble in Manhattan or even Amazon can order copies of a book from Baker & Taylor.

B&T describes itself this way:

“Baker & Taylor is a leading distributor of books, video and music products to libraries, institutions and retailers…We ship more than 1 million unique products (SKUs) annually. We also maintain one of the largest in-stock inventories of books, videos and music in the U.S. - about 385,000 titles in inventory and more than 1.5 million titles available for order.”

Publishing has an innovation problem. Well, publishing has a lot of problems, and innovation is one of them.

I have spent the last five years deep-diving into the intersection of money and publishing, and I’ve spoken to hundreds of publishers, journalists, magazines, fiction writers, comics creators, booksellers, literary agents, and more. Through this exploration, I’ve seen that various people, companies, and slices of publishing have solved some of the most pressing issues that others are facing. But the various parts of publishing are siloed into separate businesses, and within those silos, varying levels of money and access create different levels of awareness of these. There really aren’t many events that invite book publishers and comics creators and booksellers and journalists to be in the same room (literally or figuratively) to talk about the challenges associated with writing, publishing, and connecting that work with an audience.

Publishing is also a very insider-y business. Often, one has to know the right person to even get invited into the rooms where important conversations are taking place. This is a major problem which keeps publishing exclusive at a time that it’s more important than ever for the books and media we read to represent the whole broad range of human experience.

My aim with creating The Next Page is to create real, innovative conversations across these writing and publishing silos so we can share ideas about how to do things better. And I want to make sure that as many people can be part of these conversations as possible.

I was absolutely crushed to hear that another bright light of the digital age, The Establishment, is ending their run. Their farewell letter, like everything they have done, is passionate and honest. The Establishment is just one more in a series of phenomenal publications that have not been able to make the money work in our current moment.

It’s fucking hard to run a magazine. It’s even harder to run a website, they’re hungry beasts that can never get enough, and they mostly don’t earn enough money to pay the people who run them. Very few generate enough money for the founders and editors to live on. Almost none of them survive past 10 years. Few of them survive past 5, honestly.

But there’s incredible value in launching and running one. An online magazine can be a great way to introduce and build up new writers. It can let you share your unique perspective, and start or add to the cultural conversation. It can also be an excellent avenue for artistic experimentation and great design.

I’m a huge believer in creating a print version of work published online. A lot of people are using print annuals or print quarterlies as a way to create revenue for their publication.

Hello friends! I spent last week at the London Book Fair, being on the ground just long enough to be completely confused about what time zone I was for my whole trip and also once I got home. Travel woes aside, I met with some phenomenal people, learned a lot about what people are excited about, and what they’re worried about (mostly Brexit, in the immediate future.)

The conversation I kept having with independent publishers was so dramatically different than the one that I have with independent publishers in the US that I thought I’d spend some time on it. It centers on the role of public funding.

For those of you who aren’t intimately familiar, the UK, Canada, and Europe have pretty substantial amounts of public funding for literature. According to this report, Arts Council England dedicated 46 million pounds to literature between 2015-2018. For comparison’s sake, the US National Endowment for the Arts contributed $116.6 million to literature between 1966 and 2016. Attempting to compare apples to apples is a bit tough in this situation without doing a lot more digging, but if we convert the ACE grants to dollars even at the current exchange rate (which likely underplays the ACE grant levels) that represents around $61M, or ~$15M per year, compared with an average of around $2.3M per year in the US over the past 50 years. (That’s not strictly accurate, as NEA funding was a lot lower back in 1966, but it’s challenging to find figures for the annual literary spend. If you know of a source, please send it over!) Comparing per capita spending, Arts Council England is spending around 27 cents* per person in the country on literature, vs. … gosh, I’m hoping I did this math wrong. If not, we spend $0.0070 per person in the US on literature. AKA around 2/3 of one penny per person in the US.

So as you can see, the US has a basically negligible amount of public funding for literature, while England’s funding is pretty robust. And the impact this has on publishing, especially independent publishing, is really massive. In England, many independent publishers get up and running with public funds, or they can finance a special project, or even fund most of their press and hire staff with a 2-year grant. Some publishers do all three. And writers have access to these funds as well.

Last year, I went to a publishing event that was sponsored by Amazon Literary Partnership, which gives out around $1M annually to literary organizations. I know this fact because Amazon’s name was all over the signs around the event, and the brilliant head of the organization kicked off the night with such effusive praise of Amazon’s generosity that if I hadn’t known better, I would have been sure that Amazon was the sole savior of writing and publishing.

The worst sort of abuser is one that makes you thank them until you somehow manage to gaslight yourself.

Aligning itself with Cave Canem and Copper Canyon is good business for Amazon. It keeps some of the squeakiest wheels quiet. You look like a real jerk when you’re publicly bad-mouthing someone who has just given you a gift. But what if the giver took the money to pay for that gift out of your wallet, along with everything else they found in there?

Last week, a story ran in the (Bezos-owned) Washington Post, trumpeting “Amazon.com is reconsidering its plan to bring 25,000 jobs to a new campus in New York City.” That’s how the article opened. “Bring 25,000 jobs” is exactly the same kind of savior language that Amazon evoked from their sponsored partner. It sounds like a gift basket. But Amazon is the most hard-nosed and rapacious company in the world today. They need to hire at least 25,000 people somewhere to keep expanding their worldwide dominance and crush all competition until the entire world’s population is buying only from Amazon.

Publishing has a problem. It’s a money problem.

Most people think the problem is that there isn’t any money in publishing. And that’s not wholly wrong. But I think the biggest issue is really who gets the money, how they get it, and how much of it they get.

I believe that talking about money, gauche as it is, is the most important step to fixing the myriad problems facing the various writing and publishing related industries. Many writers and publishers see the problems I’ll be talking about but don’t know where to start fixing them. I see these problems and I have a few ideas about where to begin.

So who am I?