That "illusion of choosing" another commenter mentioned also operates in the world of advertising, where so many people walk around internally believing "advertising doesn't work on me."
The sad truth advertising reveals is how cognitively fatigued we are. It doesn’t work on people who are alert. But when you land in a strange city at 11:30 at night and need to rent a car, you’re going to influenced by brand name. The effectiveness of advertising, in short, reveals how many of us—and how often—are in that kind of state.
For convenience goods, I like to buy generic. That's often cheaper, the quality might be the same or even higher, and I buy them often enough to risk a bit of trial and error. If it's a scam, not much money is lost and I can just go back to the familiar brand next time. For investmenent goods, I do my research. But there's a range of goods somewhere in between, which I buy infrequently enough to be annoyed by a bad bet, but which aren't important enough to warrant days of deliberation. I have other hobbies than shopping, and I sometimes like to save on transaction costs. The example of having to make a fairly quick decision in an unfamiliar environment is also a good one. I think it's not just a question of fatigue, but also of opportunity costs. There are just more fun things to do when travelling for instance, then endlessly comparing offers. In such cases, relying on familiar brands is not the worst mental short-cut one could come up with. Brands may not guarantee the highest quality, but they guarantee some degree of consistency. Quality may not remain consistent over time - we are now by all sufficiently aquainted with the process of enshittification - but the degradation has to be at least somewhat gradual. Companies invest a lot of money in building up their brands, and any too sudden, to egregious drop in quality would be a risk to that investment. The higher visibility of established brands also invites more scrutiny, which ideally results in at least some semblance of accountability. Brands have a reputation to lose. All this is of course based on the assumption of a market with somewhat healthy competition. So people making the safer bet too often, giving too much market share to the few big brands, eventually erodes the validity of the signal they would like to rely on. But that's one those inescapable central ironies of the market.
I've heard so many doom-and-gloom things about publishing that this was oddly comforting to me: "Ironically, it is thus not true that all publishers want is best-sellers." Thank you for sharing your insights, Nick!
Ouch. But yes. There was a bestselling author who used to say that midlist books were “just there to fill out the Pinterest board,” and I couldn’t help resenting that statement from someone who was in the center of the board, but yes, wallpaper.
I still believe in the power of weird little books to find readers and vice versa, but I realize publishers don’t share my naïveté.
Pretty depressing. But seems right to me. You didn't spend much time on 'self-published' books. I was hoping you'd have more to say about them, since that's the only route today for serious writers who refuse to work to the new formulas demanded by lit agents and Big Publishing. (Yeah, I know there are lots of hacks who self-publish.)
"The average book is now “wallpaper” Awful, but true. What's even sadder is that self-published books--shunned by the snobs who run bookstores and believe that only commercially published books are any good--cannot even aspire to be 'wallpaper' in books stores.
Dreams die hard. Mine is gasping for air in the new literary world of fem-schlock, political cultism, and sexual deviancy masquerading as sophistication. But I won't stop dreaming.
I think what's so interesting about what Nick is saying is that most books were in a sense *always* wallpaper, that even at its 20th-century heights, the dynamics of publishing as a business drove the publication of many more books than the market of readers could support, in order to provide an illusory abundance that in itself overwhelmingly appeals to readers, even though only a small number of those books will actually sell well enough to make money. This isn't a bad thing, since the alternative isn't a world where no books are wallpaper, but a world in which all those wallpaper books aren't published at all.
Well, you have a point. I never thought I’d be saying something like this, but maybe big publishing should be more discerning about what they publish. There are people in the biz now saying what many people assumed, that most books that are published only sell 300 copies at most. Could it be that a large percentage of books are published to ‘push’ a certain agenda? Did I ever tell you I was paranoid?
I think another flaw in the wallpaper strategy or formula is that Big Publishing puts big money on a tiny percentage of their books while putting no money on the bulk of the others, simply making them available, spine out, no promo. As a mid-list writer in the 1990s, my own experience with big publishing was likely not untypical. The publisher ‘out-of-print-ed’ the second book of my trilogy as the third book was being published. And having talked to several ‘mid-list’ authors over the years, I heard about other screw ups indicative of corporate laissez faire.
