How Publishing Actually Works

It's Not a Pretty Picture

Dear Republic,

We can all get a little starstruck about the publishing industry — or at least wistful about how it used to be. Nick Mamatas is here to disabuse us of that and explain how the sausage actually gets made.

-ROL

HOW PUBLISHING ACTUALLY WORKS

During my years of coming up in publishing as an editor and writer, I made quite a few dollars writing term papers. I am sure few readers will be surprised to hear that business students were the most likely to outsource their schoolwork to me. Thus, I had the opportunity to read many Harvard Business School course studies and a fair number of chapters from business textbooks. At the same time, I was working for Soft Skull Press, then a small and independent “punk publisher” run out of a janitor’s basement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. There, I learned my now-favorite joke, which I picked up in a warehouse one day.

Q: Who knows less about publishing than a midlist author?

A: A best-selling author!

Luckily, I don’t even qualify as a midlist author. I’m the authorial equivalent of an oncology resident who just looked down into the toilet at a mass of bloody stool.

Doomscrollers and restackers, here is what you need to understand: publishing is a nineteenth-century production-driven manufacturing industry, not unlike the Big Three automakers, but the writers and compilers of books are artisanal creators. This contradiction is the cause of many of the anxieties and confusions experienced by aspiring novelists and even working professionals.

A production-driven industry is one that is less concerned with tailoring products toward a market and more about manufacturing large numbers of products (both units and product types), and then selling those products to another set of sellers. Those retailers are in the business of meeting the customer. The publishing industry—even leaving aside self-published ebooks—generates hundreds of thousands of books a year across all categories. This despite there being only five big publishers that do this sort of thing, and perhaps as many big retail outlets to sell the books to individual consumers.

Furthermore, publishers spend a lot of money up-front bringing books to print, but get their profits back in dribs and drabs. Booksellers sell the books, and return the ones that do not sell for a full refund. The books don’t even need to be in good shape when they return to the warehouse either. Most get Dumpstered or incinerated. (And no, “the poor” don’t want those books either, even for free.)

How does an industry that doesn’t spend time and effort finding out what customers want, and that produces super-high volumes on relatively small margins, make any money?

Simple: they offer choice while pretending to offer freedom.

Consider Penguin Random House, which has the best supply chain of the big publishers in the U.S., one so impressive that a 2020 New York Times personality profile of its then chief executive was largely about the company’s warehouses. Any bookseller who has worked receiving will acknowledge that PRH does a better job getting books to stores faster and in better condition than anyone else. And PRH, and the other big publishers, also distribute small presses.

But why? Why license one’s advantage in infrastructure to one’s competition?

Because the customer is an unknown quantity, except for one thing: they’re in a store somewhere and they’re at least semi-likely to walk out with a book. So, the best bet for a publisher to make money is to make sure the book—the generic product unit—is one of theirs, or at least that they’ll get a dollar for putting that book on the shelf. It doesn’t matter if you walk into a Barnes & Noble or click through Amazon to buy literary fiction, or a manga, or a cookbook—you can choose anything, but whatever you choose is overwhelmingly likely to be a book from a Big Five publisher, or one of the Big Five’s distribution clients.

You’re “free” to choose anything, but you won’t. You’re definitionally likely to buy a best-seller. Even you, the very online reader who likes this magazine, there is a best-seller out there for you. Even, maybe even especially, one that’ll annoy you! If you’re the average reader who buys only two books a year, of course you’ll buy two best-sellers. A best-seller is by definition a book that sells mostly to people who don’t buy a lot of books, but readers who do buy lots of books also buy best-sellers.

Bookstores, whether brick and mortar or click and mail, also work on this system of choice disguised as freedom, and also have little in the way of marketing to the customer, except for one compelling message: we got lots of books. Barnes & Noble, the late Borders, what’s left of Books-a-Million, etc. got much bigger over the past thirty years, square-footage wise. For a while there, it was unclear that big-box stores would ever hit the top of the curve where adding another square foot wouldn’t also increase sales. (Borders and B&N crippled one another by building competing stores too close to one another, not because of the ever-swelling size of their individual stores.)

The average book is now “wallpaper”—the average customer walks into a store to buy this or that best-seller, whether it is, in 2026, a romantasy novel, or something about Jesus Christ (He’s good!) or carbohydrates (they’re bad!) or Donald Trump (don’t get me started).

