The Macroeconomics of Publishing

Not long ago I wrote about the possibility that we are entering a post-scarcity age when it comes to fiction. My analysis there focused on the collapse in pay rates for authors, and the explosion in the availability of reading material of all kinds, much of it free, and much more of it nearly so, without even taking into account the piracy about which we hear endlessly.

Right now I would like to consider the matter from a different standpoint, the size of the market as indicated by sales figures in the U.S., with what that implies about the number of authors who could under even the most favorable conditions make a living from it. (I freely admit that the figures I am working from, the estimates I can make, are rough at best, but in the absence of better . . .)

According to Forbes the retail sales of childrens', young adult and adult books amounted to $8.1 billion in 2018. That sounds like a lot, but of course only part of that went to authors. In the realm of traditional publishing print royalties top out at about 15 percent of sales, while e-books come to 25 percent--while the figures for both royalties, and the sale price off which they take their cut, can vary enormously for the self-published. In the absence of much more detailed data than anyone has bothered to collect, I know of no really satisfactory way to average things out, so let us, in the near-certainty that this overstates the royalty share, assume 20 percent of the revenue ends up going to royalties. This works out to $1.6 billion. If we assume the median U.S. wage--$32,000--then that $1.6 billion works out to such livings for about 50,000 U.S. fiction authors.

However, this is a naively optimistic way of looking at the matter. After all, the reality is that not all this money is going to authors. After all, no author is collecting anything on books in the public domain, while books still in copyright but held by a deceased author's estate are, if supporting their descendants, nonetheless not to be counted here. It might be added that lots of books are by authors writing for an intellectual property owned by someone else, like the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises, which means a smaller proportion of the sales for the person who actually writes the thing. And of course, some of those sales are going to foreign authors (like, for example, J.K. Rowling and E.L. James), not U.S. writers. Thus the pot shrinks again, substantially--and while this would seem offset by the fact that American writers probably earn more from foreign sales than vice-versa, those U.S. authors benefiting this way are likely to be members of a relatively small club, the superstars, underlining the important fact that the pot is not divided at all equally. The superstars who sell millions of copies have a much larger share of the books sold, anywhere--which means that much less to go round for everyone else. And let us not forget that the literary agents are taking their cut from the marginal as well as from the rich and famous (15 percent off the top).

Tellingly the Author's Guild has 9,000 members, and reported in its Wages of Writing survey that the full-timers among its members were making perhaps half the $32,000 figure ($17,500), while the part-timers included in the number made much, much less than even that (a mere $4,500 a year), which implies that all but a small portion of even this relatively elite club are toiling in poverty to the extent that their income comes wholly from their writing. (And of course, only a portion of this group is making a portion of its money from fiction alone.)

Of course, one would never guess any of these things from the attention the media lavishes on the handful who achieve extremely high and unrepresentative sales; from the ubiquity of full-time "writers," and indeed "successful" and often wealthy writers, as figures in popular culture; from the relentless flogging of how-to books and courses and self-publishing services. And this starkly different reality raises the question of just how many of those positions are up for grabs in any given year. Realistically, it would only be a small fraction as some retire (though of course, the retired and even the dead go on writing via "coauthors," usually someone who is also already established, so, no, those are not opportunities for first-time novelists).

Still, taking a shot at even one of a very few positions might not seem so bleak a prospect if there was not so much competition. Alas . . .

Agents and editors constantly tell the public that while "no one" is buying books, "everybody" wants to publish books. They point to polls saying that eighty percent of the American public thinks they'd like to be an author. I suspect this is an idle fantasy for most of them, just as being a talk show host or a film director or a YouTube celebrity would be for most people, if that. (If you have taught college writing--a day job many a would-be novelist works, the kind that brings them far closer to reality than the Mandarins of Park Avenue ever get--you are painfully aware that a very large number of people would like nothing better than to never have to write so much as a single word ever again.) Mostly, I think, the constant mention of such figures is whining on the part of those who resent the efforts of the unpublished to become published, and the insiders' way of (lamely) excusing themselves for the nasty way they treat those who fill up the slush piles with their submissions, as well as the plain old elitist snobbery and meanness of the Joseph Epstein variety hardly unknown among such.

Still, the fact that those how-to books and self-publishing courses and the rest are out there, comprising a massive industry in their own right, indicates that the number of really interested people is not small. Let us posit that out of that 200 million would-be authors even one in a thousand--0.1 percent--are both interested in competing at the adult end of the market, and serious enough about the idea to be making some real effort to write and publish something commercially at a given moment. That would work out to 200,000 people competing not for the few thousand (or few hundred) positions already noted, but the fraction of them open at any one time--likely, just scores in any given year--which again works out to a thousand contestants for each spot, each chance to, most likely, grind along in poverty as a writer, with the odds for most the worse because of the degree to which connections overwhelmingly favor a few, and the rest compete for the miniscule opportunity afforded the slush pile. (It seems relevant that agents talk about receiving five or ten thousand queries and submissions in a year--and picking up the writer of maybe one of those, maybe none, for their list.) Even were I off by an order of magnitude, and it were just 20,000 people submitting work--only one in ten thousand of those who say they have a book in them--it would not make much practical difference for any one person's situation.

