Special Guest: Jane Friedman, on What Happened in the Book Publishing Industry in 2022

The transcript below is unedited output from OpenAI Whisper.

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Hi, I’m Len Epp from Leanpub and in this episode of the Front Matter podcast, I’ll be interviewing Jane Friedman. Based in Cincinnati, Jane is an expert on the book publishing industry and a popular speaker and consultant on business strategy for both publishers and authors and co-founder and editor of The Hot Sheet, which is by some distance the best newsletter there is for authors interested in keeping up on book industry trends and controversies. You can follow her on Twitter at Jane Friedman and check out her website at janefriedman.com. In addition to The Hot Sheet, I also recommend you sign up for her really fun Electric Speed newsletter, which includes great tips on all kinds of apps and digital resources for writers and content creators in general. In this interview, we’re going to talk about what happened in the book publishing industry in 2022 and maybe a little bit about what might happen in 2023. So thank you very much, Jane, for being on the Front Matter podcast again. My pleasure. Thank you for having me back. So the last time you were on was in May 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic. And so, you know, a lot of the things I think we’re probably going to talk about are going to be kind of high level pandemic things. And one of those things that was a potential issue early on in the year was supply chain management, something that we all sort of became familiar with, that we maybe weren’t familiar with before things started getting clogged. But in particular, for the book publishing industry, paper was a very serious issue. So I was wondering if you could recall kind of what the challenges were and how things worked out. Well, it wasn’t just paper, it was basically everything that’s required to make a book. Prior to the pandemic, the printing industry was already consolidating. And books are a very small percentage of what paper is manufactured for and what printers print. So, you know, the book publishing industry is in this kind of unlucky position of being like lowest man on the totem pole, as far as printers are concerned. And so what’s happened is that over time, there’s just less and less capacity for printing books. And then the pandemic came and really threw a wrench in things. As of today, I think things are starting to recover. But there are still issues that, you know, are painful that are leading to increased costs, like printing in China has been problematic for quite some time now, I think, for reasons that are obvious. And then freight costs were sky high during the pandemic, and they’re just now starting to come down. But this has all had the the effect of increasing prices on books, and, you know, people who buy ebooks might not really notice increased prices as much. I mean, they were already high to begin with. That’s another thing we could discuss. But print books, especially hardcovers, I think it’s not unusual to see a few dollars more being charged. Now, a lot of publishers had to change their pricing, especially small presses, you know, they might have been able to sell a paperback for 15 to 20. Prior to the pandemic, now it’s 20 and up. It’s for me, it’s actually been shocking to see some of these price increases, but that’s where we are. And I don’t know that it’s going to be resolved, except for the very biggest publishers. I know it might not be resolved for three years. And it may be the new normal. Yeah. And I imagine especially with just general inflation, the general action that we’re all experiencing people might, in a sense, the publishing industry might get off the hook a little bit for raising prices, because people are just like, well, the price of everything is going up. True, true. In the UK, that’s where I’ve seen more noise coming from booksellers saying, you know, the prices aren’t sustainable. Like we see people coming into the bookshop seeing the 30 or 35 pound hardcover and then leaving. But I think they’re in a little bit of a different situation, because they have more discounters, grocery stores, places that are selling books for half off, and we don’t have quite the same phenomenon here, except, I mean, it’s called Amazon, I guess. But it’s not, I don’t, I haven’t seen booksellers yet in the United States complain. But certainly hardcover sales are down this year. Probably that’s because sales were so great in 2021. So they can’t help but come down. But I think there is, there’s starting to be some concern that the market is softening again. But we’ll see. It’s too early to say. Yeah, one of the impacts of the pandemic and people, particularly people being at home and locked up, book sales went up for anyone listening who wasn’t aware of that, you know, there were various industries that profited greatly from the pandemic. I shouldn’t say the book publishing industry profited greatly, they never, it never really does. Except maybe the very big players, but, you know, laptop sales, home office equipment, you know, baking supplies, things like that, but books, books were in that world. And so what a lot of people in the book publishing industry experienced was an increase in sales, something you get used to, and when they go down back to normal, you often experience it as a decline rather than a return to normal, something the industry is going through. Yeah, something that is often said is that books do well during tough times, because it’s a cheaper form of entertainment, or people are looking for comfort. And so I think that has, I think that basically was true, maybe during the pandemic. But it’ll be the other thing that publishing people like to say is that the value of a book is so tremendous, because prices really haven’t increased or kept pace with inflation. So if you look at book prices in the 70s, or the 80s, they’re not like dramatically different today, or as other prices have shifted a lot. And so some are trying to justify, you know, what we’re going through now is a correction, given that book prices have remained flat. You mentioned you wanted to talk, or maybe wanted to talk a little bit about ebook pricing, which is a sort of perennial issue. Yeah. So yeah, if you wanted to talk about that for a couple of minutes and what your views are about what’s been happening or what’s going on there. Oh, I mean, by now, I would have thought that this is really talking about the big five here. The big New York publishers like Penguin Random House, in my view, have artificially inflated the price of ebooks. The reasons for that, I don’t want to get into the weeds, but it basically puts print book pricing next to it. If you’re shopping on Amazon, the print looks far more attractive because Amazon discounts it. And if you look at people who are really strong in the digital space, digital publishing space, that would include like Amazon Publishing and some other small publishers that really started digital first, you know, their pricing is more, you know, around the five to eight dollar mark for an ebook, whereas the traditional publishers, again, big five, mostly are keeping that price, you know, north of ten dollars, fifteen dollars for new releases is common. And it makes it really hard, I think, on debut authors in particular. People aren’t necessarily going to take a chance and buy that fifteen dollar ebook. And so it’s I don’t from a marketing perspective alone, it just makes me wonder why publishers haven’t softened their stance. And part of it’s because they want to preserve the print market. But given how more sales are shifting online and just the changing landscape of book selling, I would have thought there would be better pricing on ebook, especially with the supply chain issues. Right. But no, not yet. So this is one of those issues where I immediately go into plaintive voice, you know, why on earth, you know, and, you know, and have been for a decade, decade going right down that path, because it is it is just wild, like from a business perspective, for example, like if you if you were an alien and you didn’t know anything about this industry and someone was like, well, you can either distribute your product with no manufacturing at all and make like ten times the margin on every sale. Why wouldn’t you prioritize that product over the other? And I’m distinguishing ebooks which are transmitted for created and copied and transmitted for free as opposed to books which have all these come from trees and, you know, have supply chain issues and stuff like that. So in plaintive voice, why is it that the book publishers, why is it that print is so important to them? Well, I think partly they want to preserve profits. They profit a lot off the hardcover books. They’re also trying to preserve the ecosystem that they rely on for discoverability and marketing, which is bookstores, although, you know, arguably, given all of the changes that have been happening at Barnes and Noble in particular, meaning they don’t they don’t accept pay for play promotion anymore. You can’t pay to have your book put on a big front window display any longer. Now, given some of the realities now, I