The outcome of an antitrust trial currently underway in Washington could reshape the kind of books Americans read - and who writes them.
Links of the week August 22 2022 (34)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
22 August 2022
Last November, the Department of Justice sued to stop the proposed merger of two of the country's largest publishers, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. At the time, U.S. Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland said: "If the world's largest book publisher is permitted to acquire one of its biggest rivals, it will have unprecedented control over this important industry." The consolidated company, according to Garland, would control half the market for top-selling books.
The Authors Guild, America's oldest and largest association of published writers, opposes this merger. As we argued to the Justice Department in January 2021 - a position it adopted in its complaint - less competition in the industry, particularly allowing one publishing house to dominate all others, will be bad for authors and readers in general, and it could harm the free flow of ideas in our democracy.
The Department of Justice has claimed Penguin Random House's $2.2bn merger with Simon & Schuster will create a duopoly and damage competition in the US, as both sides made their closing arguments in court.
On the final day of a three-week trial in Washington DC on 19th August, lawyers for PRH and S&S defended the merger, arguing it would actually increase competition and claiming the US government had not proved it would create significant harm. Both sides will now present post-trial briefs before Judge Florence Pan makes a final verdict later this year on whether the merger should be blocked.
Presenting his closing argument, Department of Justice attorney John Read said the merger would reduce the number of players in the market and "exacerbate the risk of co-ordination". According to Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/, he said: "This merger will end that competition which benefits authors, and authors will earn less money for what they write."
One of the largest antitrust trials ever to hit the publishing industry is unfolding in a federal courthouse in Washington. The Department of Justice says that the proposed merger announced in 2020 between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster would stifle competition.
But what would a successful merger mean on a practical level for booksellers, authors and others in the industry?
On the afternoon of August 10th, in the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse, the Department of Justice trial to block Penguin Random House from acquiring Simon & Schuster had hit a midweek lull. The courtroom itself-as well as the overflow room, where journalists were permitted Internet access-was a few booksellers shy of crowded. But the first witness for the defense, the mega-agent Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, was intensely present, and seemed thrilled to be testifying. (Penguin Random House was paying her a quarter of a million dollars.) In a rippling cream-colored blouse and gold jewelry, her hair loose around her shoulders, Walsh painted a picture of publishing as a labor of love. Agents, she said, are in the business of fairy-tale matches between author and editor-mind meldings that span decades, shape careers, and win prizes. Walsh even had a magic wand, she added, that was given to her by the novelist Sue Monk Kidd. When the judge Florence Y. Pan asked if agents had a fiduciary duty to secure their writers the highest possible advances, Walsh responded in the negative. "More isn't always more," she said. "We're not always looking to take every single dollar out of an editor's pocket."
The exchange exposed the core question of the day, and of every day in a trial that has riveted the publishing industry since proceedings began on August 1st: Is publishing about art or commerce? The answer, of course, is "Both"-as with any creative business-but watching each side wrestle with that ambiguity has been instructive. Penguin Random House, itself the product of a merger between Penguin and Random House in 2013, is the biggest of publishing's so-called Big Five. (The others are HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette.) If the acquisition goes through, the new company will dwarf its nearest rivals.
Over the past two weeks, writers and publishing professionals have been riveted by coverage of the trial in which the U.S. Department of Justice is attempting to block Penguin Random House's purchase of Big Five rival Simon & Schuster. As a member of the independent book publishing community, I've been by turns frustrated and astounded by much of what the Big Five CEOs and other witnesses have said on the stand, which has been diligently relayed via live-tweets by publishing journalists John Maher and Bethanne Patrick.
Throughout the trial, witnesses from the publishing industry have referred to independent presses as "farm teams," a metaphor which apparently originated in a 2019 memo written by the late Carolyn Reidy, who was President and CEO of Simon & Schuster until 2020, according to John Maher of Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/. This phrase, which resurfaced several times, deeply rankled me and others in the independent publishing community.
