I’ve had a pretty decent run as a novelist the past two decades, awards, bestsellers, movie adaptations, the good fortune of being banned or challenged in twenty-nine states, etc. It’s a run that continues with my current book, The Heart of Winter, which has garnered great reviews and is selling well (for literary fiction). But something is happening in corporate publishing, something I--and even the publishers themselves--cannot control. Well, several things, actually.
For starters, people have stopped reading at record rates. The numbers are shockingly bad. Like 90% of adults won’t finish a single book this year. Streaming, video games, blah, blah, blah—yeah, there’s a lot of competition for people’s leisure time. But I’m not quite ready to put the blame entirely on the shoulders of the public. I honestly believe that part of the problem is the books being published, along with the sheer number of books being published to accommodate a retail footprint that is largely driven (unfortunately) by twenty-thousand-square-foot warehouse stores that require a shit-ton of titles to stock their shelves. 97% of these books will sell fewer than a thousand copies. But boy, do they make it hard for the reading public, the publishers, and the authors to sort out demand.
A bigger problem in recent years, is that corporate publishing is now owned by equity groups who have zero interest in art, platform capitalists who view books as data points on spreadsheets and nothing more (consider that they are pushing publishers to acquire more AI content, and that the hottest thing in commercial publishing right now is “Romantasy”—a genre which, as I understand it, comprises wizards tooling princesses). The result is that “literary fiction,” the kind that lasts generations, which despite its central importance and cultural cache, has never been a blockbuster sales proposition, is being squeeze out by the Wall Street set. Fitzgerald’s novels sold terribly in his lifetime. John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy had a handful of commercial failures before their careers got any traction. Whitman was harassing people on street corners to buy his pamphlets. These equity groups have no interest in the cultural value of books, even those (like mine), which have proven profitable time and again, if only marginally.
In this week’s episode, we’re gonna take a look at how Christoph Paul, and indie publisher at Clash Books is approaching the publishing crisis. We’re going to walk through the entire publishing process from acquisition to publication and beyond and see how the sausage is made. We’re also going to (hopefully) arrive at some potential solutions for a publishing paradigm sorely in need of an overhaul. How do authors and publishers sort out demand? How do we as artists circumnavigate the ruinous effects of platform capitalism? How do we make books cool again? Anyway, should be a fascinating conversation. Tune in!
Xoxo,
Johnny
Clash Books: https://www.clashbooks.com
Christoph Paul: https://linktr.ee/christophpaul