have to wonder what exactly they’re preserving. But certainly, I don’t want to, you know, look askance at the very rich and vibrant independent bookstore market. Still, though, it’s it’s still strange to me that they wouldn’t be looking for more ways to diversify their business, to create more ways to get customers on an email list and do other things that will help them in the future, because I don’t think it’s often been said that print is becoming a luxury item. And I think especially when you look at sustainability issues and supply chain issues, you’d think there would be a lot more enthusiasm and energy around ebooks, at least the same as there is around audiobooks. And that’s yet another issue to discuss. But you know, it’s yeah, I think it’s book publishing perversely takes pride in the fact that they haven’t been disrupted like some other industries by by digital products. But I don’t think it’s going to be like a long term win. I think it’s very limited. Yeah, I think we’ll we’ll get around to talking about the reputation for business acumen that the big book publishers have when we talk about the Penguin Random House attempted acquisition of Simon & Schuster and the amazing Department of Justice kind of trial that took place, which for anyone listening, like there are actual controversies in the book world. And sometimes they’re like national news, which they were in the United States this year, which is kind of amazing. But but on another note, I want to say I’m sure Jane and I both love print books. We all we of course, we understand the value of them and love them and stuff like that. But when we’re talking about things from a business perspective, specifically from the weird ebook pricing strategies, yes, it’s it’s you talk a certain way sometimes when you’re correct when you’re complaining about it. But another pandemic related thing, big high level thing that happened was something that got called, I think in a kind of with the kind of ugly term, the great resignation. But this was a kind of catchall term for a real phenomenon, which was people in jobs that asking for better treatment. And this this actually affected the book publishing industry as well. I don’t know this. I haven’t read as much about this as I should have over the year. But I do know from Twitter, oh, yeah, that, you know, kind of labor relations and stuff like that were a big issue and are a big issue in the publishing houses this year. And I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about just in general kind of what, what happened and what’s happening now. I think it’s important to see this in the broader context of cultural and societal change. Like across the anglophone publishing, or not just publishing across all anglophone markets, generally speaking, or the Western world, generally speaking. And I don’t, I don’t, it’s not my, I don’t have the pay grade to talk about this from like, did the pandemic spark this kind of new era or not? Or were we already there in the pandemic sped it up? But it doesn’t matter what industry you look at, there’s more calls for fair treatment, better wages, there’s definitely more unionizing that’s going on. And publishing is not immune to any of this. Publishing already had some aggravating factors that you could see it’s very, you can easily see why workers are upset and they’re asking for more. It’s been a very low paid industry from the beginning. Yet many of the best jobs sit in New York City or London where the cost of living is very high. And so that means you get employees who already have the financial wherewithal or support to make that work. So we’re talking about like white privileged elite sorts of people who take those jobs. And so this kind of goes hand in hand too with the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which got more earnestly started, I would say in 2020. So right now, probably the biggest headline maker is the Harper Collins unionizing as an example of workers asking for better entry level wages, better benefits, more diversity in hiring, more diversity efforts generally. And boy, if I think about when I entered publishing in the 90s, I don’t think I could have ever anticipated or expected this sort of action. And it looks like they might very well be successful. But it’s not just HarperCollins, you know, we’ve we saw we’re seeing unionizing efforts across bookstores, another area where you’re expected to work for passion rather than profits. We’re seeing it, gosh, in at smaller presses at university presses, Amazon had its first union form, I think in April at the Staten Island warehouse. So yeah, it affects every, every piece of, I think, the supply chain, basically, I know that Ingram and some other places, you know, because of the labor shortage, they’ve had to raise wages, they’ve had to do other things to entice people to come on. And I can only imagine that’s going to continue in some way. Now, I’ll pause there. And we can go off in any direction you prefer. Sure, sure. Actually, I’m so one of the things I wanted to talk about was, and from preparing for this interview, we were talking before I started to record button, but I’d sort of like lined up all the hot sheet newsletters from the year. And one of the things that I wanted to ask you about was, why did Amazon shut down all of its physical bookstores? And I think we may have just answered that question when, you know, they’re, they’re sort of starting to face unionizing, which obviously the, you know, sort of management tier does not like and, you know, having sort of exposure, not only to sort of physical retail outlets, but specifically in industry where people are unionizing might, might be why they got out of that business. It could be I would, I would have loved to seen, you know, the profit and loss on those physical locations. So yeah, that was that was almost, it seems so long ago, but it just happened this year that they announced that they would be closing all those locations. And of course, now they’re starting layoffs, which affects their books division and their devices division, which includes Kindle. So that’s like, that’s another like surprise for me to see kind of some weakness there and like, I can envision a future now where Amazon isn’t predominant, there are some people who feel like they did lose some market share in the last year or two, not least because people are becoming more conscious of how they consume, where they consume, who they’re benefiting when they shop. So I think Amazon, it’s not seen as positively, that’s for sure, as it was, you know, even like five years ago. Yeah, it’s one of the reasons it surprised me so much that they decided to close down their physical bookstores was that, you know, Amazon has incredible amounts of very local data on what people are buying. And I always thought that they were the part of the idea was to use that data to know like, oh, like, there’s a trend in Cincinnati for, you know, bread recipe books or something like that. So all of a sudden, they’d ship more to the store and promote them more. And so to see them back off of that, and in that context, another thing I wanted to talk about was, so you had an article about how Indigo, I think, which is a Canadian, is in part a book chain, 40% of their sales are like, home goods, which, when you mentioned that there’s this concept that books are becoming a luxury item, that kind of finally made something click for me about that phenomenon. Yeah, the Indigo situation is fascinating. And I just, there’s a particular newsletter I read by a Canadian publisher. It’s called Shush by Kenneth White, he runs an independent house, and he is continually harping on how Indigo is now a home goods store. And I probably shouldn’t like laugh about it, like he’s upset, and he feels like it’s a travesty. And, you know, I don’t disagree with that. But when you see the photos of the of these stores, it’s like, you know, we’re not exaggerating here, it is set up, like a home goods store, like like an IKEA. And then you like go off into a far corner, and you find your book display, like the biggest bestsellers. So is that the future of books? I mean, I don’t, I maybe from a big box perspective, but interestingly, we have the opposite thing happening with Barnes and Noble, where, when their new leadership came in, James Dott’s, this was like at the beginning of the pandemic, or shortly before when he came on. And he was like, we got to get rid of this nonsense that’s not about selling books and get back to being in fact, a bookseller. And I think the jury is still out on on how that’s working out for Barnes and Noble. But yeah, it’s, it’s interesting to watch different countries handle whatever this new situation, new normal that we’re in. It’s actually you brought up Barnes and Noble. So Barnes and Noble is one of these kind of perennial kind of issues that comes up one of the one of the surviving national big box store kind of chains in the states that had a notorious kind of like annual shifting CEO situation or something like that. And kind of weird, weird, weird kind of management changes that happening all the time. Yes. Yes. But they but they seem to have kind of sorted it out when they got the Waterstone CEO James Dott to come