Once upon a time not so very long ago, any board games beyond the household staples like Monopoly and Scrabble were the exclusive property of, well, nerds. And during this not so very long time ago nerds dwelled on the sidelines, wallflower-like: by near definition they were the opposite of popular.
Today, however, we're living in what Marc Gascoigne, publisher at Aconyte Books (the fiction imprint of the games publisher and distributor Asmodee Entertainment), calls "the great nerdification." Thanks to hit TV shows like Stranger Things, which reintroduced the public to the seminal role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, all types of tabletop games have become more mainstream-and they're exploding in growth, and raking in big bucks.
Streaming services are still eager to acquire TV and film rights to books despite reports of a decrease in the number of subscribers but are now more focused on known backlist IP that is less risky, agents and producers say.
The number of UK homes with access to at least one subscription video-on-demand service fell from 19.6 million in the first quarter to 19.2 million at the end of the second, a net decrease of 382,000, according to the latest survey by the Broadcast Audience Research Board. It is thought that the cost of living crisis is forcing people to cut back on the number of services they pay for to just a few favourites, and this could impact the kind of books that are adapted for TV.
Agents and production companies contacted by The Bookseller say it is too soon to tell what the effects are going to be, and many hope the situation could remedy itself. However, there have been some instances of high-profile shows being cancelled such as the highly anticipated adaptation of Roald Dahl's "The Twits" with Netflix, and "Batgirl" with HBO Max.
TikTok's algorithms take us deeper into ourselves, yet the viral app has profoundly shifted how books get publicity and find new audiences.
TikTok, it has become almost hard to remember, began a few short years ago (2016) as an app for sharing videos of yourself lip-syncing music and dancing. The extremity of its success (it reached one billion users in September and has been the world%u2019s most downloaded mobile app since early 2020, with nearly half of its American users occupying the coveted under-twenty-five demographic) owes something to the universal seduction of music, and quite a bit to a concert of small technical features that make it very easy and effective to use, but most of all to its famously irresistible recommendation algorithm, which measures minutely what you respond to and trawls through its vast bank of freely surrendered videos to serve up for you what you may not even be aware you like. Digital advertising has long sought you out for characteristics you inadvertently disclosed in your online life; TikTok does the work ahead of time by hiving you into ever-more-specific niches. In contrast to previous social media platforms, which were, by definition, social, encircling you with the decisions of people you had chosen to surround yourself with, TikTok opens the tiny window in your hand to the entire inexhaustible world.
Agents and editors are continuing to see a boom in escapist fiction submissions over recent months but have also identified a number of growing new trends including "stealth-help" and environment-themed "cli-fi".
Trends powered by BookTok, including a "huge surge" in rom-com titles and historical fiction are continuing to show up, while "cli-fi" submissions - science-fiction books about climate change - have risen. In non-fiction, books based on current affairs and personal narratives are proving popular.
Agents and editors are continuing to see a boom in escapist fiction submissions over recent months but have also identified a number of growing new trends including "stealth-help" and environment-themed "cli-fi".
Trends powered by BookTok, including a "huge surge" in rom-com titles and historical fiction are continuing to show up, while "cli-fi" submissions - science-fiction books about climate change - have risen. In non-fiction, books based on current affairs and personal narratives are proving popular.
I first wrote for BookBrunch in 2017, when I was promoting my second novel, An Unsuitable Marriage. The subject was "Writing As a Second Career", and the piece exuded the joy and gratitude I felt at having a two-book deal with a large publishing house. It was every writer's dream, and I embraced the experience with gusto. There was a steep learning curve - I had no prior knowledge of the publishing industry - but I was supported by some very talented people, often overworked but always patient and helpful.
So why, you might ask, have I chosen a different route to market for my third novel, The Mortification of Grace Wheeler? It's a good question. Part of the answer lies in the naive assumptions I made about being traditionally published. For example, there is a long period of time, often over a year, between submitting your manuscript to the editorial team, and your book appearing on the shelves. Many authors, myself included, find it difficult to focus on a new project while still working on an existing one, possibly already on its third, fourth of fifth draft. There will still be structural edits, copy edits, proofreading etcetera, in order to ensure a polished and error-free book.