Well, I’d love to change the world… But, it’s just the way it is, just business.
Yes. In some cases. I would say, to do well in self-publishing, you either need to have two skills, have them in spades—the ability to write well AND the ability to promote and sell. If you don’t have the latter, but have lots of money, you can pay others to promote and sell your work.
I like to think I can write. Some people who know good writing have said mine is good. However, I don’t have the huckster gene. Not knocking it, just saying that it didn’t come with my tool set.
A book that “sells mostly to people who don’t buy a lot of books” is the best definition of bestseller that I have ever heard. The bestseller is AM radio, while all the good stuff is left of the dial. All the best writers have day jobs.
That a large selection brings in more trade (a fact you quote) is consistent with (a) your sacred wallpaper theory, (b) minor titles contributing to overall sales, and any number of other possiblities.
Your going straight from volume to wallpaper shows 1. you are not used to sorting how facts relate to one another and 2. you desperately need to blame someone else for failed books.
I actually don't mind your calling me a troll or whatever so long as this conversation will teach you something about yourself.
How is a minor title’s contributing to overall sales at odds with someone’s not giving a hoot about anything but that very minor title?
When I invoked myself as a consumer, I was illustrating the type of data you need to adduce--of course on the other side: people preferring to see irrelevant tites papering the wall. You have produced none.
Until your very latest comment what you didn't give a hoot about was selection size. Now you only give a hoot about a minor title.
But we'll let you play that palmed card. In what sort of bookstore are you more likely to find that minor title? One with a larger selection.
Now, given prior comments that non-bestsellers are duds because they are boring, we can reasonably conclude that consumers like you are also likely to buy best-sellers--in fact, we know it! By definition people are more likely to buy best-sellers. That's what makes the book a best-seller.
So which bookstore are you likely to go to:
a small store that only has best-sellers?
a small store that only carries niche titles?
a big store likely to have what you want whether minor title or best-seller?
an online store attached to many many warehouses and POD technology for instant printing?
We know this answer! The bestseller-only stores barely exist anymore, even as mere departments or shelving bays in drug stores and supermarkets. The format catering to these (mass-market) is all but defunct. There are still many best-sellers and types of best-sellers! More than one shelving unit at a CVS can hold.
The last few decades saw a massive culling of the second type of store, whether brick and mortar or specialty mail-order. There has been a bit of an uptick recently though.
Fifteen years ago, nearly half the giant stores just vanished. The remaining half floundered for a bit, reduced inventory to fill up with toys, but then after being sold, refocused on their shelves and have improved performance by having lots of books.
The big giant online store? It got so big it finally has become hard to navigate thanks to an influx of free books, fraudulent books (e.g. repackaged wikipedia articles about a best-selling book etc) and non-edited books (e.g. fivver-ghost writers) thus giving a smidge of room in the marketplace for the smaller curated stores to regain a teeny bit of share.
So even by not giving a hoot, yes you do give a hoot. Even if there were a sizeable number of best-seller-avoiders, who also somehow have disparate tastes from one another, they would still end up in the biggest store... and that store would also be centering its best-sellers. After all, you and your cothinkers don't give a hoot--a Sally Rooney section isn't driving you away from the store, but the wallpaper attracts everyone.
"Until your very latest comment what you didn't give a hoot about was selection size. Now you only give a hoot about a minor title." Wait. Do you really not understand how they are consistent? If a consumer goes straight for the book he wants (be it a bestseller or minor title), then there is no "wallpaper" effect. Selection just means more books to sell. Okay. I think you actually didn't understand.
"Now, given prior comments that non-bestsellers are duds because they are boring, we can reasonably conclude that consumers like you are also likely to buy best-sellers--in fact, we know it!" Know it? What a random guess! For your info, I don't know which books or even authors are bestsellers unless they are Stephen King or that Harry Potter lady.
You can't do this kind of analysis. You just don't have the wherewithal. Stick to editing or book coach or whatever you do.
I want to make one thing clear though. When I speak of a poor quality or failed book, I only mean its commercial viability (which is your topic). That failed book may be a masterpiece for all I know.
