I wrote a version of this essay around ten years ago. It was my answer to the ever-repeated question of authors being better off self-publishing or pursuing a traditional deal through an existing Big Publishing House (BPH).
Back then we had a resource known as AuthorEarnings, a now-defunct website created by best-selling author and self-publishing guru Hugh Howey and a statistics guru then known only as Data Guy, (Paul Abbassi) in an attempt to expose what kind of money authors were really making. Hugh’s data raised quite a bit of controversy, with rebuttals coming from several trade-publishing supporters such as Mike Shatzkin, Dana Weinberg at DBW, and agents such as Donald Maass calling the whole study such things as “incomplete”, “a stellar example of what not to do”, and saying that it “raises more questions than answers”.
Sidenote: Abbassi ended AuthorEarnings in 2005, taking the data that was provided to him by many indie authors with him. He then founded BookStat in 2007, which services mainly Big Publishing Houses and charges them fees that are well out of reach of the indie authors that helped him.
This is his reply when asked about the future of Author Earnings:
“Bookstat.com is totally separate commercial business from Author Earnings, with an informal agreement to occasionally provide some aggregate data to AE on a pro-bono basis,” he wrote. “Like Bookscan, Bookstat’s customers are generally businesses with at least $10 million in annual revenues, to be able to afford Bookstat.com yearly subscription fees.”
There has not been a free Author Earnings report since 2018.
Bookstat was acquired by Podium Audio in 2022.
The Covid 19 plague called into question much of Bookstat’s reporting.
I didn’t argue Hugh’s numbers then, and I’m certainly not going to do so now. Most people took those numbers and twisted them to support whatever agenda they had at the time. One thing that I did notice in the many responses was the insistence by the trade-pub crowd that the numbers meant little, that it was simply not how the trade publishing world worked. They said this while offering no data to support their argument. Regardless, they failed to see (or tactfully ignored) the main question that the reports attempt to answer.
Is a new writer better off pursuing a trade-pub deal, or going it alone with self-publishing?
A lot of things have changed since then. But one thing that hasn’t is the way that the Big Publishing Houses view their customers. They may view writers differently, but that is only because they have to. Today they view them in two groups; writers that are aware of the option/advantage of self-publishing, and those that are still in the dark and view the BPH’s as their only option.
But that’s a separate topic, one that I’ll pursue at a later date. For now, let’s talk about how the BPH views its customers.
Notice that I didn’t say readers. Why? Read on.
It’s now accepted that publishers no longer view the reader as their customer, the customer for the publishing industry is now accepted to be the bookstore. The reader is viewed as a persona, a variable to plug into an algorithm in an attempt to find the next 50 Shades of Grey.
So, from a BPH point-of-view, what kind of reader are you? Most would answer by genre; I like Thrillers and Science fiction. I think trade-pub sees the reader in an entirely different way. To trade-pub, you the reader fall into one of three categories;
The Casual Reader: This is the reader who divides their entertainment time and money among several other different sources, be they TV, Movies, or Newspapers, in addition to Books. They stick to authors they know, usually best-selling names, and rarely divert from them. Their busy lives and short supply of free time limit their reading to less than 12 books a year. Price is not much of an issue due to the low volume of books they purchase. They prefer Paperback and Hardcover or are late adopters of e-books. They are also the group least likely to try an unknown self-published author.
The Voracious Reader: This is the reader who spends his entertainment time and money on books and little else. They put one down and immediately shop for the next one. They make up the smallest percentage of the reading public but spend the most dollars-per-person by a large amount. Most were early adopters of the e-reader, and due to their reading appetites seek out lower priced books. They are the group most likely to try an unknown self-published author.
The Defensive Reader: This reader prefers to get their entertainment from sources other than books, reading perhaps one or two a year at the most. However, they are by far the largest population of readers out there. They read mostly for social reasons; when the Casual Readers in their social group are all talking-FaceBooking-TicToking about a book they will not hesitate to pick it up. They are driven by Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO). They are the group most likely to be seen reading the hot book-of-the-moment, and also the ones telling the world via every social connection they have what it is they are reading, thus promoting it even further. The Defensive Reader is what makes a book a blockbuster. By their nature they are nearly impossible to market to. The Defensive reader requires a Casual Reader to stimulate their reading/purchasing of a book.
What’s changed in the last ten years is the wide adoption of social media and the rise of the “influencer”. One influencer can equal dozens or even thousands of Casual Readers. This despite their actual knowledge of the book itself or the expertise of that influencer in relation to the book’s subject. One viral ad/video can work the same way. Clicks and Likes trigger FOMO, and FOMO leads to defensive reader engagement.
Most industries would target the voracious consumer as logic states they would be their most valued customer. If your product were candy bars this would be true. Books however, are much different in flavor and ingredients. They also cost a significant amount of money to produce and a different recipe is required every time. It is much more profitable to make one candy bar that everyone likes and sell it millions of times than it is to produce millions of different candy bars and sell one of each to millions of people.
As book prices rose, voracious readers found other means than buying new to feed their habit. Libraries, used book stores, book swaps, etc. In example, for every reader who bought Stephen King’s latest in either hardcover or paperback, there were probably fifty who didn’t buy the book new but read it anyway.
To test this, I visited my local library when King’s book Kennedy came out, I reserved it on the library list, and was informed that I was number 234 in the queue. That means 234 people who wanted to read his latest, but weren’t willing to pay retail for it, were willing to wait behind 233 others. Ten years later and I still have yet to receive a call telling me it is now my turn. With low-priced ebooks, these readers are buying again since it’s so cost effective. Here is where Big Pub is making a big mistake, again. By slapping high prices on ebooks, they are discouraging this group. The Author Earnings reports proved (to me) that this “shadow” market was now being served by indies.