And on that point, I didn't realise that authors have little or no creative control over how their novel will look when it's published. The old adage about judging a book by its cover is true, so it's difficult to live with a design about which you're not completely happy. Marketing is key, but not all books are allocated a marketing budget. In fact, the lion's share of limited resources tends to get swallowed up by exciting new debuts, established authors and previous bestsellers.
This has been the summer of Colleen Hoover, a recent viral TikTok announced, editing together clips of young women at the beach reading books by the Texas novelist. Furthermore, just a couple of months ago we had a Colleen Hoover spring and before that a Colleen Hoover winter and before that a Colleen Hoover fall. On any given week for more than a year now, the 42-year-old Hoover has had three to six books on Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/'s top 10 bestseller list. Currently three of the top five titles on the New York Times' combined print and e-book fiction list are Hoover's. The most popular of these novels, It Ends With Us, isn't even new. It was published six years ago. A forthcoming sequel to that novel (or possibly a prequel, it's not yet clear), It Starts With Us, will be published in October, its perch at the summit of both lists guaranteed.
Observers typically attribute Hoover's success to BookTok, the segment of TikTok dedicated to authors and readers. And Hoover-known as CoHo to her fans, who call themselves Cohorts-is indeed the queen of BookTok, an adept TikToker herself, as well as the subject of countless videos in which young women appear clutching huge stacks of candy-colored CoHo paperbacks and proceed to rank their favorites among her 24 titles. But while Hoover might just be the ideal author to preside over TikTok, the platform is only the latest online vehicle she had ridden to fame and fortune. She sometimes presents herself as surprised by her own virality, but Hoover has been a savvy self-promoter since 2012, when she distributed free copies of her first, self-published YA novel, Slammed, to influential book bloggers. She was big on BookTube (the YouTube book community) and big on "Bookstagram" well before TikTok came along. Furthermore, her story-social worker and mom transformed into blockbuster author via whatever new technology of the moment is ostensibly revolutionizing the book business (self-publishing, blogging, Instagram, TikTok)-is catnip to traditional news outlets.
Having finally published her first novel, Alex Aster was feeling disheartened. The book had tanked during the pandemic and she had been dropped by her literary agent. Then, on 13 March 2021, she decided to take to TikTok, asking her followers if they would: "read a book about a cursed island that only appears once every 100 years to host a game that gives the six rulers of the realm a chance to break their curses." One of the rulers must die, the short video revealed, "even as love complicates everything" for the heroine, Isla Crown.
Aster didn't expect much, especially when she checked in a few hours later to see that her post had only clocked up about 1,000 views. Maybe the books world was right, she thought. Maybe there wasn't a market for Lightlark, a young adult story she had been writing and rewriting for years, to no interest from publishers. The next day, however, she woke up to see her video had been viewed more than a million times. A week later, Lightlark had gone to auction and she had a six-figure deal with Amulet Books. Last month, Universal preemptively bought the film rights for, in her words, "more zeros than I've seen in my life".
Amanda Gorman already knows you want her to save the world. "Young people are expected to rescue everyone, even when we're struggling to rescue ourselves," she tells me in the same clear, strident voice she used to deliver her poem "The Hill We Climb," which she performed at President Biden's 2021 inauguration.
Gorman is probably the most famous poet in America. She is the woman who, at 22, became the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history when she issued that call for unity on the steps of the U.S. Capitol a mere two weeks after militant far-right factions stormed the building in an attempt to prevent the election from being certified. She would go on to become the first (and so far only) poet to deliver a poem during the Super Bowl - another performance that would help thrust her into the stratosphere of the public imagination.
Members of the trade have hailed the courage of Salman Rushdie and shared their shock after the Booker-winning writer was stabbed at a literary event in New York state.
