Appendix: Exploring Traditional Publishing’s Remaining Advantages

The cachet of traditional publishing is the reason that most of us joined the industry. We grew up loving books, went on to study English or something similar in college, kicked about for a while, perhaps got a job in a bookstore, perhaps a Masters of Publishing certificate, then worked as an intern at a publishing company, and here we are today. You love your job, though the pay sucks and the working conditions are not always pleasant.

That same cachet feeds the publishing supply chain. On the input side of the supply chain: it means a lot to a lot of authors. We see it all the time. The economics of traditional publishing makes no sense, and it takes four times as long to get into print, but, maybe, just maybe, I’ll be the next debut winner, like Delia Owens (Where the Crawdads Sing) or second-time megastar, Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow).

It’s like Vegas: except the odds are better in Nevada. Play a single number in roulette and the odds against you are 36 to 1. Play traditional publishing and the odds against you are… far worse.

The odds of getting a contract with any of the traditional trade publishers, let alone one of the big 5, are poor. But that’s the least of an author’s problem. It’s actually finding readers that’s the mega-challenge.

One thing that can help is landing a spot on a bestseller list.

Let’s consider PRH, Penguin Random House. The company publishes just 15,000 new titles each year. In 2021 they managed to get 196 books onto the Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. As the linked article highlights: “PW publishes four adult bestseller lists, each with 20 titles: hardcover fiction, hardcover nonfiction, trade paperback, and mass market paperback. That means that over the course of a year, there are 2,080 hardcover positions on our lists and 2,080 paperback positions.

Not all of the bestsellers were newly-published that year—let’s guess generously that 90% were, 1870 slots.

Meanwhile The New York Times has 15 bestseller slots per week for each category of book (fiction, nonfiction, children’s; separate lists for YA and how-to; hardcover separate from paperback, plus combined lists). For an individual author, that means 780 available slots per year, although most of those slots are filled with repeat sellers. (The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk has been on the paperback list for five-and-a-half years!) So let’s divide that in half, 390 available slots. You have to sell a lot of books to grab one of those.

What about coverage in the New York Times Book Review? In 2016, Pamela Paul, then the editor of the Review, claimed that “The Book Review at the Times reviews about 1% of the books that come out in any given year.” Clearly she means 1% of the books from the top publishers—she can’t be thinking about small presses or self-published authors. And so perhaps 150 of PRH’s 15,000 new titles are reviewed each year.

Most observers agree that while getting attention from top media is still important, and can be powerful, the impact of reviews is not what it once was, if for no other reason that fewer book readers interact with the major review outlets.

Let’s turn our attention to the supply chain downstream, to distribution. While publisher brands carry weight with authors, it’s always been a truism that, unlike many consumer goods, publisher brands carry next to no weight with book buyers and readers. But they do carry a lot of weight with distributors and booksellers. This reflects the historic business-to-business nature of publishing (rather than B2C—to consumers). Publisher cachet is disseminated via distribution and retail channels: Barnes & Noble carries a book because it’s from PRH, and then places it in front of buyers’ faces; thus is cachet disseminated to readers.