on board. And he it was interesting watching that like he started to keep who knows who was behind this sort of PR moves, but he tried to pull a little kind of Steve Jobs thing like where he was going to change the inclination of the book display by like point one millimeters or something like that. I don’t know if you remember that one, but that that was for real like it was something along those lines. So how and but then but then they’re all we obviously there’s all kinds of labor issues and stuff like that with Barnes and Noble as well. And particularly, one thing is which is uncertainty, right, which is often gets left behind like having a job that you think you might lose any day in terms of anxiety is different from being unemployed, but you know, it’s not exactly like being properly employed either. Yeah, Barnes and Noble over the last few years has shed a lot of people. And I mean, I, I would have to go research what percentage of their workforce is left from say, five years ago, but it gosh, it just feels like a really tough situation there. And they’ve closed a lot of locations. And when they reopen a new one, it’s almost always dramatically smaller. So like, they might have a 50,000 square foot store that closes and then they’ll say, Oh, but we’re opening a new one. But then they don’t mention Oh, it’s about 7000 square feet, you know. So it’s that creates other kinds of interesting and really unfortunate issues for authors. For instance, Barnes and Noble announced this year that they were pulling back on stocking hardcover frontlist, in particular in children’s. And this, this came as a surprise to many authors who, you know, had a hardcover book coming out and then got the news practically on launch date that it wouldn’t be stocked in Barnes and Noble. So you know, everyone’s fearful that there’s not going to be a place to market and promote new titles. And that Barnes and Noble is moving into more of a, it’s just the books you’ve heard of sort of situation. But again, I think it’s hard to assess, not least because Barnes and Noble has gone private since you know, James Dott took over and we don’t necessarily know everything that’s going on unless he decides to say what’s going on. Yeah, it’s it’s so interesting having these kinds of conversations because the book publishing industry sort of when you sort of think about it in just sort of common sense way seems like Oh, bookstores, you know, Amazon and stuff like that, but it actually touches on so many things. So, you know, supply chain, labor, retail, management fights, things like that. But when you talk about, for example, sort of losing venues to promote books, then you get into sort of newspapers and media and social media. And just I think it was just today and I believe I actually saw on Twitter that this might be your second conversation of the day because you had a conversation with Joanna Penn, where you talked about USA Today firing their bestseller list editor and pausing their bestseller list. So what’s I mean, I know I’ll point people to the other podcast in the links. But like, is this a trend or bestseller lists going away now? Well, I think what this is, is really related to the newspaper and magazine industries. I’ll refer to them collectively because I think they have similar challenges. So USA Today is owned by Canet, which is one of the last standing kind of newspaper conglomerates, and they’ve just had a big round of layoffs and that included their books editor who manages that bestseller list. They’ve said officially that it’s on hiatus, but the rumor mill that I’m tuned into has pretty much predicted it’s it’s over, which is a terrible blow, especially I think for self published authors, people who prioritize ebooks because the USA Today list is unique or was unique in that it counted unit volume and they didn’t discriminate between formats like the New York Times does. It was put all the sales into one bucket and whoever comes out on top comes out on top. And so you can imagine self publishing authors really like that because they’re really good at selling those ebooks and they would, you know, do box sets and anthologies and price them really low and get them to hit the list. It’s really hard if not impossible to get a self published book on the New York Times list at this point or any other national list. So the USA Today, that was that was it, you know, and it has, you know, 150 spots. So you could be a USA Today bestseller much easier than some other type of list. But that’s that development. It’s it’s sad. It’s and it’s kind of aligns with some other developments of the last month where Book Forum, a big book review outlet has closed, went under new ownership. The new owner quickly closed it because they were interested in other properties they were buying and not that one. And Astra closed. That’s a literary journal that was only launched a couple years ago with some very deep pocketed investors who even told them bluntly, you don’t have to earn money. This is a prestige play. Well, even they got tired of the prestige with all of the money that they have. And I feel like there’s another maybe something else I’m missing that closed up. But yeah, there have just it is so challenging right now for newspapers, magazines and really everyone I think is in crunch, like like tightening the belts. You can see it in Silicon Valley. You can see it across corporate America. Everyone is like, it’s a recession. We need to pull back. We need to be more efficient. One other big dimension of the book publishing industry that we might be able to say something positive about is conferences. So shortly after you were last on the podcast, I interviewed Jürgen Buess, who was the CEO of the Frankfurt Book Fair. And he was on to talk about something else. But like it was kind of an exciting time because he was like, you know, the Frankfurt Book Fair for anyone listening is a BFD and you know, it’s like a big for big. It’s actually an important part of like the German economy. And and you know, when all the conferences were sort of in-person conferences were stopping, people really had to scramble to sort of figure out what to do next. And in particular, for example, the Frankfurt Book Fair, a lot of what happened there was like sort of agents sort of selling publishers, selling books to booksellers and, you know, agents and kind of writers getting together with meetings. And I remember him talking about having like using tennis courts so you could sit on opposite sides of the tennis court instead of instead of meeting rooms and stuff like that. But then they decided to go all digital. But anyway, are in-person book conferences back? I’m not sure. I mean, I do think Frankfurt Book Fair is unique and has staying power. I would I doubt that’s going to go away, at least within my career lifespan. Book Expo is gone. I don’t think it’s coming back. Publishers Weekly has launched a new effort to support the U.S. market, but it’s entirely virtual. It’s not quite the same thing. Digital Book World is coming back in January and I’ll be there. I’m really curious to see how many people turn out for that. It is going to be back in New York for the first time in quite a while. So will the publishers show up at that? I like everyone else will see when I get there. My conference schedule is picking back up, but I think there are some things that like BEA, I don’t know that they’re going to they’re going to return. You mentioned audiobooks. This was something that I think Spotify started selling audiobooks this year or announced that they were going to. And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the audiobook landscape in 2022. The format’s still growing. I thought it would have kind of at least gone into like single digit growth by this point after so many years of double digit growth, but no, it’s still going strong. I think there are two big questions for me about the continued growth. One is will Audible and other retailers start allowing AI narrated audiobooks because the technology is now good enough that you can charge for it. I mean, you do have to be upfront in the marketing that this is AI narrated. You can’t pass it off as a human being if it’s not will audible specifically doesn’t allow it. But I don’t know how much longer they can hang on to that position because both Google and Apple are allowing it. Be interesting to see if and when Spotify allows for that. So when it’s to me, it’s just a matter of when not if. And then the other big question is, especially now that Marcus Dolly has departed Penguin Random House as CEO, will Penguin Random House and maybe some other publishers be more interested in putting their audiobooks into the subscription services so that that would include like story tell script. And I’m sure that Spotify would love to have a subscription offering for audiobooks, but they weren’t able to make it work like they couldn’t come to terms with the publishers or you know, I’m sure there were a million negotiating points. It’s always been a problem for anyone offering a subscription service to get the biggest players in and to get the newest titles in because publishers have been demanding what are essentially a la carte prices. But that model doesn’t work in an