You are positing a world where browsing in a store (a practice positively correlated with square footage) doesn't exist or is some kind of obscure minority pursuit? And one where almost nobody sees something else in a store, say, on the shelf they march right over to, and buys that as well? B&N has its 3-for-2 tables for no reason or has no data about how well they work? And in which people only rarely talk to anyone else, read a newspaper, see complaints or praise about best-sellers online (not even on substack!), or even see the "bestseller" signs in the store they go to? Well, no need to even refute that. You don't live on Earth.
And of course you don't mean commercial viability: you previously denounced non-bestsellers as "boring." Not my problem that you can't keep your own ideas in your head for more than a few hours, not even when they're written down.
If I call a book “boring,” why does it make it the case I don’t mean commercial viability?
Think about this: If I am a philistine that thinks, “Bestsellers are exciting & commercially viable while other books are boring & unviable,” then when I call a book boring I am talking about commercial viability. I may simultaneously think that these boring & unviable books are true masterpieces, which simply go over my head (and so are boring to me). All this is consistent.
In short, I was allowing for the possibility that you might have written masterpieces.
On returns falling in a specified window usually (3-12 months after publication) and can use that credit to order new titles to tempt the unsuspecting. The labour required to track unsold titles is not to be taken lightly. The labour required to read with deliberation the titles from small presses and imprints and try to encourage the unsuspecting customers into purchasing them because they are excellent, surprising, or different is no small thing. Belittle the independent bookseller at your peril!
I've been an independent bookseller (Books Inc., Berkeley--I was also the store's event coordinator.) Of my co-workers I was probably the most enthusiastic about independent press titles. Even with an ancient Wordstock POS system (see pic at link for terrifying example) it wasn't that challenging to pull returns. It was a bit harder to be the store re-buyer, especially if one's tastes didn't match the clientele, but nothing challenging.
Whenever I walk into a store I scan the shelf-talkers to locate The Shop Weirdo and I sample a lot of great books that way, but sadly the industry is not comprised of weirdos.
Nick, it does feel impossible--but we do write in spite of all that you say, get published anyway and hang in there for reasons that don't operate via reason. See my newest reissue by Empress Editions and my short story that appears on this site: https://therepublicofletters.substack.com/p/sine-die
How do you know that a publisher *wants* to sell a few bestsellers? How do you know they wouldn't be equally happy if many books all sold moderately well (so long as the revenue is the same)? You are just making a random guess about intent from the outcome. "Oh, the industry is best-seller driven. So, that must be what they want." Also, choice *is* freedom. Just because someone ends up buying a bestseller, that doesn't mean he wasn't free to buy something else. I don't think you know what you are saying. Next time, concentrate on the substance. Try less hard to be clever.
Because it is more profitable to sell a few bestsellers, as described in the essay. As print runs go up, unit prices go down. So a publisher makes more money from printing and selling 100,000 of one title than 5000 copies of 20. And that's not even taking into account the other costs associated with bringing 20 books to press (20 covers, five editorial salaries, etc.)
But those 20 books *have* already been brought to press even assuming they (or at any rate 19 of them) were meant for wallflower. Also, why must a publisher only consider (a) 100k copies of 1 book or (b) 5k copies of 20? They wouldn't mind (I presume) (c) 100K copies each of 2 or (d) 100K copies each of 20. I don't think you have presented evidence for the proposition that any book is meant for wallflower. They are like light fixtures or the rug? "Gees, why are those people taking our wallpaper? Now I have to freaking replace them. Buy the goddamn books!" That's what it means to predestine a title to wallflower.
As pointed out in the piece and as intuitively grasped by walking into any store, publishers are doing both, not choosing between.
Booksellers also benefit from a large inventory because risk is minimal--they can return books for a full refund. This is also mentioned in the piece.
If it were possible to generate nothing but 100k bestsellers, publishers would do so. But it is not. We know it is not possible because they don't do it.