As I have remarked before, the ex-interns who once had the charge of looking at the material in those slush piles, venting their hatred of aspiring authors in publications which should know better than to run the rants of the snobs (like the Guardian, always showing its elitism when push comes to shove), insist with as much vehemence as viciousness that those in the slush pile are not worth bothering about (automatically meaning, as this does, that no one but the genuinely privileged people who tend to have the connections can ever produce anything worthwhile). But what I get from these numbers is very different--namely that it is less the possession of talent than getting one of the exceedingly few "breaks" that makes the difference between the "success" on the pedestal and the "failures" the world holds in contempt (and that it is very plausible indeed that a good many of those being endlessly rebuffed have far more to offer than those whose principal asset was having an "in").

I also conclude from these numbers that while Establishment authors malign self-published writers as making things harder for everyone by bucking the system, there is simply no way in which anything remotely resembling our current way of producing books, distributing books, and apportioning the economic rewards of that activity within the existing market can give any but the thoroughly connected or lottery-winner-lucky, no matter how talented and hard-working, even a slight chance at getting their work published and read, let alone the economic opportunity to write full-time.

Is there anything that might change that?

One possibility is that the market will get bigger--that people will read more contemporary fiction than they do now. This may not seem a particularly radical thing to hope for when there is so little such reading going on. But is that really plausible?

Consider how we are constantly told that life will soon get more convenient. Consider, for example, the claims we are hearing about self-driving cars, or better still a shift from private car ownership to ride-sharing those self-driving cars. Many of us who spend hours at the wheel--and still more hours in the tedious tasks associated with car ownership, from filling up the tank to shopping for insurance--would suddenly have a lot more hours on their hands each week. Should ride-sharing prove cheaper as well as more convenient (as seems likely) they would also have more disposable income for other conveniences, translating to still more hours. And let us assume that something does not come along and muck up this improvement in our quality of life, and that people are at least able to use some of those hours for entertainment purposes. Those who already like to read might read more. Some of those who have not read much might find that they like doing so. But that they will necessarily devote that time to the fiction writers are putting out now is not a given (they might, for instance, turn to the vast treasury of classics in the public domain--which they avoided precisely because they did not have the time for them), let alone do so in a way that affords those writers now struggling more opportunity. (We might, for instance, see the biggest bestsellers claim those new readers, while all the rest get none of the extra attention.) We might see any increase in the number of readers overmatched by the increase in the number of writers competing for them as some of that eighty percent of the population interested in being an author takes advantage of the time available to them to finish that novel and get it out there. And in any event, I do not think it overly cynical to suspect that YouTube and Netflix will be bigger winners than any purveyor of things people actually read.

Another possibility is that writers will be able to claim a higher share of the income of book sales as a result of book production getting cheaper. Think of it this way: at this moment we've brilliantly automated book production and distribution. But editing, copyediting, design (to say nothing of marketing) remain laborious, and at that, labors best done by experts. This means that production costs for publishers of all kinds remain high--with the self-published especially suffering. But what if we could perform those tasks much more quickly and cheaply via an advance in artificial intelligence? Traditional publishers might find it economically attractive to publish more books than they do, while the self-published will not be at such a disadvantage, and writers at least potentially able to pocket more profit on their efforts. However, that level of AI looks to be far off, and even if it is not, I suspect the arrival of AI which can edit a book will be accompanied, or even preceded, by AI which could write a book by itself--so I suspect writers will end up losing ground in the market rather than gaining it (as the likes of James Patterson take up computers as their coauthors).

The third possibility I see is writers not having to worry nearly so much about making a living at all from their books--because no one does. I do not think this would require full-blown post-scarcity, just some tolerable minimum of income which would let people take a chance on full-time writing for as long as they found it worthwhile, and let the really determined go on plugging away if prepared to make some sacrifices. Yes, we have been talking about Universal Basic Income of some kind for a half century now without anything of the kind happening, but we have undeniably seen an uptick in mainstream interest in recent years, while at the same time a sharp drop in the cost of living may make such an income scheme more practicable than before. The RethinkX think tank, notably, has just issued a fascinating report forecasting that in a decade's time everyone on the planet could have access to a "First World" living standard at Third World income levels due to drops in the price of food, energy, transport, information and shelter resulting from the mere continuation of the recently observed trend of technological advance. None of this is a done deal by any means (indeed, I think this will take even more managing than the authors acknowledge given the extremity of the economic disruptions involved), but all the same, if $3,000 a year could keep a person well-fed and clothed and housed and mobile and Internet-connected, or we even went only partway to that goal, suddenly what was impossible becomes possible in economic and political terms. And that, in turn, would open up new cultural possibilities, above all for those so long excluded from the arts by an accident of birth that in our allegedly democratic and meritocratic age can seem hardly less damning for such ambitions than not being of noble blood in an earlier era when poetry was the purview of the patricians, and those very few of the lowborn they personally patronized for so long as they were prepared to bow and scrape.