Problems with Book Publishing

And How We Might Hope to Solve Them

Today is Tuesday, March 11, 2025. Tuesday is ruled by Mars, the god of war—a day for strategic action, bold announcements, decisive moves against adversaries, and new releases.

As such today is the publishing date of my book, A Book About Books, now available everywhere books are sold. You may purchase the title from Amazon, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and an array of other sales channels.

I like to focus on a specific problem I am trying to solve for when writing. A character in a story might struggle with his sense of value, a piece of copy may seek to address something a customer is missing, and in the case of a text on the business of books, we examine each part of the book industry’s supply chain and the challenges it faces today.

Below is an opening excerpt from A Book About Books, where we outline some of these problems. The book goes on to thoroughly define each step of the chain before exploring ways one might approach solving them.

Reader, I am proud. We only get so many publishing days—so many chances to send something off into the world. As this loop closes, another trailhead emerges. A driving purpose of this book is to motivate action—to show, by example, that you can do this too. Onward!

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Problems

Problems are inevitable and I don’t perceive them as bad. They are a product of our crawling state of entropy. The thrilling part is that we have the opportunity to harness a problem like a wild stallion and ride it directly into the sun. Let’s mount our stallion by taking a high-level look at each step of the supply chain and the problems that exist within them. Bold phrases are industry terms that have been expanded upon in the glossary, starting on page 102.

Problems with Big Publishing

Book publishing has been severely disrupted by print on demand and the democratization of distribution that it has granted independent authors. Social media amplifies this effect by providing individuals with large followings more distribution capital than publishers. Today, publisher acquisitions are less influenced by curatorial taste-making and behave more like venture capital—in other words, the logic is to purchase assets below their value, corner a market or genre, cast a wide net, and hope for some whales.

As such, book publishers have become increasingly averse to risk and more prone to homogenized choices; taking obvious bets, following trends in lieu of being “ahead of the curve,” and shirking anything too “avante garde.” What I largely mean by this is book publishers have flattened their content considerations into a predictable pancake and invest far less in evangelizing new talent.

The data that emerged from the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust suit filed in 2021 against Penguin Random House (Bertelsmann) over its attempted acquisition of Simon & Schuster from Paramount Global reveal the following trends:

1. Emerging to mid-career talent are being largely ignored; author care can be great but has great potential to be stagnant. Of 14,000 PRH titles published in 2021, 90% sold under 1,000 copies.

2. Advances are shrinking, even for authors who have previously published bestsellers. The consolidated market has reduced competition between big publishers, driving down advances.

3. Criteria is assessing emerging talent has changed to fit a fast-paced churn of content informed by social media and parasocial clout.

Problems with Distributors

Throughout this book I detail the ‘Book Trade’—the ecosystem of distributors, wholesalers, and booksellers that are all responsible for the movement of books and how companies like Ingram and Amazon are entrenched across several crucial layers of the trade’s supply chain. The problem here is distributors honoring arcane and vestigial agreements penned with Amazon in the 90’s that do not make sense in today’s market.

The intended role a distributor provides is to connect a publisher’s catalog of forthcoming works (a Frontlist) to a network of booksellers. Distributors are also meant to be curatorial tastemakers, selecting the publishers they represent with integrity equal to a publisher making their choices on who to publish. This creates wholesale relationships between publishers and booksellers, and forges authorities in publishers who stand up talent both fledgling and established. These distributors service Amazon in addition to other big-box retail and e-commerce giants.

The issue at hand is that purchaser behaviors have largely migrated to online retailers—Amazon as an obvious default—while brick-and-mortar independent retailers reduce in size and meaningful sales volume, some publishers see Amazon taking up a majority share of their distributor sales.

The original function of the distributor creating bonds between publisher and bookseller seems drastically diluted as the priority shifts to filling larger Amazon orders. This often leaves distributors appearing more like a superfluous pass-through entity for passionless purchases online; taking a cut on a sales channel that require no human intervention, typically stirred up via the distribution capital of the publisher or author to begin with.