unlimited subscription system. Something we’ve been seeing is some subscription services, even from Audible being launched in other markets like France or Scandinavia or Spain, they’re starting to implement like tiered memberships where, okay, at this membership level, you get 10 hours and then it’s 20 and 30 if you pay more. I think maybe it would be interesting to see more experimentation in that regard because right now, the Audible model, which is so prevalent in the US and the UK, which is one credit per audiobook, you want to spend your credit on something you feel is credit worthy. And there are lots of books that are never going to be credit worthy, children’s books, for example, or you’re probably not going to experiment with something if you’re not quite sure you’re going to like it. So I think the concern, of course, is cannibalization. There’s concern about lower payments to both authors and publishers. In Scandinavia, though, the thing that gets repeated, because that’s where there’s the most audiobook sales and the biggest market for unlimited subscription, if you look at them, they’ve seen tremendous growth and authors begging to have their backlist put in these subscription systems because once someone finds an author they love, they immediately then go through the entire backlist. So yeah, right now it feels like we’re in kind of very elementary stages of offering audio and given how popular it is, how much it’s growing, it feels like there could be a lot more growth if publishers were more flexible. And why would Audible not permit, using the term loosely, AI-generated audiobooks? The control issues, perhaps. That’s the only thing I can imagine, but if that policy, I don’t know when that policy was established, but as of today, it’s starting to look not progressive. Yeah, it’s such an interesting issue because one thing, I mean, people’s standards change when they encounter new types of technology or ways of delivering things and sometimes their priorities change too. So for example, with the explosion of podcasts and particularly in-ear earbuds and stuff like that, you see people walk around all the time now with headphones in listening to things and they’re mostly actually not listening to music anymore, they’re listening to words being spoken and now most of these apps will have a slow it down by half or double the speed. And a lot of people like that, I hate it, but a lot of people love that double the speed feature. And I think for a lot of people the idea that it’s going to be Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice is less important than getting the words. And it’s a very, especially for nonfiction, I mean, a lot of people are doing this for self-help reasons to advance their career, to learn something about business. And in that case, like, oh, I can click a button and get an audio version. I don’t care if it’s sort of like sultry tones. Right, right. I couldn’t agree more. And I think there’s a huge swath of books and publishers for which hiring a human narrator is not going to be economically feasible, like scholarly works in particular. But that if there were an audio edition, it would definitely get sold. So AI helps resolve that. Yeah, definitely. And even for self-published authors, you know, getting, hiring a professional voice actor to do your book is very expensive. Might be worth it, by the way, I’m not saying it’s not worth it. But like, you know, one thing to keep in mind is to sort of not be all that precious about things all the time, and particularly if you have to be, I mean, one thing that might become clear from conversations like this is that you have to be very creative and you have to try a lot of different things to make money in the book world. And you know, sort of just getting something out there might be way better for you and for your audience than sort of holding back because, you know, you’re too worried about quality, which is not to say you shouldn’t worry about quality. That’s the number one important long term key to success as an author or publisher. But still, you know, when it comes to audio book quality in particular, that might not be something that one needs to be so kind of concerned about. Even Medium, the sort of blogging website, has a free feature now where you just click a button and it reads the post for you. And it’s good, which is actually something, I mean, maybe we should talk about technology now. One of the big surprising things that just happened in the last month or so is the release to the public of ChatGPT, which is this AI thing that can, well, why don’t you explain a little bit about it? Because I know you’ve written about it and it’s fascinating. It is. So there’s a company called OpenAI that generates these models, not just for text, but for art and other things as well. And you know, I don’t know what it sucked up from the internet, I like how expansively it sucked things up, but it did such a good job. The current model is called ChatGPT 3.5 and you can basically treat it like a chat partner or like a Google search engine. You can ask it for a cocktail recipe or you can ask it to explain what’s the future of publishing. I tried that one to see what it would say. And it will spit out something that looks pretty reasonable on the face of it. Now it’s going to be very generic, bland, voiceless. It’s going to be just kind of just information without any personality, without real depth to it. But the fact that it can do that in a millisecond and give you something that’s like publication quality, depending on your standards, I mean, it’s pretty amazing. And we know that we’re still in the very emergent stages of this technology. It’s not as good as it’s going to be by a long shot. So people like Joanna Penn have been talking about this sort of tool for years now, kind of cheerleading and warning like this is coming, you’re not going to stop it. And I do see it currently as a great sort of assistant brainstorming partner, especially if you’re able to train it on your own writing. And there is a tool out there that I think it’s still in beta that right now that would allow you to do that. I think it’s going to put pressure on maybe the people whose writing just doesn’t have a voice or personality or that’s just very rote. I read a really good analysis by someone who said this could hurt writers who are trying to make a living writing copy for like marketing or business purposes. Because now a big company, a corporation of some kind could use something like chat GPT to fashion a copy for something very quickly rather than hiring a freelance writer. So yeah, I don’t right now I feel pretty neutral about it. I know there’s some people with some very hot, hot takes, angry takes. But I still think it’s so early. I think it’s hard to predict exactly how it will play out. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that and for that great description. One thing I would say is that actually some of the fun things that actually can have a bit of a personality sometimes if you haven’t played with chat GPT, by the way, I really recommend giving it a try. It’s quite a lot of setting aside concerns. It’s a lot of fun. So for example, one thing and it’s funny you say like suddenly call it when you talk about writing by rote. Suddenly the freshman college essay became like a controversial kind of hot tape kind of topic, right? Because the first thing I did was go in and go like write it, write it, write an essay, write a short essay about Hamlet. And it wrote one. And like I, you know, I’m a former PhD, I have a doctorate in English literature, right? So I’ve done marking and stuff like that and seen a lot of first year essays. And it was a B minus essay that was produced in a pretty good B minus essay, which by the way is kind of not the level that most students attain in their first year. So it’s better than most first year essays and it’s produced in five seconds. But I just bring this up to say, because the next one I asked was like write an essay about Heidegger’s being in time. And so I was posting these on Facebook and this friend of mine who’s an English professor goes, now ask it to do a Celine Dion song about being in time. And it did. And it was a coherent song with the chorus and it kind of made sense, which was hilarious. And I think there’s something going around like, you know, Twitter about asking for like an instruction manual for why you shouldn’t put a sandwich in your VCR in the style of the King James Bible. Yes. I read that one. I really enjoyed that. Yeah. So, I mean, and that’s like, you know, the personality kind of comes from the question that you asked to some extent. But the really bracing thing with this kind of thing is that, A, this is just what like us plebs are seeing now. Who knows what’s behind, what the wizard has behind the curtain. And when you think about where this is going to be in like 20 years, which is like not an unreasonable horizon in the book publishing industry to think about, you know, it’s really fascinating. Yeah. I think there are going to be some legal issues to sort through, massive legal issues regarding ownership of the IP, given that these models are trained on stuff that’s under copyright. And then if it’s producing something that’s in the manner of a Celine Dion song, is that problematic? Like, can Celine Dion say, no, you cannot do that? I don’t know. Yeah. I think that reminds, actually that reminds me of something specific I wanted to ask you about. But yeah, copyright issues with AI generated, like with any kind of automatically generated content. I think that there was a ruling in the States this year about that saying that some type of content couldn’t be copyrighted if it was artificially generated. Yes. Yes. I saw that same ruling. I don’t know how narrow it was, like what it might’ve been applying to, but there’s going to be a lot more like that because there’s just, I don’t know. I don’t even think we can fathom some of the sticky wickets that we’re going to have to sort through. