[HN Gopher] The publishing industry has a gambling problem
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The publishing industry has a gambling problem
Author : Caiero
Score : 41 points
Date : 2025-10-07 18:55 UTC (4 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (thewalrus.ca)
| babblingfish wrote:
| When ebooks first came on the scene, self-publishing was
| profitable. Due to relatively low competition, new authors and
| new releases could get traction with minimal marketing budgets.
| At the time, it seemed the great equalizer we'd all been waiting
| for had finally arrived.
|
| Nowadays, ebooks is a huge industry with thousands of new
| releases every day. Word on the street is 10k-30k of marketing
| spend per year is required to generate any sales at all.
|
| It's maybe the case that books as a whole is a winner-takes-all
| market. Is there a model could we create to bolster out the
| middle? If you look at sales data, you'll see the #1 bestseller
| sells more than 10x more copies than #2 on the list. It just
| makes economical sense for the big publishers to focus on their
| bestsellers.
|
| There's so many high quality books being published each day. It's
| overwhelming! I guess all we can do is continue our patronage for
| the authors we like, to trust the recommendations from people we
| respect, and to be willing to try out new authors and new
| releases.
|
| When working on a book for 2 years nets a $30k advance and it's
| unlikely to payout. It feels the incentives to pursue writing
| full-time are increasingly diminishing. Sometimes I wonder if for
| the majority of people who'd like to pursue authorship that doing
| so part-time is the only choice.
| irq-1 wrote:
| > Is there a model could we create to bolster out the middle?
|
| Extend Copyright? (no, no..)
|
| I have two ideas:
|
| - Recommendations. Publishers connect with private LLM/Agents
| for custom recommendations. They'd need to keep reviews
| private, but could trade them among themselves.
|
| - Insurance Pool. Authors could add works to a pool of books,
| and the profits could be split. Publishers would need to
| maintain the quality of books or authors won't join.
| prerok wrote:
| You mean like an authorship coop? Might work, but the main
| problem is authors' self importance. Not a single author I
| know of would opt for it. They are all just impoverished
| millionares.
|
| For less narcissistic authors it may well work, though. Will
| pitch it, thanks for the idea!
| Telemakhos wrote:
| > There's so many high quality books being published each day.
|
| Great is the stream of the Assyrian river, but much filth of
| earth and much refuse it carries on its waters. And not of
| every water do the Melissae carry to Deo, but of the trickling
| stream that springs from a holy fountain, pure and undefiled,
| the very crown of waters.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Username checks out.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Perfect quote!
| prerok wrote:
| I think part-time is indeed the only option and has been for a
| long long time. The e-books only shortly promised a disruption
| until it fell apart. As you say, partly due to advertising, but
| partly also due to being no editor. Editors can be both an
| annoyance but they are also a blessing, because they can advise
| as to what works and what does not.
|
| If most people will just read one book per year, or better yet,
| will choose which one book to give to someone else (not having
| read it at all), of course they will choose #1.
|
| I vividly remember the disappointment I felt when I gave #2 to
| an acquaintance (where I read both 1 and 2 and genuinely liked
| the one I gave better), only to be told that I gave the #2 and
| why didn't they receive the #1, and if that meant anything. Ok,
| off on a tangent, but geez that still hurts :(
| dingnuts wrote:
| > If you look at sales data, you'll see the #1 bestseller sells
| more than 10x more copies than #2 on the list
|
| All commercial art follows this pattern, a Pareto
| Distribution[0]. The top musician gets 10x what #2 does. Same
| with athletes. On and on. The rule applies to many competitive
| fields. The sky is blue, but it's astute of you to notice.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
| borroka wrote:
| I don't think there have ever been any particular incentives to
| become a full-time writer. Most of us have read articles or
| books (Graydon Carter's) that have recently talked about the
| huge sums paid to some journalists 20 or 40 years ago, but the
| ratio of aspiring writers to well-paid writers has always
| yielded very high numbers.
|
| It's the same in all creative professions, and even more so for
| those that grant visibility. I think most would be fine
| considering this activity as a part-time commitment, instead of
| chasing something that has little chance of coming true. Of
| course, you can't be a part-time athlete and aspire to
| greatness, but I don't think the same applies to writing, for
| example.
|
| Now, we are in the realm of anecdotes, but the novel "Il
| Gattopardo," which I consider to be among the top three
| Italian, and perhaps European, novels of the 20th century, was
| written by an amateur who did not even send the manuscript out
| to be considered for publication. It was discovered after
| Tomasi di Lampedusa's death by Giorgio Bassani, a talented
| writer who did not write full-time and who had incredible
| success with some fantastic novels, such as "Il giardino dei
| Finzi-Contini" (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis).
| BJones12 wrote:
| > It's maybe the case that books as a whole is a winner-takes-
| all market.
|
| It seems that any product with effectively capped consumption
| will become a winner-take-all market. People go to the movie
| theater 6 times a year, so that's winner-take-all. People read
| 12 books a year, so that becomes winner-take-all. People go to
| approximately 1 university, so while an average university has
| 200 million in endowments, Harvard has 50 billion (250x). Heck,
| I'm pretty sure the same factor is leading to the rise of
| megachurches because people are only capable of attending
| approximately 1 service per week.
|
| I recall the book Blockbusters by Anita Elberse (2013) being
| one of the first to point this out.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > People read 12 books a year, so that becomes winner-take-
| all.
|
| It doesn't sound like you know much about the market for
| books.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >That same 2016 publication showed that on average,
| Americans read 12 books a year.