Consider this quote from Mike Shatzkin, made on his blog titled “Vendor-managed inventory: why it is more important than ever“, April 23, 2013;
“Looking at the store’s records for the month, 65% of the units sold were single units: one copy of a title. Only 35% were of books that sold 2 or more. (I didn’t ask the question, but that would suggest that 80-90 percent of the titles that sold any copies only sold one.)
Then, the following month, once again 65% of the units sold were singles. But only 20-30 percent of them were the same books as had sold as singles the prior month. Upwards of 70% of them were different titles. And upwards of 70% of the ones that sold one the prior month didn’t sell at all.”
What Mike is describing is Casual Reader purchasing activity. A book a month and a different title each month.
If you combine this statement with the reader personas, then add in the economics of book production and distribution, it’s not hard to come to the conclusion that the targeted reader for the BPH’s, the one they spend their marketing efforts on, is the Casual Reader. Once you realize this every baffling practice adopted by Big-Pub falls into place; the select list of big-name authors, the monthly new releases, the high cost of trade-pub ebooks, the purchased coop space, the limited marketing push for new authors, the six-month shelf life, the lack of marketing for the existing mid-list. It all makes sense now.
More importantly it leads to this; There is an upper limit to how many Casual Reader Authors a publishing house can have at any one time.
Following this profit-maximizing strategy is the way they position themselves for the elusive blockbuster novel. This is the book that attracts the Defensive Reader, the reader who was the real target all along. Once this happens that book becomes pure profit for the publisher.
While the Casual Reader is the target for all the Big-Pub marketing, the end-goal is always the Defensive Reader that they cultivate. Whether it be by word-of-mouth, social networks, influencers, viral ads, or just peer pressure, they are the trigger that produces the blockbuster. It’s a trigger that Big-Pub cannot pull on their own. The Voracious Reader, and the authors they read, are viewed as the unfortunate cost of reaching the Casual Reader. The six-month trial period a new author/title gets is simply how long it takes Big-Pub to determine whether or not the Defensive Reader has been triggered and FOMO has come into play or not.
Trade-Pub lives in fear of losing the Casual Reader. If a Casual Reader were to become a Voracious Reader that would lead to less Casual Reader Authors being read, Big-Pub does not produce enough of them, and if they did, the cost of reading them all would be very high. If this were to happen it would reduce the chances of the blockbuster trigger being pulled. This is why Big-Pub regulates the release of Casual Reader Authors titles, slowing them down to a schedule that prevents the Casual Reader from becoming anything else. The Defensive Reader is an elusive animal, but their numbers are HUGE. 50 Shades of Grey did a lot to support this, most readers admitted that they had never read a book in that genre before, yet the book sold millions of copies.
This is further supported by the hand-written note made by Carolyn Reidy, CEO of Simon and Shuster at the time, on the margin of an E-mail made to Eddie Cue of Apple in regard to the Big 6-Apple price fixing case;
“Higher prices slows Ebks/casual purchaser/keeps retailers/stops authors leaving”
The Apple/Big-6 case pointed to just how afraid the publishers were. Price is usually the defense of a collusion charge, but the real reason is simply that Amazon can do something that they cannot; target the Voracious Reader.
In the beginning Amazon was like most on-line businesses, they just had a more forward-thinking guy at the helm. He saw a future for books that they did not. Amazon was the first company that had a motivation to turn Casual Readers into Voracious Readers.
Jeff Bezos modeled Amazon around the idea that selling one unit each of a million products would make the same amount of money as selling a million units of one product. Books were the perfect product for this, particularly in digital format. The only thing he lacked was the means and the content. This lead to the invention of the Kindle (the means) and the creation of Kindle Direct Publishing (the content). Amazon simply needed more content, a tsunami of it if you will, than the BPH’s were willing to produce.
The BPH’s biggest fear is due to the fact that they have no way to copy or compete with this. If they join Amazon (without the aid of collusion) they lose a large degree of control (read; Pricing). Remember, Trade-pub depends on the Casual Reader > Defensive Reader > Blockbuster Model. They count on the Grisham’s, Patterson’s, Brown’s, and King’s, to keep them afloat and provide the funds necessary for them to throw mid-list spaghetti at the wall hoping for the next 50 Shades to stick.
To be fair, Amazon, and the self-publishers they enable, are doing the same thing. Most are also hoping to trigger a blockbuster. They are just doing so by way of the Voracious Reader > Defensive reader > Blockbuster Model. The big difference is that while doing so the authors are keeping their copyright, maintaining complete control of their product, publishing on their own schedule, writing what they wish to write, giving the readers longer than six months to discover them, and according to Hugh’s data, making a lot more money while they do it.
As soon as writers realize that Big-Pub is not even looking for the next John Grisham, and is only looking for the next E.L. James, will they still go the way of the query letter? Will they still waste months on submissions and hand over 15% of a lousy advance to an agent, all while they wait a year or more for their book to get its six-month chance at the lottery, a lottery that may not even exist as they think it does? What will the mid-list authors currently under contract do with their next book?
What will the Big Publishers do when the quality writers no longer submit their work? What will happen when the successful self-published authors refuse to be cherry picked, turning down million dollar offers, leaving their agents, leaving their publishers, or simply never sending a query at all? Without content and a steady supply of fresh spaghetti to throw at the wall, what will they do?
We’re now 14 years into this business we call self-publishing. The BPH’s have been thoroughly disrupted yet are maintaining a lose grip on the print market. The new reality is that there is very little that a BPH can do for an aspiring writer that the writer cannot do for themselves. As more authors realize this, the less of a hold the BPH’s will have on the publishing world.
When that happens there will be nothing left but the writers and the readers, as it should be.
Randall Wood is a former Special Operations Medic and the author of the political thriller Closure.