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. So what that reminded me of though, talking about copyright was that something called the Copyright Claims Board became active in the United States in 2022. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what that is and has it had any impact on anything? This is essentially a small claims court where people who have their copyright infringed or they believe their rights have been infringed, they can file a claim. It’s very inexpensive. I think total it’s maybe a hundred bucks to file a claim. You don’t need a lawyer. The system is designed to be used by average everyday people who don’t want to have to go through federal court to file a copyright case and federal court. If you try to do that, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars to see that case to fruition and usually damages aren’t worth it. So you have to have a really significant claim to even think about it. So this was something that was fought for by any number of organizations that representing artists, musicians, photographers, and writers. And I was pretty skeptical of it when it was making its way through Congress, but it got approved and it went into effect in, I think it was in June and they started accepting their first cases. And they’ve been, you know, by and large, people are using the system as it was intended to be used. There was a lot of fear that copyright trolls would start submitting spurious claims and threatening average people, you know, just bad actors taking advantage of the system. But so far that hasn’t happened. And it seems like the court has been very efficient. There hasn’t been, in fact, a lot of writing claims. A lot of them have been related to photography more so than writing. So it’s interesting to see how the court’s being used. It’s still early, but I would consider it a really great option for people who feel like something has happened that’s not right, you know, file the claim and they will help you step by step make your case. Now the drawback to this court is that whoever you’re filing against can decide to up out of proceedings and then you’re kind of back at square one, like you would have to go to federal court. So for those who understand that, like the people who are accused to understand that, that’s unfortunate. But, you know, the court is hoping that people will play fair and, you know, do this instead of the threat of larger litigation ahead. Yeah. Thanks very much for sharing your opinion on that and the facts of the case there. I was skeptical of it myself from a couple of directions as well. I mean, partly the, the fact that the, the person, the accused can simply opt out would seem to make it toothless. But my position changed when I kind of realized it’s just, it’s, it’s primary purpose is probably at least maybe not an intention, but functionally to deter bad actors from doing bad things in the first place. Right. Because a bad actor, if they know that someone can easily make things complicated for them and put them on a list, you know, they might think twice about what they’re doing. And in the past, it was very difficult for authors and expensive for authors to do this. And now if they could just, if they can make trouble for you quickly on the cheap with guidance, you might, you might think twice. So that’s good. The other part of me that’s skeptical about it though, is that although I know like from dealing with, with, with authors and, you know, produce things myself, how awful it feels to encounter your book being kind of plagiarized, to find your work being sold under someone else’s name or even under your own name, but, but you know, someone’s just got a hold of it and they’re selling it for money. I know how awful it feels, but the advice we always give to authors is like, of course, send down a DMCA take down or something like that if you want to, but you really shouldn’t be spending your time fighting copyright violations. You should be spending your time writing and building your audience again, to sort of go, go full plaintiff voice. There was this article in the New York times a couple of years ago where someone wrote about like how he had a folder in his like email that he kept called thieves. And like, I’ve just, you know, and I just got this image of this guy, this angry man sitting by himself in the dark at night, unable to sleep, trolling the internet, looking for instances of his book having been pirated. And it’s like, mate, you’re not, you’re not, you’re not improving your situation and you’re not being a tough guy fighting back. You’re just, you know, letting them, in addition to steal your work now, they’re wasting your time and your emotions too. Right. Exactly. Yeah. It’s, it’s a fruitless effort. Yeah. But having, but having some system out there that, that does act as a sort of automatic deterrent is, is a good development, I guess, just as long as authors don’t now spend all their, I know it’s kind of an obscure worry, but as long as authors don’t spend all their time going to the copyright board, making claims, you know, hopefully, hopefully it will do the work that it’s supposed to do. So one very big issue, actually, you know what, I’m going to talk about book, I’m going to ask you about book banning in a little bit, but before we get there, hanging over this whole conversation basically has been the, the sort of, you know, the, it was the, you know, like I said, it was prime, primetime news, the book industry this year because Penguin Random House, which is one of the big, forget if it’s always four or five, one of the big four publishing companies in the States tried to buy Simon and Schuster, which is another one of the big ones. And it’s a very interesting thing, both in itself, but also because there’s this high level shift happening under the Biden administration around monopolies and how monopolies are treated. And there’s a new kind of person in charge of this policy and they alighted on this particular acquisition to kind of make a show of what they’re up to. And so I was wondering if you could just tell a little bit of the story of this, what this acquisition was all about and what happened in the end. So Penguin Random House, which is the biggest publisher in the United States, wanted to buy another of the big five, Simon and Schuster, which would have made it like two and a half times the size of any other competitor. So the Department of Justice moved to block the merger. And what was so fascinating about it from the very beginning was that they were basing their case not on harm to consumers, but harm to authors and that authors would get paid less in the end should the merger occur. And it’s a very novel argument to make in this sort of antitrust situation. And I think everyone, you know, everyone who watches the government in these things seems to think this is laying the groundwork for other similar actions to pursue antitrust cases that aren’t about consumers, but about workers, about workers being harmed. Now for me, sitting on the inside of publishing, I mean, I liked how all this unfolded in the way that it gave some transparency to what’s a very opaque business, that people were asked very simple questions about the economics of books, about why books succeed or not. And there was just a lot of throwing up of hands and like, it’s random. Like that’s what the CEO of Penguin Random House said, it’s all random. The CEO of Simon and Schuster said, taking credit for a book’s success is like taking credit for the weather. And so obviously authors and all sorts of people are listening to these answers thinking this is who I’ve entrusted my book with. People who just think it’s going to be random what succeeds. But that’s, you know, inside the industry, that’s always been the conventional wisdom that you were going to have a lot of things fail. You would be surprised at what broke out and you would survive on the things that did well while 80% of books didn’t earn out their advance. So I’m grateful that this information is circulating more avidly now. But what really annoys me about this case, really annoys me, and you already know what it is since you’ve been reading my newsletter, is that this case focused on the top two percent of authors, which is a very elite set of people who probably are already well off and are earning lots and lots of money and ensuring that they maintain their high advance levels of beyond two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That’s