What Do Book Publishers Actually Do?

Thoughts on the discourse

The discourse now turns to publishers once again. Most books go unread, claims one widely-read Substack piece, and the traditional publishing model is rotting away. Others counterbalanced that view, and I found myself, despite my own newfound zeal for the self-published, agreeing more with the correctives offered for the viral piece. Rather than rehash all the arguments, I’ll explain, instead, what I think traditional publishers still do for writers—and what, for a variety of reasons, they do not. The old model is old, but it’s built on a certain logic. It’s not vanishing anytime soon.

Five corporate conglomerates control much of book publishing, though not all of it. Amazon controls much of bookselling, though Barnes & Noble and independent bookstores remain durable businesses, despite claims to the contrary. The distribution of books is largely controlled by Ingram in an arrangement that some publishers believe is predatory. Monopolization came to book publishing and distribution in the second half of the twentieth century and this has been, from a cultural standpoint, rather debilitating, especially as the counterculture withers and the mainstream loses its vibrancy.

At the same time, it has never been a better time to be a self-publisher, unless you count the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when publishing itself was much more bespoke and a poet like Walt Whitman could find fame after selling Leaves of Grass door-to-door. Publishing a book yourself can be a relatively low-cost endeavor and the internet has made it far easier to attract an audience of some sort. For writers who already have a degree of fame or a following, self-publishing holds a particular appeal; go to the fans and raise the cash to pump out new books. The science fiction and fantasy author Brandon Sanderson held a Kickstarter campaign a couple of years ago that raised more than $41 million. Most authors, of course, can’t command even a fraction of that, but it’s not impossible to crowdfund the cash for the equivalent of the small advance (a few thousand dollars or less) a publisher might pay you.

Since I care most about literary fiction, I am interested in what self-publishing can do in that space—where writing is what is prized most and the boundaries of language are pushed. Traditional publishing has grown ideologically and sociologically homogenous. Smart, daring writers who would have found publishers twenty years ago are now going out on their own, calculating that it’s better to have a work exist than to let it wait in the purgatory of the slush pile. I do not blame them. Even with an agent, I’ve waited as long as five months to get any sort of reply from a publisher. And I’ve found it a genuine slog to acquire an agent. Agents themselves, if they respond to you at all, can take many months to decide whether they want to take on a project. The pandemic era, I’ve been told, has only lengthened wait times.

Talented writers, in general, are not getting the opportunity to publish consistently. A writer recently asked why it seemed like so many short story writers and novelists were publishing less than their predecessors of the last century. It can be startling, in retrospect, to see how many books the likes of Philip Roth, Joan Didion, John Updike, and Joyce Carol Oates (she is in her own league entirely) actually published. There aren’t as many leading literary writers who have ten or twenty books in their bibliographies and some of this is a function of economics: a writer can’t simply live on book advances anymore, thanks to cost-of-living increases, and there is less of an incentive to pour all effort into a singular book. But I also blame the industry itself for its obscene sluggishness. Few realize that once a novel is accepted for publication, it can take as long as two years for it to actually appear online and in bookstores. (Nonfiction can work on a much more condensed timescale.) My next novel, which I’m excited to announce later this week, was first finished in the summer of 2020. It is not an exaggeration to say that publishers in the last century could produce works of literary quality at a faster clip. Why they did so is not entirely clear, but I have one theory: editors. Ambitious editors were trusted by their bosses to curate lists according to taste; they were not bound by committees, as editors are today, and they could weigh aesthetic and economic factors almost equally. Dense, difficult works could emerge from major publishing houses. If an editor was enough of a star—Maxwell Perkins, Robert Gottlieb, Toni Morrison, Gordon Lish, Sonny Mehta, and Gary Fisketjon come to mind—they could decide, almost unilaterally, which novels appeared in bookstores. This was a lot of power to invest in individuals, but it allowed for idiosyncratic or even subversive works to find large audiences. Anecdotally, these editors also seemed to read more. Gottlieb once said he could read an entire manuscript within a few days and make a decision on whether he wanted to acquire it. Editors, in the 2020s, do not seem to read with such efficiency or respect for a writer’s time. In their defense, they are also overworked and underpaid. Few can ever hope to enjoy Gottlieb’s wealth or privilege.

Still, the business model of publishing is not in danger of crumbling. I do believe Substack is an underrated networking and promotional tool for writers, a blogging and social network populated by those who care about the written word. I plan to hustle my next books, aggressively, on Substack. I also admire those who serialize their books on Substack. When the serialization is done, it still makes most sense to put that book into print form, either with a traditional publisher or through self-publishing. Part of the advantage of Substack itself is that it has a logic for book promotion that is increasingly absent from traditional publishing. Book publishers themselves struggle now, in this decentralized digital era, to imagine a formula that can lead to increased sales for particular books. Until the 2010s, the job of a book publicist was straightforward enough: get the author and the book as much media attention as possible. Aim for a wide range of book reviews in newspapers and magazines. Schedule a regional or nationwide book tour. Hope to land some radio and TV interviews. Take out advertisements in newspapers, magazines, and industry periodicals. Secure blurbs from esteemed writers and tastemakers. Some of this still works; much of it doesn’t. Newspaper review sections are dying and existing reviews themselves don’t necessarily drive sales. (Substack, too, can be the future of book coverage here, as trusted writers with dedicated audiences recommend books to their readers.) Social media is spotty at best, with BookTok offering a boost to some genre works but proving useless for a lot of new literature if you’re not willing to marinate on TikTok for months on end. Even book clubs and daytime TV don’t offer automatic boosts. Yet it must be said books still sell. Business isn’t booming like it was during the pandemic period, but it’s far from dire. It’s just that no one quite knows what button to press to make particular books sell or make a certain author’s work into a cultural event. Conglomerate books can appear and disappear as fast as any self-published book these days.

What advantages do traditional publishers actually offer? If you aren’t self-publishing, you are much more likely to accrue conventional media attention, but conventional media attention isn’t guaranteed to sell books and books that appear from Big 5 imprints are not always attracting press. Not every Penguin Random House novel is getting mentioned in the New York Times. There is still more prestige allotted to a book published by an imprint versus one put out by the author herself and prestige is not irrelevant. We all wouldn’t mind vying for awards and such. But it’s just as easy to have a novel out with a conglomerate and find it nowhere near award consideration. What is obvious enough is that the advantages gained through traditional publishing are not as great as they once were. Not as great, though, cannot be conflated with none. A self-published author can vacuum up all the royalty cash, but she cannot benefit from an advance. Advances range from the hundreds to the many thousands of dollars and there are writers who have bought homes on their advance cash. Publishers will do all the work, for free, that the self-publisher must finance, like cover design, editing, and creating promotional materials. Publishers have a far easier time getting books into bookstores. Agents and publishers, together, can help writers earn additional income through audio rights, foreign rights, and, if lucky, TV and film rights. Self-publishing and ventures like Authors Equity put far more (or all) of the risks and expenses on the writer. Ideally, perhaps, this wouldn’t be so.

My own selfish longing is for less homogeny and more risk-taking in publishing. I want bolder, more ambitious fiction. I want publishers of literary fiction to care more about aesthetics and less about politics. I want authors in America to grapple genuinely with the greatness and terror of America. I want less “wan little husks.” I want more of what John Pistelli has termed Romantic Realism. I want a new and better culture. Whatever delivers us there—the self-publishers, the conglomerates, the indies—I am for it. Let that world come.