Publishers Aren't in Trouble—Writers Are
I crunched the numbers on writer revenue. Here's what I found.
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I spent the past year reading the transcripts from The Trial, the antitrust case between Penguin Random House and the Department of Justice. I wanted to understand more about the publishing industry, something that has previously been opaque to me, so I took notes and published what I found interesting. I called it “No One Buys Books.”
I could not have foreseen how viral that post would go, and how angry it would make some who work in the publishing industry. I get why. I wrote the article from the standpoint of an author and each individual author doesn’t sell a lot of books. In 2020, there were 2.7 million books published in print, digital, and audiobook, but 96% of them (2.6 million books) sold fewer than a thousand copies. Only 268 print titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and only eight sold more than 500,000.
That doesn’t mean the publishing houses are struggling—far from it. Lincoln Michel points out that Americans still buy one billion books every year, and that’s true. That number includes America’s share of the 80 million Bibles that are sold annually, books by the Obamas that have sold more than 25 million copies combined, celebrity memoirs like Prince Harry’s Spare, which sold 1.4 million copies in 2023, and Britney Spears’ The Woman In Me which sold over 2 million.
As publisher Brooke Warner points out, if only a couple of books sell more than a million copies every year, that’s enough for the publishing house to earn their whole payday. She says Britney’s memoir is proof that Simon & Schuster is doing just fine, then points out that her indie press earned $1 million last year even as her top 10 books sold only 500 copies each last week. She has a point: Publishers are still doing very well even though most of the authors they publish aren’t.
Even if every author sold only 100 copies of their book, with 2.7 million books sold in a year, the publishers will take a cut of every sale and win the whole game.
The house always wins.
I get why stats like these are important to the publishing industry—that’s how they make money—but they aren’t important to me as a writer. Unless I’m going to write the next Bible or become a British prince my work will not have a big reach. To find statistics relevant to me, I can’t look at the market for books as a whole, I have to look at the market for books—each individual title—and that, as we’ve established, is a much smaller number.
Even if every book that sold 1,000 copies in its first year goes on to sell 1,666 copies in the course of its life (according to the math of Michael Pietsch, CEO of Hachette) the market for each individual book is still incredibly small. As Michel concedes: “Most will likely do a few thousand. If you’re lucky, tens of thousands. If you’re really exceptionally lucky, hundreds of thousands.”
Some writers find this depressing, but I find it informative.
Actually, I find it empowering.
Because “books” aren’t the only place we can put our writing. In fact, in the age of the internet the book might be the least sharable medium available to us. The only reason my post went so viral is because people kept reading and sharing it all over the internet. If I had put that same information in a book, people wouldn’t have been able to share it the same way. They might recommend it to a friend or quote from it in an article, but everyone would have to purchase the book or find it at their library to read it—it wouldn’t have the same reach.
That’s why I publish my writing on Substack where, rather than publishing 100,000 words every three years as a $10 book, I publish 1,000 words every week for a $70 annual subscription. Each individual post has the opportunity to be shared far and wide, these attract new readers who subscribe to my work and even financially support it over time. Today I have more subscribers than I would have book readers, more paid subscribers than I would have book sales, and, because I am earning an annual subscription rather than a one-time payment, my work is better read and better financially supported than it would be if I bundled it into books.
Substack is no panacea. There are still too few readers for all the people who love to write. Almost a quarter of Americans don’t read at all, and we average only 15 minutes a day. Even if I think the average writer would be better off putting their writing on Substack than putting it in a book, it still doesn’t mean they will have a large audience. Most won’t.
Most writing, no matter where it is published, will not have a mass audience, it will have a niche audience.
But here is the point I want to make: A niche market can be just as powerful and even just as profitable as a mass market if writers know how to cater to it!
Because here’s the stat everyone missed from that viral article: If few people read and even fewer read books, a quarter of those who do read, read voraciously. According to Markus Dohle, former CEO of Penguin Publishing House: “Around 20% to 25% of the readers, the heavy readers, account for 80% of the revenue pool of the industry of what consumers spend on books. It’s the really dedicated readers.”
25% of readers account for 80% of the industry?! That means a very small group of people is doing a lot of reading and a lot of buying!
And a very small group of people can still be a very big market.
Substack makes that possible, allowing readers to subscribe to their favorite writers, and allowing writers to earn a living from a niche group of people. For instance, I am a big fan of Matthew Yglesias—I pay $80 annually to subscribe to his newsletter Slow Boring and have also purchased his book One Billion Americans for $10. Which medium do you think he prefers?
His newsletter reaches 131,000 free subscribers, and only 13,000 paid as of 2022, but at $80/year he’s earning at least $800,000 per year from a very niche audience. Even after Substack takes 10 percent of those earnings and Stripe takes another 2.9 percent plus a $0.3 transaction fee, he’s still netting at least $693,800 a year. As a writer, wouldn’t you rather have 10,000 newsletter subscribers at $80/year than 10,000 book sales at $10 each every few years? (Especially when 85% of those book sales are going to the publishing house and literary agency?)
Again, that doesn’t mean it’s easy—finding patrons for art never has been. Matthew Yglesias is one of the most successful writers on Substack and most of the writers I follow have much smaller audiences. Moving all of the writing that would have been books to Substack won’t magically result in every writer having 1,000 true fans (as in Kevin Kelly's famous formulation).
I certainly don’t have that.
What I do have: a place where I can write an essay that inspires a dozen more writers to write responses to it and where their responses inspire me to write this one. It’s a place where writing is easily shared, where we can like and comment on one another’s work and even support it financially. It’s a place where I can write all of the incredibly niche things I’m interested in writing about alongside a literary community that is doing the same.
I’d much rather have all of that than a couple of books to my name that no one ever reads.
Elle Griffin is the author of The Elysian, a newsletter exploring utopia.
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The stats about the economics of publishing are certainly eye opening. But I would I would argue these dynamics are at play in any creative endeavor--not just publishing. Even though tens of thousands of Americans list “actor” as their profession, only a small number are able to make a stable living as a working actor. And only a rare few are able to make it big—they can all fit into the first several rows of seats at the Oscars.
Yes, “tortured poet” Taylor Swift is a billionaire, but the vast number of musicians are “starving artists” barely getting by. Thousands of bands are formed each year in garages across America and very few will see commercial success. https://ryanclarkself.substack.com/p/the-shocking-truth-about-book-publishing
To the author's point, Substack has opened up countless new opportunities for writers, for which I am very grateful.
Elle,
Do you have any stats on the books that are greater than 1,000 but don't make the 100,000 sales mark. That's still almost 100,000 books. I know there are books that sell 20k to 50k copies and are still considered successful for both the author and the publisher.
And are these numbers for the American market? Because some books break out in Europe or other countries, which its another source of revenue down the line.
Thanks for all the work you're putting into this effort.