the set of books. The case revolved around these two percent, not all authors, not all advances, only that harm would come to the top two percent. We’re talking about like a thousand authors. The other thing that kind of also I would be upset if I were an author is that when the economists for the government studied the effects of the Penguin Random House merger, which happened in 2012, 2013, they found that advances pretty much stayed the same or maybe increased for your average author. It was only when you got up into the high advance range of two hundred and fifty thousand or more that we saw advances decrease after that merger. And I just think it’s stunning. I think it’s stunning that the merger was blocked on those grounds. Now I’m not here to say whether it was right or wrong, but I just think that is incredible. Yeah. Thanks very much for that great description and for your pointed opinion about it. I share some of the frustration, I think. Yeah, in particular, I mean, there was something totally fitting about it, though, because the whole kind of point of these big publishers is to present themselves as the guardians of the eminences of our society. Which is the reason that the admission that they basically have a random business resonated so much with people who are kind of like with authors, basically. It’s like, wait, you make us write these 50 page business plans ourselves for you and what they just go in the bin, you know, like or they’re pointless. Is that what you’re really telling us? Or if you’re the guardians of eminence, but you you know, you’re just throwing spaghetti at the wall is turns out is what’s really going on behind those those closed doors in those office towers in, you know, Midtown, you know, and that’s why that’s why sort of. But also in particular, to focus on, as you say, very specifically, like quarter of a million dollar advanced advances might go down and we’ve got one data point point to where that happened. And it’s like, what’s this all of this is supposed to be about protecting workers from exploitation from monopolies, if that’s what this is all about. What on earth is all this theater for? I know there was one takeaway from the judge’s final decision. But I feel like, yes, this is why I could believe in this case, if it were decided on these grounds, which is where Judge Florence Pan said that, you know, if you’re trying to sell a book today to one of the big five, you know, you’re going to find that they’re all paying the same book royalties, which are too low. They’re all going to insist on having audiobook rights. They’re all going to pay you in four to five installments. Like there are certain things that can no longer be negotiated at that level. And I think that is very unjust and unfair. And whether it’s collusion, I have no idea. But it is it is this fact that authors have so little room to maneuver in these deals. And the agents inadvertently, I think, support that by they’re just trying to get the biggest advance possible, raise the advance, biggest advance. Because everyone knows most of them don’t earn out. And no one seems to put pressure or care about the other deal points, like the royalties and the other things that but, you know, I’m not blaming agents. I think they’re playing the hand they were dealt. But it’s just that’s where I felt like I think the judge nailed it. But that’s not what the case was decided on. Another thing you wrote about this year was I’m just reading a headline I hear about major media coverage doesn’t sell books like it used to, which is a super interesting thing that has a lot of causes and a lot of effects. But it’s in that context that major media doesn’t cover. Well, let’s let’s why don’t we begin with that? Can you tell us a little bit about why major media coverage doesn’t sell books like it used to? The media landscape is fragmented, splintered tremendously. And also we talked about how newspapers and magazines are having tough times. The book section is like the first thing to go critics and reviews are paid so little to begin with. So you’ve got that issue. And that particular piece you mentioned, really, like the reason I wrote it was because we had someone from the New York Times who writes books, coverage saying, essentially, the New York Times doesn’t sell books like it used to. I was like, wow, you’re willing to say that. But it’s true. You know, you can get I think authors are shocked. Authors who don’t understand the business when they get that really big review, whether it’s the New York Times or somewhere else, and they look at their sales and they can’t tell that the needle has moved, if at all. And it’s like, what? Well, what does move the needle? And for the last couple of years, it’s been tick tock. So, you know, and it’s not that I think talk is necessarily so special. It’s just that we’re finding that peer to peer recommendation, word of mouth, book communities have a lot more power now to speak to the particular interests of their groups. Influencers now can recommend books and sell them in ways that are just as powerful as the New York Times. So I think that’s a high level of what we’re seeing. Yeah, it’s really fascinating. I’ve long sort of, I mean, partly just because of part of the way Lean Pub works, I’ve long been a sort of proponent of the idea that establishing a personal connection of some kind between the content creator to broaden it from book authors and the, you know, kind of a gross term to use, but the content consumer, you know, let’s just say authors and readers, right? Establishing a connection between authors and readers is one of the most powerful ways to build an audience and to sell books, basically. And it’s because, and the one feature of the one reason the fragmentation has happened is there’s this proliferation of these platforms like TikTok, where people are all themselves become content creators, but they can talk about other people’s creations. And so there’s this, as toxic as a lot of these things can be when they’re positive, it’s all very mutually reinforcing, right? So you know, if there’s an author that’s outselling the Bible and then they like your tweet or whatever it is, that just feels great, you know, they saw it, right? And they know they saw you for a moment. And that like, and if you, and particularly, and this is the thing, it’s important not to be cynical about all of this, like you really mean it. And they really mean it. You really mean, I loved your book, I love your work and they really mean, thank you. Yes. Yes. And that’s for people who wonder why, you know, sort of book talk or TikTok, or book talk as people might be familiar with is so popular. It’s that like, you make a fun, happy, cheerful thing saying why you love the book. I mean, you know, what’s, what’s not to like about that? The rest of TikTok, leave aside, but the book talk thing can be really great. Which of course, but in the context of, you know, the mid list books are getting put at the front of the bookstores now, media, major media coverage doesn’t get you attention anymore. It’s all social media. We inevitably have to talk about what’s going on at Twitter and you’ve, you’ve written about this because you’ve got, I think, 250,000 followers on Twitter. Twitter has been sort of a very great, great platform for you. So just what are your thoughts? Sadness. Yeah. I mean, I, I openly say I made my career on Twitter and so to have that compromised, diminished, used as a tool for unsavory things, it’s, it’s depressing. I haven’t given up on it. I have created accounts at some competitors, you know, cause it’s always good to claim your profile or your username before someone else does. But I’m not particularly active on the alternatives cause I don’t know if you’ve tried any like Mastodon, but if you go to some of these alternatives, everyone’s still talking about Twitter. It’s, it’s kind of like, it’s still sucks all of the air out of the room. It doesn’t really matter that you’ve left. That’s still the topic of conversation. So I’m going to stick with it until probably they turn off the lights, I suppose. You know, as we’re speaking right now, Elon Musk just ran a poll asking if he should remain in charge. And he said, I will abide by the results of this poll. And the poll said 57.5%, yes, you should give it up and hand it over to someone else. And I, I hope that he does abide by his own poll. So yeah, without getting into the politics of it, that’s, that’s how I feel. Yeah. For anyone who’s maybe listening to this sometime in the future, what had sort of crazy, crazy thing happened this year where Twitter, one of the world’s most popular social media platforms became a target, and I’m just going to sort of name the name, the politics a little bit, became the target of a very peculiar form of right wing fascination regarding perceived bias and in particular, and I mean, perceived exclusion, which has become a feature of today’s right, a sense that you often see terms about the term, the public square being used as forms of expression of a sense of being just generally excluded. And you know, there’s various things that are fixated upon the universities, for example, the academy is one of these areas of