I think what you want to say is that most books are duds. They didn't take off. Since the publishers do not know (for sure) which will take off, they throw a whole lot at the market. Then most of them fail and *become* wallpaper (sorry about "wallflower"--you did not say that). Or at any rate, the bestseller-driven nature of the industry is consistent with (a) most books just plain sucking, (b) some sinister plot to consign *your* book to wallpaper, (c) their all sucking and it not mattering which stupid book happens to take off, or any number of other cases. Unless you are going to adduce evidence specifically for a type (b) explanation, I think you need to confirm that you did not impute any design against any of the little failing authors.
No, that is not what I wish to say. It hardly requires a conspiracy to note that publishing is a mass-production agency born in the age of mass production. As pointed out in the piece, if it was just a matter of scattershot trying for bestsellers, the investments in and licensing of distribution infrastructure to putative competitors wouldn't be a major driver of publishing.
Mass production did not involve producing stuff that was destined not to sell. I think you do an unkindness to authors by inventing a story to explain what they manage all on their own: To write boring books that would never sell under any circumstances.
Broadly similar. Kindle resolved the historical problems with self-publishing, distribution and quality. Anyone with a phone, much less a Kindle device, can find and read a self-published book now. And quality is handled by price: Kindle Unlimited means that books are "free" and even the individually priced books are much cheaper than print royalty published books. Some random horror novel might be only a tenth as good as Stephen King, but it's one thirtieth the price. People also don't care if their Dollar Store spatular breaks after two months, but would be livid if their Williams-Sonoma spatular broke so easily,
As far as the wallpapering, it remains the same: a book is uploaded onto kindle every fifteen seconds or so. The subscription service of Kindle Unlimited fundamentally promises a new kind of World's Biggest Bookstore, and low risk because the books are free with membership. Individual self-published writers have to be very prolific to keep their audience--more than one book a year, a novella for free with newsletter sign-up, lots of audiobooks, a patreon etc.The most successful self-pub books almost inevitably get reissued by a big publisher though, e.g., Colleen Hoover, Dungeon Crawler Carl, etc.
For the sort of literary fiction Substackers seem most interested in, KU seems much chancier, and creating a small press to first publish one's self might be smarter, but one needs capital to invest.
I don't know where you're getting your sales figures from but even a failure from The Big Five would sell a thousand copies or more. When I was a small press only one book didn't sell out of twenty years of publishing. Between ebooks, print, and subsidiary sales it wasn't hard. And when we worked with S&S and we were printing 25,000 copies a failure was something that failed around 25% or even less sell-thru.
“Kristen McLean, lead publishing industry analyst for BookScan, revealed findings from BookScan’s study of print retail sales in the U.S. of new titles by the top ten publishers in the U.S. trade market (Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Scholastic, Disney, Macmillan, Abrams, Sourcebooks, and John Wiley). BookScan found that only 33.9 percent of these titles were selling more than 1,000 copies in their first year (Kristen McLean response to the blog “No, Most Books Don’t Sell Only a Dozen Copies” by Lincoln Michel, September 4, 2022). A more recent study of BookScan data found that close to 90 percent of titles published by the Big Five trade publishers fail to reach 2,000 copies sold (“The Economic Realities of Traditional Publishing,” For the Writers, January 16, 2026).”
Bookscan doesn't measure ebook sales, library sales, book club sales, nor many sales from independent bookstores, special sales (non-bookstores that carry books) etc. Even your own cite dilutes the claim, looking at top ten rather than Big 5--two of the top ten, HMH and WW Norton, have many hybrid academic/trade titles as well. You can easily double bookscan #s to get a better idea of total sales
That "illusion of choosing" another commenter mentioned also operates in the world of advertising, where so many people walk around internally believing "advertising doesn't work on me."
The sad truth advertising reveals is how cognitively fatigued we are. It doesn’t work on people who are alert. But when you land in a strange city at 11:30 at night and need to rent a car, you’re going to influenced by brand name. The effectiveness of advertising, in short, reveals how many of us—and how often—are in that kind of state.