New types of distribution models are emerging today that do not require exclusivity over a represented publisher’s catalog, meaning the publisher can open up their own accounts with Amazon and fill orders directly through programs such as Amazon Advantage or Amazon Seller Central (Fulfilled by Amazon or FBA) or Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Both the margins and cashflow potential in this direct control of e-commerce accounts are becoming increasingly crucial for smaller/start-up publishers to consider as they enter the market. Even mid-to-large sized publishers can use their weight to strike non-exclusivity deals with distributors, carving out digital rights or even the entire Amazon account.

Problems with Printers

We can thank the 90s through the aughts for the domestic manufacturing drought we are in today. We saw massive supply chain disruptions in 2020’s pandemic era that resulted in book paper shortages that lasted through 2023. It feels back to normal now here in 2024, although book paper and printing costs have generally doubled across the board since 2020.

Offset Printing remains the way to go for large-volume printing. There are a handful of competitive options in the United States, although it’s easy to outsource to China for high quality large-run book manufacturing that is ridiculously cheap. However, today’s tariffs on China (which get passed onto us, the business, and then you, the reader) make this option not as marginally beneficial as it used to be.

As I’ve cudgeled into your head by now, print on demand is and is still becoming increasingly pervasive. This author believes it will be the primary default of book manufacturing a decade from now.

Problems Authors Face

If you’re new talent that does not have some sort of platform, some kind of parasocial relationship with your audience that gives you ridiculous distribution capital, it’s hard to find a publisher or representation that will give you the time of day. This doesn’t exactly mean you need a big social media following. Of course it helps, it’s a solid tool. There are ways to manufacture a platform beyond social media, but social media is a risk-mitigating factor in today’s venture capital mindset of book publishing.

Literary agents are increasingly difficult to find as advances are inconsistent—again, an impact of risk aversion. As such, there are very few independent literary agents, and literary representation is now largely dominated by Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and William Morris Endeavor (WME), where they can take their brand name talent and funnel their works to the bigger publishers.

There are still, of course, independent publishers and agents of integrity that can spot and build new talent. The players are few and far between, and they all participate in the vibes roulette of our business. This speaks to the VC mindset; a confluence of taste, integrity, and grit—seeing the future in the face of unknown odds. But like any good strategic partner, it’s hard to find in today’s landscape, and sometimes doing it yourself is better than doing it half-assed with a publisher who has no skin in the game.

Problems with Small Publishing / Start-Up Publishing:

“What good is a publisher?” asks the high distribution capital individual. “If you’re relying on me and my network to shill my book, what good are you?”

Great question. Big publishers solve for this by paying fat advances and offering legacy brand authority. Smaller publishers have to compete hard in order to prove value over what high distribution individuals can achieve themselves with today’s highly robust self-publishing tools.

Smaller publishers can compete by scaling up to the same levels of distribution as the Big Five, or using Big Five distributors, or creating their own distribution that services these accounts. At the end of the day, distribution is a plateau; there are only so many sales channels and reps behind them in addition to their heavy skew toward Amazon sales.

This leaves new or smaller publishers in a position to get creative with their offerings, how they market them, and how they choose to make them available. A big example of a simple blind spot in bigger publishers are cool events. It’s uncommon to see publishers offer their authorship a book tour or even a single event. Generally authors, especially new talent, are left to their own devices to figure out the events surrounding their book release; they often are responsible for doing it themselves or finding third party promoter support.

While capital intensive, there are ways of standing up tours that can have a reasonable target of breaking even with a solid ticketing model. The quality of marketing from sublime in-person experiences translates very well into lasting word-of-mouth awareness campaigns, and are good content pipelines in and of themselves if you record your programs. I can’t stress this enough; curating a space where an audience can have a good time is probably one of the most valuable things on the planet Earth.

A final problem small publishers face is the private equity-ization of everything; consolidations across distribution, printing, and publishing. While publishers on a micro level (a title by title basis) have to think like venture capitalists, publishers on a macro level have to think like private equity. Because most of it is owned by private equity. Simon & Schuster this last fall was sold to top PE firm KKR.

What this means is that the incentive is to keep a mature asset improving on an annual basis. This compounds the issue of risk assessment and value association in book publishing, creating constraints around acquisition choices that simply did not exist thirty years ago.

In total, this amalgam of problems has created a large, flat, stagnant surface with a massive saturation of content. This poses a challenging playing field for emerging authors and publishers alike. However, this has also created new opportunities for disruption and competitiveness against extremely boring and hegemonic publishers, crafting entirely original paths for success.