|
| Sounds like they may know more than you in this case.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| There is nothing approximating a cap at that level. You
| can easily read five times as many books. The proposed
| mechanism cannot work.
|
| Note also that the average of 12 books a year is
| dominated by people who read zero a year, and those
| people aren't relevant to the market.
| IanCal wrote:
| Would a figure of 60 books per year change the argument?
| 100? 200?
|
| There's a realistic cap on total number of books consumed
| by a large enough group of people to matter economically.
| pixl97 wrote:
| You might have skipped statistics class in school...
|
| At the end of the day there is a limitation to how many
| books a human can read in a year/month/day/nano second.
| Add to that the number of people that consume massive
| numbers of books is positively tiny. Now add in that the
| number of books being written is increasing far faster
| than the amount of reading that is happening on average
| (which i believe is decreasing due to other forms of
| entertainment).
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| I don't know anything about the reading habits of
| Americans, but I know Anscombe's quartet says that ain't
| the whole story, not by a long shot.
| hshdhdhehd wrote:
| Word on the street 30k spend, I guess that scenario is someone
| unknown. But what if someone builds an audience first. Granted
| that audience building isn't free.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| There's no book recommendation system in the same way that we
| have music recommendation through Spotify et al, and
| video/movie recommendation through Netflix, YouTube et al.
|
| The best way to discover books is when they are mentioned in
| other good books, but this does nothing for new books.
|
| A book recommendation system will need to have access to full-
| text search within the books to work well. That will solve the
| problem.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Recommendation systems are just bad across the board.
|
| Audible says "You liked this John Scalzi book? Here's every
| other Scalzi book as a recommendation! Also a few other very
| popular books which are almost exactly the same as the one
| you just read!"
|
| Amazon says "You just bought a hammer, here are 37 more
| hammers in case you want another one!"
|
| Why yes, I do like books with spaceships in them, but maybe I
| want to see more than the next 20 most popular books with
| spaceships in them...
|
| Recommendation engines fail by failing to make connections
| that aren't in the immediate neighborhood.
| Zigurd wrote:
| I wrote a book about Macintosh programming in C in the 1980s,
| when the first self hosted C compilers became available. At the
| time, I could barely write a coherent paragraph. Before
| Stackoverflow and other online resources people were desperate
| enough to buy tens of thousands of copies. I made serious money
| off of that.
|
| I quit writing books about coding when I wrote one with a team
| of amazing co-authors about Android programming that was 100
| times better than my first book and sold a 10th of the number
| of copies.
|
| Unless you're Peter Norton, you never made a lot of money
| writing books even when it was profitable to do so. And I
| suspect a lot of Peter Norton books had ghost writers.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Nowadays, ebooks is a huge industry with thousands of new
| releases every day.
|
| > There's so many high quality books being published each day.
| It's overwhelming!
|
| Thousands of new releases a day could mean as many as two or
| three in high quality. That's more than you can read, but not
| enough to overwhelm anyone. What's overwhelming is the several
| thousand that are garbage.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That goes for almost everything, these days.
|
| Job-hunting is a brutal, humiliating slog, because of the
| thousands of junk CVs even the most obscure job posting gets.
|
| Selling high-quality stuff (software, hardware, widgets,
| literature, etc.) is a nightmare, because you have to tread
| water above the deluge of junk.
|
| It's really depressing.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > It's maybe the case that books as a whole is a winner-takes-
| all market.
|
| Books, music, films, games, basically all creative things.
| Because everyone can just watch/read/listen to the best of the
| best. It's not like restaurants where the consumer actually
| consumes the product.
|
| It's the result of global scale distribution networks. Long ago
| you could be okay-famous by being the best guitarist in the
| village and people would appreciate you. Or you could be the
| local history buff. But if you write enter the global arena,
| you'll compete with everyone else. There's no limit to how many
| books the famous author can sell, or how many times a famous
| singer's song can be streamed on Spotify. There's simply very
| little demand for mediocre stuff. Also, people want to be able
| to talk to each other about cultural things. Even if it's a bit
| more fragmented today, people still want to belong together
| through liking the same things.
| kace91 wrote:
| Winner doesn't necessarily equal better.
|
| Media takes time to consume, which means that many products
| won't be consumed at all even if they are good, much less be
| consumed enough to reach the point where word of mouth can
| achieve virality.
|
| The reality is that the best winner is usually a product good
| enough to not be laughed at (though not usually best in
| class), with some characteristics that make it marketable,
| and with strong backing behind (money, connections or both).
|
| One funny effect is that you end up with artists talking
| about viral topics like social justice and discrimination
| like it's first hand experience, but a quick check will show
| they come from immensely privileged backgrounds.
| Finnucane wrote:
| None of this is new, it has been this way for decades. It just
| gets worse as the industry gets more concentrated, and the
| publishers are more tightly controlled by media conglomerates and
| equity investors who treat them as black boxes for the extraction
| of value. I haven't worked on the acquisitions side in a long
| time, but practically everything in this article could have been
| written thirty years ago. The midlist where you'd try to grow a
| new author's audience was already being squeezed out.
| nemomarx wrote:
| I feel like part of this is that ebooks basically exist on Amazon
| and a few other large store fronts. Maybe if each niche had their
| own markets you could try and compete in smaller pools?
| precompute wrote:
| Going by what's popular on Goodreads, the publishing industry
| thinks the way out of this uncertainty is smut disguised as
| fantasy.
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