For convenience goods, I like to buy generic. That's often cheaper, the quality might be the same or even higher, and I buy them often enough to risk a bit of trial and error. If it's a scam, not much money is lost and I can just go back to the familiar brand next time. For investmenent goods, I do my research. But there's a range of goods somewhere in between, which I buy infrequently enough to be annoyed by a bad bet, but which aren't important enough to warrant days of deliberation. I have other hobbies than shopping, and I sometimes like to save on transaction costs. The example of having to make a fairly quick decision in an unfamiliar environment is also a good one. I think it's not just a question of fatigue, but also of opportunity costs. There are just more fun things to do when travelling for instance, then endlessly comparing offers. In such cases, relying on familiar brands is not the worst mental short-cut one could come up with. Brands may not guarantee the highest quality, but they guarantee some degree of consistency. Quality may not remain consistent over time - we are now by all sufficiently aquainted with the process of enshittification - but the degradation has to be at least somewhat gradual. Companies invest a lot of money in building up their brands, and any too sudden, to egregious drop in quality would be a risk to that investment. The higher visibility of established brands also invites more scrutiny, which ideally results in at least some semblance of accountability. Brands have a reputation to lose. All this is of course based on the assumption of a market with somewhat healthy competition. So people making the safer bet too often, giving too much market share to the few big brands, eventually erodes the validity of the signal they would like to rely on. But that's one those inescapable central ironies of the market.
"It doesn’t work on people who are alert. " -- this is what I mean. Show me that evidence.
Insightful. Can't take away from people the illusion that they are 'choosing'.
(Typo: haruspex!)
Thanks! Dear @The Republic of Letters, please fix!
I've heard so many doom-and-gloom things about publishing that this was oddly comforting to me: "Ironically, it is thus not true that all publishers want is best-sellers." Thank you for sharing your insights, Nick!
Ouch. But yes. There was a bestselling author who used to say that midlist books were “just there to fill out the Pinterest board,” and I couldn’t help resenting that statement from someone who was in the center of the board, but yes, wallpaper.
I still believe in the power of weird little books to find readers and vice versa, but I realize publishers don’t share my naïveté.
Pretty depressing. But seems right to me. You didn't spend much time on 'self-published' books. I was hoping you'd have more to say about them, since that's the only route today for serious writers who refuse to work to the new formulas demanded by lit agents and Big Publishing. (Yeah, I know there are lots of hacks who self-publish.)
"The average book is now “wallpaper” Awful, but true. What's even sadder is that self-published books--shunned by the snobs who run bookstores and believe that only commercially published books are any good--cannot even aspire to be 'wallpaper' in books stores.
Dreams die hard. Mine is gasping for air in the new literary world of fem-schlock, political cultism, and sexual deviancy masquerading as sophistication. But I won't stop dreaming.
I think you should reconsider your position on sexual deviancy.
Why?
So you can have something to live for.
I've lived long enough to have tried that if I was so inclined. No interest in that. Seems like you do, though.
I think what's so interesting about what Nick is saying is that most books were in a sense *always* wallpaper, that even at its 20th-century heights, the dynamics of publishing as a business drove the publication of many more books than the market of readers could support, in order to provide an illusory abundance that in itself overwhelmingly appeals to readers, even though only a small number of those books will actually sell well enough to make money. This isn't a bad thing, since the alternative isn't a world where no books are wallpaper, but a world in which all those wallpaper books aren't published at all.
Well, you have a point. I never thought I’d be saying something like this, but maybe big publishing should be more discerning about what they publish. There are people in the biz now saying what many people assumed, that most books that are published only sell 300 copies at most. Could it be that a large percentage of books are published to ‘push’ a certain agenda? Did I ever tell you I was paranoid?
I think another flaw in the wallpaper strategy or formula is that Big Publishing puts big money on a tiny percentage of their books while putting no money on the bulk of the others, simply making them available, spine out, no promo. As a mid-list writer in the 1990s, my own experience with big publishing was likely not untypical. The publisher ‘out-of-print-ed’ the second book of my trilogy as the third book was being published. And having talked to several ‘mid-list’ authors over the years, I heard about other screw ups indicative of corporate laissez faire.
Well, I’d love to change the world… But, it’s just the way it is, just business.
Self-published books can do surprisingly well, especially if you have a platform.
Yes. In some cases. I would say, to do well in self-publishing, you either need to have two skills, have them in spades—the ability to write well AND the ability to promote and sell. If you don’t have the latter, but have lots of money, you can pay others to promote and sell your work.
