How publishing has changed in the past fifty years (This week in books)

This week! Books!

First up, please stick with me past a housekeeping matter because there’s some analysis about the last fifty years in publishing that I want to make sure you see.

Housekeeping: Elon Musk’s ongoing demolition of Twitter reached yet another low this week as he removed headlines from links, further antagonizing anyone running a blog/newsletter like this one and removing what little value proposition remained for me to stay there. It’s no longer a place I want to spend any time or energy on, and given Musk’s chumminess with white supremacists and conspiracists, I agree with Dave Lee that I’m not sure it’s even ethical to do so. If you’d like to keep up with new posts as they go live, please follow me on Threads, Bluesky, or my Facebook page.

Now then, book news!

Norwegian author Jon Fosse, who wrote a shockingly readable and very Scandinavian series that forms one extremely long sentence, among other novels and plays, won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Check out Merve Emre’s recent fascinating interview with Fosse.

Meanwhile, three recent articles really capture the transformation of the publishing industry over the last 50 years and are worth spending some time with to understand where we’re at in the trajectory of publishing history.

First, while it sometimes seems like there was a straight line between Tolkien and today’s ubiquitous fantasy novels, it took a writer and fabulist who claimed his name was “Ramón Felipe San Juan Mario Silvio Enrico Smith Heathcourt-Brace Sierra y Alvarez-del Rey y de los Verdes,” born Leonard Knapp but best known as Lester del Rey, who started his eponymous imprint and gave rise to Terry Brooks and Piers Anthony and literally established the formula for modern post-Tolkien fantasy in the late 1970’s.

Dan Sinykin’s profile of del Rey is incredibly deft (and I look forward to reading his upcoming book on publishing history) because it captures the broader publishing ecosystem that undergirded del Rey’s success. The industry had started a transition from chummy elite family-owned houses to corporate consolidation in the 1960’s, a trend that may have reached its apotheosis only last year, and Ingram’s rise as a distributor facilitated the rise of mall bookstores like B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, which is where Sinykin found Piers Anthony and where I found Terry Brooks. Del Rey was as good as anyone at selling into the new chains.

Fast forward to the present. Not only are B. Dalton and Waldenbooks largely a thing of the past, so too is Borders, and Barnes & Noble’s future is uncertain. We now have e-books and A.I. But even more consequential than those disruptions, as Mike Shatzkin writes, “most books consumers buy are still printed rather than electronic, but stores are not where most of them are purchased.” The days of discovering a book in your local B. Dalton is long gone. Major publishers, who for the majority of their lifespans essentially specialized in B2B marketing to bookstores and the media, are struggling in our current media cacophony to drive sales outside of their backlists and a small handful of established bestsellers and celebrities.

And there’s ever more competition. The ease of publishing in all forms (facilitated broadly by Ingram) means that while there were approximately 500,000 books in print in 1990, Ingram’s Lightning Print database now has over 20 million titles and they’d be happy to ship you a copy of any of them within a few days. A.I. will likely only exacerbate (intentional word choice) the number of books available.

The orderly chain from author to agent to publisher to bookstore to author making a living writing books largely appears to be going by the wayside. As Shatzkin says:

Whether new leaner publishers with Internet followings and AI “staffs” will enable more authors to have successful careers in the new publishing era is something we will just have to find out. But the view from here is that anybody who expects anything like a revival of traditional trade publishing, particularly one that provides a sizable number of authors with a real living, is going to be very disappointed.

As an exemplar of the new era, for better or worse, a self-published book on mental health called The Shadow Work Journal by a 24-year-old with questionable credentials that’s not even available in many bookselling channels blew up on TikTok and became Amazon’s top seller, and has apparently sold over 290,000 copies on TikTok alone.

And in a bookselling landscape increasingly influenced by TikTok, many authors on social media noted this week that current bestseller lists are far from diverse:

Post by @alechiadow

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Accordingly, I hope you’ll join me in supporting the wonderful organization We Need Diverse Books, whose work is as important as ever.

Arguments for freedom of artistic expression came from two very prominent authors from quite different backgrounds this past week. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie argues against moral stridency in the way people respond to speech and against those “who now increasingly think that you cannot write about experiences that you have not personally had,” calling it “terrible for literature.” Ian McEwan criticized the recent trend of authors and publishers hiring sensitivity readers to raise the alarm about offensive content, railing against “these mass hysterias, moral panics, sweep through populations every now and then” and distinguishing between the need for reckoning with colonial pasts with the freedom to still read Nabokov and Conrad.

In publishing ephemera news, a draft fragment of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men that was eaten by Steinbeck’s dog (seriously) is up for sale, and Austin Kleon takes a look at Wes Anderson’s treatment of Roald Dahl’s meticulously crafted writing shed.

And Drew Barrymore will need to hire some new writers to explain to her what the expression “you reap what you sow” means.

This week in bestsellers

Here are the top five NY Times bestsellers in a few key categories. (All links are affiliate links):

Adult print and e-book fiction:

1. The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith
2. The Armor of Light by Ken Follett
3. Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
4. 12 Months to Live by James Patterson and Mike Lupica
5. House of Sky and Breath by Sarah J. Maas

Adult print and e-book nonfiction:

1. Enough by Cassidy Hutchinson
2. Killing the Witches by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard
3. The Democrat Party Hates America by Mark R. Levin
4. Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson
5. Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

Young adult hardcover:

1. Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross
2. Foul Heart Huntsman by Chloe Gong
3. The Scarlet Veil by Shelby Mahurin
4. This Winter by Alice Oseman
5. A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid

Middle grade hardcover:

1. Wrecker by Carl Hiaasen
2. The Little Kid with the Big Green Hand by Matthew Gray Gubler
3. Wonder by R.J. Palacio
4. The Sun and the Star by Rick Riordan and Mark Oshiro
5. A Horse Named Sky by Rosanne Parry

This week on the blog

In case you missed them, here are this week’s posts:

• Your query should read like you had fun writing it
• Remember kids’ agency (page critique)

Don’t forget that you can nominate your first page and query for a free critique on the blog:

• Nominate Your First Page for a Critique on the Blog
• Nominate Your Query for a Critique on the Blog

And keep up with the discussion in all the places!

• Follow me on Twitter
• Follow my page on Facebook
• Join the Facebook Group
• Check out the Bransforums

And finally, given all the fear of what Twitter is becoming, writers strikes, and what A.I. will bring, I enjoyed Kyle Chayka’s look back at the Luddites and what they did (and didn’t) stand for.

Have a great weekend!

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