The Satanic Verses author, 75, was attacked on stage at the Chautauqua Institution on Friday (12th August) and later airlifted to hospital. His agent Andrew Wylie said Rushdie had suffered severed nerves in one arm, damage to his liver and could lose an eye. On Sunday (14th August), Wylie said Rushdie had been taken off a ventilator "so the road to recovery has begun". He added: "It will be long - the injuries are severe, but his condition is headed in the right direction."
No matter which way you look at it, sales of mass market paperbacks have been in steady decline since 2017. NPD BookScan data shows that unit sales fell 31.5% in 2021 compared to 2017, while the Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies put the decline in dollar sales at a more disturbing 42.7% in 2020. Both data sets show more declines occurring in 2022.
To be sure, the mass market paperback format has experienced ups and downs in the past. The last time PW wrote about the prospects for mass market paperbacks, in October 2014, the format was trying to recover from the shock it suffered due to the explosion of cheap e-books, especially in such important areas as romance and science fiction and fantasy. (Asked last week, during the DOJ's trial to prevent PRH from acquiring S&S, whether he had made reductions in title output following the Random House-Penguin merger in 2013, PRH CEO Markus Dohle pointed to adjusting the number of mass market paperbacks published by Berkley/NAL in response to the flood of 99¢ and $1.99 self-published e-books that hit the market, luring away readers of genre fiction.)
The Society of AuthorsThe British authors’ organization, with a membership of over 7,000 writers. Membership is open to those who have had a book published, or who have an offer to publish (without subsidy by the author). Offers individual specialist advice and a range of publications to its members. Has also campaigned successfully on behalf of authors in general for improved terms and established a minimum terms agreement with many publishers. Recently campaigned to get the Public Lending Right fund increased from £5 million to £7 million for the year 2002/2003. Regularly uses input from members to produce comparative surveys of publishers’ royalty payment systems. http://www.societyofauthors.org/ has issued a call for unity among its members and says it has investigated allegations it failed to support gender critical members but has found no basis for complaint. The development followed a second open letter issued by critics of SoA chair Joanne Harris.
In the wake of the attack on Salman Rushdie, Harris faced calls to go in an initial open letter which called her position "untenable" and claimed the society "failed to come to the defence" of authors like Gillian Philip, Rachel Rooney, Julie Bindel, Onjali Rauf and Kate Clanchy when they received death threats. The letter, hosted on Bindel's Substack page, has been signed by more than 270 people, around 50 of which are not from the industry.
A rival open letter was released by Melinda Salisbury in support of Harris and has now amassed more than 600 signatures. It calls Harris "stalwart, fair, dedicated, and passionate chair, who has frequently gone above and beyond her role as chair to champion all authors". Harris has defended herself on Twitter and denied the claims about her conduct, insisting she will remain in post until her term ends in 2024.
In Dan Chaon's new dystopian thriller, Sleepwalk, his narrator/protagonist draws on a roster of similar but different names, reacting to the shifting existential requirements of his ever-precarious situation. There's Will Bear, Billy Bayer, Barry Billingsly, and Liam Bahr among his dozen-odd aliases, and each serves a (usually devious) purpose. As Chaon's spooky tale unfurls, we learn that many in his supporting cast have aliases, too. Their own survival would seem to depend on their ability to "be" someone else when necessary.
Chaon is an ingenious writer, and his latest novel reminds me of the essential properties of a name - of our own names (sometimes a pseudonym itself) and the names we give our fictional creations. But as Chaon's people rely on a name or names to mislead and protect, all of us, as fiction writers, more commonly use names to designate, characterize, enlighten, arouse, frighten, or amuse.
In fact, few authorial choices are more important to the tone and verisimilitude of our stories, not to say more fun for the author to conjure, consider, and re-consider. Some authors, myself included, find it difficult if not impossible to develop our nascent stories without first settling on the names of at least the major characters. That's because their names often do as much to define and animate them as their behavior, language, and physical description.