I like to think I can write. Some people who know good writing have said mine is good. However, I don’t have the huckster gene. Not knocking it, just saying that it didn’t come with my tool set.
A book that “sells mostly to people who don’t buy a lot of books” is the best definition of bestseller that I have ever heard. The bestseller is AM radio, while all the good stuff is left of the dial. All the best writers have day jobs.
That a large selection brings in more trade (a fact you quote) is consistent with (a) your sacred wallpaper theory, (b) minor titles contributing to overall sales, and any number of other possiblities.
Your going straight from volume to wallpaper shows 1. you are not used to sorting how facts relate to one another and 2. you desperately need to blame someone else for failed books.
I actually don't mind your calling me a troll or whatever so long as this conversation will teach you something about yourself.
a. and b. are not at odds.
Both are however are at odds with your prior claim about you and people like you not giving a "hoot" about selection size.
There's nothing desperate about knowing how the industry ones works in actually operates.
How is a minor title’s contributing to overall sales at odds with someone’s not giving a hoot about anything but that very minor title?
When I invoked myself as a consumer, I was illustrating the type of data you need to adduce--of course on the other side: people preferring to see irrelevant tites papering the wall. You have produced none.
Look sharp! You can figure this out.
Until your very latest comment what you didn't give a hoot about was selection size. Now you only give a hoot about a minor title.
But we'll let you play that palmed card. In what sort of bookstore are you more likely to find that minor title? One with a larger selection.
Now, given prior comments that non-bestsellers are duds because they are boring, we can reasonably conclude that consumers like you are also likely to buy best-sellers--in fact, we know it! By definition people are more likely to buy best-sellers. That's what makes the book a best-seller.
So which bookstore are you likely to go to:
a small store that only has best-sellers?
a small store that only carries niche titles?
a big store likely to have what you want whether minor title or best-seller?
an online store attached to many many warehouses and POD technology for instant printing?
We know this answer! The bestseller-only stores barely exist anymore, even as mere departments or shelving bays in drug stores and supermarkets. The format catering to these (mass-market) is all but defunct. There are still many best-sellers and types of best-sellers! More than one shelving unit at a CVS can hold.
The last few decades saw a massive culling of the second type of store, whether brick and mortar or specialty mail-order. There has been a bit of an uptick recently though.
Fifteen years ago, nearly half the giant stores just vanished. The remaining half floundered for a bit, reduced inventory to fill up with toys, but then after being sold, refocused on their shelves and have improved performance by having lots of books.
The big giant online store? It got so big it finally has become hard to navigate thanks to an influx of free books, fraudulent books (e.g. repackaged wikipedia articles about a best-selling book etc) and non-edited books (e.g. fivver-ghost writers) thus giving a smidge of room in the marketplace for the smaller curated stores to regain a teeny bit of share.
So even by not giving a hoot, yes you do give a hoot. Even if there were a sizeable number of best-seller-avoiders, who also somehow have disparate tastes from one another, they would still end up in the biggest store... and that store would also be centering its best-sellers. After all, you and your cothinkers don't give a hoot--a Sally Rooney section isn't driving you away from the store, but the wallpaper attracts everyone.
"Until your very latest comment what you didn't give a hoot about was selection size. Now you only give a hoot about a minor title." Wait. Do you really not understand how they are consistent? If a consumer goes straight for the book he wants (be it a bestseller or minor title), then there is no "wallpaper" effect. Selection just means more books to sell. Okay. I think you actually didn't understand.
"Now, given prior comments that non-bestsellers are duds because they are boring, we can reasonably conclude that consumers like you are also likely to buy best-sellers--in fact, we know it!" Know it? What a random guess! For your info, I don't know which books or even authors are bestsellers unless they are Stephen King or that Harry Potter lady.
You can't do this kind of analysis. You just don't have the wherewithal. Stick to editing or book coach or whatever you do.
I want to make one thing clear though. When I speak of a poor quality or failed book, I only mean its commercial viability (which is your topic). That failed book may be a masterpiece for all I know.
