publishing

I published my book with Simon & Schuster, but before I sold the proposal to them I put the book proposal – which is basically the idea for the book without the full story fleshed out – up for auction. I got five bids when I put out my proposal. There were more than five editors who wanted to make a bid, it’s just that some of those editors were at imprints owned by the same conglomerate, and conglomerates don’t let their subsidiary imprints bid against each other. In other words, because of previous publishing mergers, the auction had an artificially low number of bidders, meaning that the price was likely lower than it should have been.

Matt Stoller on competition.

Tl;dr extreme consolidation in the publishing industry hurts authors.

Five is, not coincidentally, the number of big publishing conglomerates that existed when Stoller sold his book (S&S, Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan). If he’d done it today, he likely would’ve only gotten four bids…

I would have added: “You know Random House was built on right-wing politics, no? Ayn Rand […] was a staple of our list in our glory years, and she’s still a significant contributor under Signet, one of our ‘classics’ imprints.”

And more: “We also publish George W. Bush and Henry Kissinger and the Fifty Shades Trilogy. And you’re all complicit. Don’t be suckered by the shell game. Don’t think your hands are clean because you work at the other end of the hall. It’s all Penguin Random House, and you’re complicit in all of it.”

As for the evasions: “Of course, we hid the damn thing from you. We can’t have tantrums getting in the way of business. Next year’s budget, our current staffing levels, and lots of things we like to do as a publishing company depend upon this book. It’s JBP or the 2021 Christmas party. Think about that.”

And: “As for the anti-racist and allyship things, of course it’s performative. All corporate social responsibility stunts by all publicly-held companies are performative. But we probably do some good regardless, and at least we weren’t partnering with WE.”

On publishing’s shell game.

Tl;dr commercial publishing is dominated by formerly five, now four publishing companies. That’s it; that’s, like, 99% of all books you’ll ever see. Everything else, all the little “brands” you see on books spines, are “imprints” which is basically a shell game publishing houses play to pretend there’s more diversity in the market than there actually is.

For full disclosure, Liesmith and Stormbringer were published by Random House basically at the time of its merger with Penguin. It was an… interesting time. And also a massive professional mistake on my end but, eh. Hindsight and all that.

The features of gambling that make it pleasurable (and hence potentially dangerous) are the way rewards are structured. Those features are:

• Occasional small rewards
• Unpredictable, irregular rewards
• An illusion of control (I.e the chance element may be disguised or the gambler rationalises that they have more control than they actually have)
• Losses disguised as wins (a payoff that helps hide the fact that overall the gambler is losing)
• The real chance of a large payoff

How many of those features match aspects of writing fiction for money?

Camestros Felapton is too honest.

… yikes. Too soon, brah.