Nobody would patronize a best-seller–only shopping mall kiosk called We Bet We Have That Book You Want, even though best-sellers are most of what anyone buys. People want to walk into stores with lots of books which they have no interest in even looking at. Amazon uses the same strategy—it launched in 1994 with its slogan “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore.” Amazon claimed to have millions of books in its warehouses, while the two big chains at the time had a couple hundred thousand. Attracted by the promise of endless possibilities, tons of readers made accounts and bought...Harry Potter titles and Who Moved My Cheese?, which they could have gotten anywhere else.

Ironically, it is thus not true that all publishers want is best-sellers. There is one major benefit in the best-seller: as print runs go up, per-unit costs go down, but that’s not enough. The Big Five want wallpaper, which they use to make you buy their best-sellers. If publishers just wanted best-sellers, and if publicity and marketing could automatically create best-sellers, there would be many fewer books published. Publishing would look like the Hollywood film industry: 1000 products a year or so. 99.8 percent of the market, vaporized.

Booksellers also want wallpaper, because it’s the cheapest form of marketing. Wallpaper is returnable, so stores are always full of new, decorative, stuff. If there was no Faustian bargain between stores and publishers—stores get to return product for their money back, but publishers get to inscribe their price on the product—we would end up with either bookstores the size of baseball stadia, or, more likely...99.8 percent of the market, vaporized.

The abiding complaint of the midlist author is that the midlist is “shrinking.” And, from their limited point of view, it is. They used to be able to sell books to publishers for middle-class sums. Now they can’t. Their job is going away! But the problem isn’t that the midlist has been shrinking, it’s that the midlist has been growing, and growing much faster than the pool of regular readers. The pie isn’t smaller, the slices are.

And those lucky recipients of lightning strikes, the best-selling author? Why, in the old days there were book tours and TV spots, and millions of mass-market paperbacks sold, and best-slash-worst of all, authors were taken seriously for their opinions on the important questions of the day. The decline of this level of marketing push coincides with the rise of the big-box and online bookstore. Those old book tour stops were as often booked at department stores as bookstores, those massive sales were via strippable mass-market paperbacks at a 4 percent royalty, and the opinions shared with Mister and Missus TV Land...yes, I guess women really are a mystery, and war is bad, or is it good? Who knows?!

Most best-sellers are not perennial sellers. They soar, then they plummet. The visions of the halcyon days of the literary best-seller is a matter of survivor bias: we’ve all forgotten the blockbusters that lasted but a season, which is to say 90 percent of them. Want to read a bunch of best-sellers from the days when publishing was actually good, and cared about literature? Go find a thrift store. Bring a pocketful of quarters with you.

Despite all this, there is something unique about a book. Publishers can try to sell books as though they are generic units—toilet paper rolls or the current thirty-five flavors of Pop-Tarts—but there’s a hard limit to doing so. Books are still largely produced individually, by real human beings. They’re also acquired by real human beings, albeit with assistance/interference from marketing departments with access to numbers that are unassailable because they are ambiguous, just like a bird’s guts in the hands of a haruspex. Wages are kept low by offering editors a chance to experience “love” for a book twenty out of a thousand times a year.

A unique book can still do well. The potential audience may be as small as 20,000 readers over a book’s physical lifetime, from shelf to shelf, from Goodwill to streetcorner, but a distinctive individual work of art can find the majority of that readership before its pages disintegrate. Extruded cultural product has a much larger potential audience in the short term—let’s call it 200,000 on average—but with thousands of competitors for that 200,000 readers, ECP Unit #997 is much more likely to be Dumpstered and forgotten after ninety days as it is to annoy us all with its popularity.

Now that you know a bit more about publishing than the average midlister, what sort of book would you like to write?

Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including Move Under Ground, The Second Shooter, and Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest. His short fiction has appeared in McSweeney's, Best American Mystery Stories, Tor.com, and many other venues—some of it was collected in The People's Republic of Everything. Nick is also an editor and an anthologist; his latest anthology is 120 Murders: Dark Fiction Inspired by the Alternative Era. He co-edits the Outspoken Author series of chapbooks for PM Press.

Image: Penguin Random House warehouse.