You are positing a world where browsing in a store (a practice positively correlated with square footage) doesn't exist or is some kind of obscure minority pursuit? And one where almost nobody sees something else in a store, say, on the shelf they march right over to, and buys that as well? B&N has its 3-for-2 tables for no reason or has no data about how well they work? And in which people only rarely talk to anyone else, read a newspaper, see complaints or praise about best-sellers online (not even on substack!), or even see the "bestseller" signs in the store they go to? Well, no need to even refute that. You don't live on Earth.
And of course you don't mean commercial viability: you previously denounced non-bestsellers as "boring." Not my problem that you can't keep your own ideas in your head for more than a few hours, not even when they're written down.
If I call a book “boring,” why does it make it the case I don’t mean commercial viability?
Think about this: If I am a philistine that thinks, “Bestsellers are exciting & commercially viable while other books are boring & unviable,” then when I call a book boring I am talking about commercial viability. I may simultaneously think that these boring & unviable books are true masterpieces, which simply go over my head (and so are boring to me). All this is consistent.
In short, I was allowing for the possibility that you might have written masterpieces.
Yikes. So the book I’m writing must one of these: (cool)
A bestseller
A mid seller
A low seller
Wallpaper
Toilet paper.
Have Middle Earth or Narnia already been taken?
Booksellers don’t actually get a “full refund” or their money back. To be precise, they get credit with the distributor
A distinction without difference.
Read the rest!
On returns falling in a specified window usually (3-12 months after publication) and can use that credit to order new titles to tempt the unsuspecting. The labour required to track unsold titles is not to be taken lightly. The labour required to read with deliberation the titles from small presses and imprints and try to encourage the unsuspecting customers into purchasing them because they are excellent, surprising, or different is no small thing. Belittle the independent bookseller at your peril!
I've been an independent bookseller (Books Inc., Berkeley--I was also the store's event coordinator.) Of my co-workers I was probably the most enthusiastic about independent press titles. Even with an ancient Wordstock POS system (see pic at link for terrifying example) it wasn't that challenging to pull returns. It was a bit harder to be the store re-buyer, especially if one's tastes didn't match the clientele, but nothing challenging.
Whenever I walk into a store I scan the shelf-talkers to locate The Shop Weirdo and I sample a lot of great books that way, but sadly the industry is not comprised of weirdos.
http://www.wordstock.com/wsmanual/chapter6.html
Yeah I was that weirdo…I was also the buyer so my wallpaper was pretty interesting.
Nick, it does feel impossible--but we do write in spite of all that you say, get published anyway and hang in there for reasons that don't operate via reason. See my newest reissue by Empress Editions and my short story that appears on this site: https://therepublicofletters.substack.com/p/sine-die
We should chat!
How do you know that a publisher *wants* to sell a few bestsellers? How do you know they wouldn't be equally happy if many books all sold moderately well (so long as the revenue is the same)? You are just making a random guess about intent from the outcome. "Oh, the industry is best-seller driven. So, that must be what they want." Also, choice *is* freedom. Just because someone ends up buying a bestseller, that doesn't mean he wasn't free to buy something else. I don't think you know what you are saying. Next time, concentrate on the substance. Try less hard to be clever.
Because it is more profitable to sell a few bestsellers, as described in the essay. As print runs go up, unit prices go down. So a publisher makes more money from printing and selling 100,000 of one title than 5000 copies of 20. And that's not even taking into account the other costs associated with bringing 20 books to press (20 covers, five editorial salaries, etc.)
But those 20 books *have* already been brought to press even assuming they (or at any rate 19 of them) were meant for wallflower. Also, why must a publisher only consider (a) 100k copies of 1 book or (b) 5k copies of 20? They wouldn't mind (I presume) (c) 100K copies each of 2 or (d) 100K copies each of 20. I don't think you have presented evidence for the proposition that any book is meant for wallflower. They are like light fixtures or the rug? "Gees, why are those people taking our wallpaper? Now I have to freaking replace them. Buy the goddamn books!" That's what it means to predestine a title to wallflower.
As pointed out in the piece and as intuitively grasped by walking into any store, publishers are doing both, not choosing between.
Booksellers also benefit from a large inventory because risk is minimal--they can return books for a full refund. This is also mentioned in the piece.