exclusion. Another area of perceived exclusion is the news media. And another, or the mainstream media, which is the kind of term of art. And another one was Twitter, very specifically Twitter and Elon Musk, you know, the sort of at times the world’s richest man, he apparently is a true believer and, you know, kind of signed on to this movement. And so he bought Twitter, foregoing due diligence for a total price of $44 billion. Obviously there’s investors and debt and some weird thing about Tesla shares in there and stuff like that. But the ticket price was $44 billion for a social media platform, basically so he could control it. And the sort of the message to his constituency was if you’re in this kind of particular form of right wing politics, you’re not going to be excluded from the platform anymore. And then he went in there and he started doing things like just kind of capriciously banning journalists. He dropped in on like, cause Twitter has, I forget, spaces. It has this audio feature where you can, you know, people can sort of attend and some people can speak and others can’t. And he joined in on one and then blocked it because he didn’t like what was, I mean, to put it crudely, because he didn’t like what was being said about, about him and Twitter. I mean, isn’t, isn’t that astonishing that the world’s richest man has the time to drop in on a conversation and like, why did, like, I just find that mind blowing. Well, I think, I think it’s explained by the, the, the, the, the depth of this sense of, of resent, of resentment of, of exclusion that it doesn’t, I mean, you know, like it, I’ve, I’ve seen it expressed by very powerful figures like Laughlin Murdoch, for example, they get this, they actually get this look on their face of kind of bitterness at some, again, some sense of being excluded. And you know, just to sort of just briefly talk about that, like my view of it is like Umberto Eco had this politically incorrect joke to explain a certain kind of mistake that people make about themselves, which was the man with a stammer who complains that he can’t get a job as, as a radio announcer because he doesn’t carry the right party card. My apologies for the ableist joke, but it, but it does, it does capture the mistake that a lot of people are making about why they’re being excluded from certain areas is not actually primarily your political views. It’s because you’re not playing the game the way it’s supposed to be played. Right. And so if you pull move, just asking questions type moves like, well, if evolution is true, then why are there still monkeys, like you might want to consider that there’s something other than your politics that’s excluding you from various discussions. And I would say, again, having a PhD myself in particular, if you go to campus and you find that you’re not getting good grades and people aren’t listening to you, it might not be because of your politics. There might be something else going on. And anyway, I just feel like writ large, you know, and particularly if you pull, if you pull up just BS moves, like changing the subject or just charging people with inauthenticity, like if you get into a serious discussion, someone’s made a substantive argument on a particular issue and you reply, you’re just virtue signaling. What you’re saying is I’m not going to engage in a good faith conversation with you. So all these people who want to have it, they want to, they want to get in an argument with you, but you’re saying I’m not going to do it right. And so that’s the reason that you’re often being excluded from these things. And I, I just go on about this because it is such an important phenomenon, including like the fact that very wealthy people are motivated to sort of turn all of their attention to these, to these, these kinds of this sense of exclusion and resentment. But yes. So having gone on my, my tangent there, I have tried, I’ve actually signed on for Mastodon in 2018. So I had an account there. I think I followed you yesterday, but you know, it’s, it’s and I tried Hive, I’ve applied for Postia Hive. I, I shake my head as well, unfortunately, I mean, don’t, no, no disrespect or whatever, but but yeah, I feel that, you know, I, I, I feel sad about it as well. I mean, for, particularly for me, I’m probably like a lot of people, you know, the old joke that Facebook is who you went to high school with and Twitter is who you wish you did. And so I thought basically that’s like how I get a lot of news because I follow a lot of journalists on there and it would be, it would be a real loss if it went away. Yeah. I mean, it’s been the writing and publishing water cooler since I got on and it’s hard to see how that gets replaced in the same way. Yeah, it’s, it’s, I feel like there’s some sort of very slow motion grieving process going on collectively and but I still retain a modicum of hope that it might get out of its tailspin. So to go on to another easy to discuss topic, book banning is a thing in the States now, primarily with school libraries but, but it does extend into the library space more generally where there’s like children’s sections of book, book libraries and stuff like that. I just saw a headline today about some move in Texas to put like age warnings on books and stuff like that. So maybe let’s imagine we’re talking, we’re talking to an audience outside North America and they’re like, can you Jane, can you please explain to me in five minutes what this is all about? So there is a movement in the United States concerned with parental rights. And I think that’s at the root of a lot of what we’re seeing in terms of the book banning. Now I’ll back up for a second. Book banning is not like new. It’s been going on for many, many decades. I’m sure since books maybe were first printed, there’s probably been a book ban of some kind. But usually as far as like schools and libraries, these things would be brought up by parents, you know, concerned citizens, and it would be one off sorts of requests or bans and certainly not highly politicized or what, like what we’re seeing now. The twist here and what makes it feel more dangerous and awful is that it’s not parents necessarily that like a one off parent. It’s a coordinated effort by political groups, a coordinated effort to get people on school boards, coordinated efforts by legislators to ban books. And that’s something that at least I haven’t seen before. So there was a I think over the summer, not saying the problem is not as bad today, but over the summer, I feel like there was like a fever pitch that we reached where just left and right, we saw like a few states doing like wide scale bans. I think Florida and Texas were two of the biggest important to note which states here, the red states are the ones that tend to have particular sorts of governance that leans to the right. And so what we saw is that they were taking entire like ebook subscription services or libraries down unavailable for access because of certain titles that may be slipped through the gates. I don’t want to get too much into the weeds of this, but with a subscription service that a library might use, I mean, there could be 10s and 10s of 1000s of titles in there that are, you know, technically available to the public, but they haven’t been each one hasn’t been vetted and placed in the library by a librarian. So over the summer, we saw some action that was triggered by some of these digital subscription services and some of the collections that they had that were offensive to people. I think some of that has been resolved, but it’s it can be hard to follow each and every one of these cases. So going back to the parental rights thing where I started, why are the groups doing this? Why are they banning the books? Well, they feel like these books are promoting values or ideas they think are harmful to their children. So it kind of ties in with Rick DeSantis is don’t say gay law in Florida. DeSantis is the governor of Florida, where, you know, they don’t want any discussion of sexual orientation, what before third grade, something like that. And so, you know, hand in hand with that are book bans of anything that might be construed by these groups as discussing that or promoting education around homosexuality or transgender, you know, all of these issues that really upset the right. And so this is this is kind of book bans are kind of like this outgrowth of the culture wars between the left and the right. Yeah, thanks. Thanks very much for that great, great explanation. This is it is a difficult thing to talk about for all sorts of reasons, particularly because, you know, when you think about children, you think about, you know, vulnerable people and and sort of and particularly ones. I don’t have children, but one’s own children, I imagine, you know, it’s cranked up to 11. We know when you when you think about potential harm and things like that. And so, you know, when you think about why would these crazy Americans be banning books and it’s like, well, because it’s incredibly personal and when and, you know, when you when you put your kids on the bus and they go to this place, the incredible sort of take it for granted. Right. But like the incredible amount of trust that you’re placing in the whole process is, you