Why Am I So Negative About Traditional Book Publishing? by Dean Wesley Smith

"Traditional book publishing with thousands of publishers worked pretty well from 1960 to 1995 and then it just fell apart. Those good years are where the myths built up. Now in the last 30 years, traditional publishing and its four publishers has become a sad little echo of the thousands of publishers that came before."

Full article here. 

One of the commentators to the above post (Steve Perry) wrote: "Trad-pub peaked, I think, just before the Great Recession of 2007-2009, that took with it the traditional publishing midlist and the careers of a shitload of writers." 

I have to join in and say this entirely mirrors my own experience. The midlist (the place for quirky interesting books, often nonfiction) started dying around 1995, when all the mainstream publishing went fishing for potential bestsellers, leaving everything else behind.  University presses tried to pick up the slack, but what they pay is risible, so most authors sensibly didn't go that route. 

With the 2007-2009 crash, all publishers tightened their purse strings, and pushed a lot of good writers, who didn't sell according to bestseller standards, out of the marketplace. Within a few years, a writer had to be a heavy self-promoter (on all the social medias) to get a publisher in New York to listen to their proposals, and publishing decisions increasingly were ruled by the marketing departments, who nixed everyone without large a social media presence. It really has become depressing: why do all the work so that a publisher can take all the rights and the money (throwing pennies toward the author), dumbing something down in order to appeal to idiots?  I speak of course of the non-fiction market. If publishers treated writers fairly, I'd have a lot more entries in my bibliography.  As it stands, it's just not worth all the effort. 

 

 

 

The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction

I would substitute "literature" for "literary fiction" in the title of this short article by Elizabeth Kaye Cook and Melanie Jennings from Persuasion, but a lot of what it says about the state of publishing in the 21st century is spot on. Witness:

Mirroring many other American industries, publishing has followed the path of consolidation, starting when Random House bought Knopf in 1960. What followed was a fifty-year feeding frenzy of mergers and acquisitions. In 2012, when Random House and Penguin merged, we were left with today’s “Big Five”: Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster. 

And I'm not sure I see much hope in the current situation--certainly not for the writers who expect to be paid for their work. Small presses may be good for getting publication, but the terms are unpropitious. 

The full article can be found here.

Cancel Culture Dominates Children's Literature

Jonah Winter's article, "Cancel Culture Dominates Children's Literature," published on 5 February 2024 in The Wall Street Journal, is a sad story of the state of publishing today.

"Children's publishers now live in fear of these activists, terrified of showing up on their radar with a book or author that could be deemed “problematic”—meaning out of alignment with the activists' puritanical code. According to that code, an author's identity must match a book's subject matter. Further, certain books can harm children, the activists believe, and books they deem harmful must be removed. If that sounds similar to the right-wing activists' mission, it's because it is. The only difference is that while right-wing activists merely want certain books removed from particular schools, left-wing activists want the books they target annihilated."

The full article is here, but probably behind a paywall. Jonah Winter has also done a picture book for children (with artist Gary Kelley) on a related topic. It's called Banned Book. Worth a look, and worth supporting.