If it were possible to generate nothing but 100k bestsellers, publishers would do so. But it is not. We know it is not possible because they don't do it.
I think what you want to say is that most books are duds. They didn't take off. Since the publishers do not know (for sure) which will take off, they throw a whole lot at the market. Then most of them fail and *become* wallpaper (sorry about "wallflower"--you did not say that). Or at any rate, the bestseller-driven nature of the industry is consistent with (a) most books just plain sucking, (b) some sinister plot to consign *your* book to wallpaper, (c) their all sucking and it not mattering which stupid book happens to take off, or any number of other cases. Unless you are going to adduce evidence specifically for a type (b) explanation, I think you need to confirm that you did not impute any design against any of the little failing authors.
No, that is not what I wish to say. It hardly requires a conspiracy to note that publishing is a mass-production agency born in the age of mass production. As pointed out in the piece, if it was just a matter of scattershot trying for bestsellers, the investments in and licensing of distribution infrastructure to putative competitors wouldn't be a major driver of publishing.
Mass production did not involve producing stuff that was destined not to sell. I think you do an unkindness to authors by inventing a story to explain what they manage all on their own: To write boring books that would never sell under any circumstances.
What’s your take on self-publishing alternatively?
Broadly similar. Kindle resolved the historical problems with self-publishing, distribution and quality. Anyone with a phone, much less a Kindle device, can find and read a self-published book now. And quality is handled by price: Kindle Unlimited means that books are "free" and even the individually priced books are much cheaper than print royalty published books. Some random horror novel might be only a tenth as good as Stephen King, but it's one thirtieth the price. People also don't care if their Dollar Store spatular breaks after two months, but would be livid if their Williams-Sonoma spatular broke so easily,
As far as the wallpapering, it remains the same: a book is uploaded onto kindle every fifteen seconds or so. The subscription service of Kindle Unlimited fundamentally promises a new kind of World's Biggest Bookstore, and low risk because the books are free with membership. Individual self-published writers have to be very prolific to keep their audience--more than one book a year, a novella for free with newsletter sign-up, lots of audiobooks, a patreon etc.The most successful self-pub books almost inevitably get reissued by a big publisher though, e.g., Colleen Hoover, Dungeon Crawler Carl, etc.
For the sort of literary fiction Substackers seem most interested in, KU seems much chancier, and creating a small press to first publish one's self might be smarter, but one needs capital to invest.
Wallpaper… 🙈🙃
“as small as 20,000”—don’t the majority of Big 5 books sell less than 1k?
no and 2. also we’re talking lifetime of the product including secondhand sales, libraries, gifting/borrowing until the pages crumble.
66% of Big 5 books sell less than 1k copies. Very few books make it to 20k even after a lifetime of secondhand sales and borrowing.
I don't know where you're getting your sales figures from but even a failure from The Big Five would sell a thousand copies or more. When I was a small press only one book didn't sell out of twenty years of publishing. Between ebooks, print, and subsidiary sales it wasn't hard. And when we worked with S&S and we were printing 25,000 copies a failure was something that failed around 25% or even less sell-thru.
“Kristen McLean, lead publishing industry analyst for BookScan, revealed findings from BookScan’s study of print retail sales in the U.S. of new titles by the top ten publishers in the U.S. trade market (Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Scholastic, Disney, Macmillan, Abrams, Sourcebooks, and John Wiley). BookScan found that only 33.9 percent of these titles were selling more than 1,000 copies in their first year (Kristen McLean response to the blog “No, Most Books Don’t Sell Only a Dozen Copies” by Lincoln Michel, September 4, 2022). A more recent study of BookScan data found that close to 90 percent of titles published by the Big Five trade publishers fail to reach 2,000 copies sold (“The Economic Realities of Traditional Publishing,” For the Writers, January 16, 2026).”
Bookscan doesn't measure ebook sales, library sales, book club sales, nor many sales from independent bookstores, special sales (non-bookstores that carry books) etc. Even your own cite dilutes the claim, looking at top ten rather than Big 5--two of the top ten, HMH and WW Norton, have many hybrid academic/trade titles as well. You can easily double bookscan #s to get a better idea of total sales
Well, doubling those numbers are not very big numbers.