know, is is dramatic. And it is something that one can get very sensitive about my particular I was just going to add for people who are outside the US and mystified by this, I think it might be helpful to understand that the education system is largely seen as run by the left. I can’t say whether that’s true or not, but that’s kind of like that’s why the right kind of feels aggrieved. They feel like they’re all these very liberal teachers pushing this critical race theory. I didn’t mention that, but that’s part of it, too, or, you know, promoting this very progressive agenda that they feel is wrong. Yeah. Yeah. And I think I just said my my personal view of this is like, why is it why in particular is it kind of like, you know, right wing leaning states where this is happening? And part of the answer there is actually that a feature of the right one, one way into it, at least for me, this is, you know, these are all by the way, I am IMO kind of like kind of things. But like one question question to ask to sort of get to the heart of this culture war conflict is why can’t certain parents just say to their kids, you shouldn’t believe everything you hear in school and be done with it. And there’s a serious answer to that, which is that a lot of people believe that these places are these are places not where you go to learn, but places of authority, places where people who are superior to you in a power hierarchy are going to tell you things. And they want to live in a society where all those things that are told, you can relate to them as true without having to think about them without having to criticize them without having to be suspicious of them. But what you don’t want is this idea that the authority is wrong about anything. You want to live that way. And and so, you know, that’s that’s one of the reasons like one of the sort of key key kind of complaints that you’ll hear on the right is why do you have to make everything so political? And I’m by the way, I’m not saying this in a disparaging way. I’m trying to say this in a sympathetic way. If you really believe that a human being is or ought to be the sum of the forces that have like the passive result of the sum of the forces that have been brought to bear upon them, then things like having books you don’t agree with in your kid’s school is just like a total problem, right? Because you really believe that if your kid comes in contact with this, it’s going to have a causal effect on them. And you don’t it’s not just that there’s no defense. You don’t want to have to build defenses in your kid. You don’t want to live in a world where you got to be thinking about that all the time. And I think that that that kind of gets to the heart of why because people read like it’s important to internalize for those of us who might not be of that persuasion to think that people, they really do believe that it’s just this cause effect thing. It’s that straightforward. And if you want to know why people get really panicky and angry and why in particular they react often the way they do to the kind of what they take to be the kind of blase attitude of progressives. You know, like what, what, you know, cause you know, just go like, what’s the, what’s the big deal? And they’re like everything, everything’s at stake in this. And so that’s, you know, that’s that to me anyway, is one of the, one of the reasons that like it’s really important to get into other people’s mindsets when you think about this. Which again, that’s not to be sympathetic either in a certain sense, but it’s important to understand if the stakes are really high for people, there might, there might be a reason that you can at least not, you don’t have to agree with it, but that you can divine. Yeah. I think there was also a lot of anger, continuing anger at what happened with schools in the United States during the pandemic was, you know, in the blue States, they were more likely to be closed for longer periods in the red States, not so much. And so you still have like parents just angry at some of the decisions that were made. I don’t know how much that feeds into it, but it certainly feels like it’s all bubbled up and at the same time. And of course there are, there’s, you know, all kinds of, you know, disagreements with the way American culture is heading towards more diversity and things like that, that, you know, I don’t want to have this conversation without mentioning that a lot of this is a resistance to that. And particularly with, with race and sexuality and things like that, there’s all, this is, this is in part a manifestation of, of, of resistance to those changes. And you know, that that’s an important element to, to, to, you know, face with open eyes as well. I guess probably the second last thing I’d like to ask you about is what do you see happening in the book publishing industry in, in 2023? What are some of the sort of trends that we should keep an eye out for? We talked a little bit about one of them, the audio book situation. If AI audio books are going to start populating all of the major retail outlets like audible. So I’m keeping a pretty close eye on that. Very curious to see how sales play out in 2023. And if we see them basically sink to 2019 levels right now, that’s seeming more and more likely. I’m curious to see what happens with tick talk because it has been such a dramatic mover of adult fiction sales. Tick tock is starting to implement more, let’s say like monetization, more avid marketing and promotion, things that will make them money. And assuming that, you know, tick tock doesn’t get banned in the United States, I don’t think it will, but there’s going to be some, it’ll be interesting to see if tick tock remains such a strong player for book sales. Once tick tock starts whatever monetization, you know, objectives that they have. So you can already see a little bit of discontent among book talk community people that the space is starting to become commercialized. There are more marketing partnerships with publishers and booksellers. There’s more pressure to sell. There’s been intimations that tick tock might prioritize content that sells better. And so if what we fear comes to pass, which it always seems to with social media, will tick tock kind of lose its, I don’t know, the halo effect that it’s currently having on book sales. I don’t know. We’ll see. And the last thing I guess I wanted to ask you about was what will you be up to in 2023? Well, my first responsibility of the year is to go to digital book world. I’ll be speaking there as well as a number of conferences throughout the year. And but other than that, I don’t know that I have anything big on the horizon. I am going to be moving my newsletter, the hot sheet, to a new subscription platform, which will make the big reason for that is it will make the full historical archives available for search to subscribers. So that is a project that’s been two years in the making. So every single word published since 2015, I’m very, very proud to have accomplished this. So that’s coming in the first month of the year. And just in the interest of pointing people to some of the some of the work that you do, you also do these these courses. Oh, yes. Yeah. And I was wondering if you could just like tell people a little bit about that part of what you do. Sure. So if my paid newsletter is one half of the business, the other half is the online classes. These are one off webinars. They’re typically one to two hours long. I teach a handful, but most of them are by guest instructors, people I’ve known for many years in the writing and publishing space, going all the way back to my time at Writers Digest magazine. So my my mission here is to provide affordable instruction. So most of the classes are 25 bucks. And it’s it’s something that I just take a lot of joy and satisfaction from because people who might not have access to quality writing instruction like at college or the university, they can’t you know, they can’t invest in MFA, they can’t invest in some of the more expensive classes, they can still get a quality one to two hours of instruction live or recorded. And the other website is Jane Friedman dot com for anyone listening who might be interested. And also, I would highly recommend Jane’s YouTube channel. You do these, you know, Sunday business sermons and things like that. You’re very generous with your time and you have guests on and things like that for your for your videos where you talk about sort of the challenges writers face and give them some guidance and all the way from, you know, how to get out how to get a book published to like details of websites and things like that. And so I highly recommend that for anyone watching or listening wherever you found it. It’s true that if you like and subscribe, it sort of helps our audience grow. So please, please do that if you’re up for it. And thank you very much, Jane, for being on our first third time interviewee on the podcast. Thank you, Len. And as always, thanks to all of you for listening to this episode of the Frontmatter podcast. If you like what you heard, please rate and review it wherever you found it. And if you’d like to be a Leanpub author yourself, please check out our website at leanpub.com. Thanks.