Tag: publishing (page 1 of 1)

February 4, 2026

DIY culture

Micah Mattix’s Prufrock on Monday linked to two essay-reviews that I think should be considered in tandem.

Turing’s Imitation Game paper was published 14 years after the first Writers’ Workshop convened at the University of Iowa, in 1936. Turing may not have known, with his grounding in maths at King’s College Cambridge, that elements of machine learning had already evolved across the Atlantic in the apparently unrelated field of creative writing. Before Iowa, the Muse; after Iowa, a method for assembling literary content not dissimilar to the functioning of today’s LLMs.

First, work out what effective writing looks like. Then, develop a process that walks aspiring writers towards an imitation of the desired output. The premise extensively tested by Iowa – and every creative writing MFA since – is that a suite of learnable rules can generate text that, as a bare minimum, resembles passable literary product. Rare is the promising screenwriter unfamiliar with Syd Field’s Three-Act Structure or Christopher Vogler’s Hero’s Journey: cheat codes that promise the optimal sequence for acts, scenes, drama and dialogue.

I think Beard could have made it more clear that what people learn at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop is very, very different from what they learn in screenwriting workshops, but let that pass for now. He is right to suggest that our arts education in general had a mechanistic I/O character. Thus a point I have made on this blog: LLMs can so easily produce a classic undergraduate thesis essay because the assignment is already so formulaic that it might as well be written by a machine.

Meanwhile, in the WSJ, Daniel Akst writes about a new book that documents the traumas that await any book that can’t satisfy armies of sensitivity readers and other searchers-for-transgression. Isn’t this also a way to impose formulas?

There are lessons to be learned here that converge with other developments: for instance, see some recent essays — one and two — celebrating the great Anglican tradition of choral Evensong and fearing for its loss. Now, to be sure, there’s nothing like listening to trained choirs singing in an ancient beautiful church — and I am immensely grateful that we do choral Evensong on Sunday evenings at my parish church — but: if you really love Evensong you can do it yourself, with just a few friends, a prayer book, and maybe some sheet music. Will it be as aesthetically polished as a thoroughly practiced choir singing in a medieval cathedral? Of course not; but it might be more powerful in other ways. Maybe more lastingly meaningful ways.

(Not directly relevant to this, I guess, but in this context I find myself remembering what may well be the most powerful musical experience of my life.)

The world seems to be filled with people who have certain gifts and certain interests but are continually forced to acknowledge that the institutions that have been created to foster those gifts and serve those interests have ceased to do so. Sometimes the misbehavior of large institutions can spark the creation of new units within them, such as the creation of the many new institutes and schools devoted to classical liberal themes and questions. But the failure of many universities to steward the inheritance of the greatest of books is what moved Zena Hitz to start the Catherine Project. Many people on Substack are trying to renew the lost tradition of the literary magazine. If the institutions won’t do it for us, we’ll have to learn how to do it ourselves. And then maybe these amateurish and improvised endeavors will eventually develop into new institutions.

September 10, 2025

KK on publishing

This post by Kevin Kelly about publishing is interesting and informative, but it gets some things wrong. For instance, he says this about the traditional publishing route:

The task: You create the material; then professionals edit, package, manufacture, distribute, promote, and sell the material. You make, they sell. At the appropriate time, you appear on a book store tour to great applause, to sign books and hear praise from fans. Also, the publishers will pay you even before you write your book. The advantages of this system are obvious: you spend your precious time creating, and all the rest of the chores will be done by people who are much better at those chores than you.

Book tours have always been for bestselling authors, not for midlisters. I’ve never had a book tour, though I have had publishers pay for the occasional one-off talk. And “pay you even before you write the book”? — well, they’ll pay you something, but, as I’ve said before, advances are parceled out: if you get a book contract on the basis of a proposal, then you’ll get a certain about on signing, a certain amount on turning in a complete manuscript, a certain amount on pub date. All of this is an “advance” in the sense that it arrives before any copies have been sold, but if you hear that someone has a $100,000 advance, they’ll probably on signing the contract get $25,000. Long gone are the days when a writer could live on his or her advance while writing the book. (The people who could live on their advances are people who already make so much money that they don’t need the advances.)

One note about “packaging”: I have found that, in general, publishers will work with authors to get a cover that everyone likes — often by showing three or four options. But when Profile in the U.K., the publisher of Breaking Bread with the Dead, showed me the cover of the book — one design and one only — I told them that I hated it more than I could possibly say and they replied that they were going to use it anyway. (One editor added that what I had written was basically a bunch of essays so it’s not like it really matters what it looks like.) When they sent me my author’s copies of the finished book I tossed the box in a closet and have never opened it. I really think that with that dreadful cover they killed any chance of the book doing well in the U.K.

Their cover for How to Think, my other book with them, was great.

New York book publishers do not have a database with the names and contacts of the people who buy their books. Instead, they sell to bookstores, which are disappearing.

No, the decline in bookstores stopped around 2019, and since then there’s been a mild upturn. Who knows whether it will continue, but for now bookstores still matter, very much.

Are agents worth it? In the beginning of a career, yes. They are a great way to connect with editors and publishers who might like your stuff, and for many publishers, this is the only realistic way to reach them. Are they worth it later? Probably, depending on the author. I do not enjoy negotiating, and I have found that an agent will ask for, demand, and get far more money than I would have myself, so I am fine with their cut.

This isn’t wrong, but it’s not the whole picture. An agent will almost certainly negotiate a bigger advance for you than you could negotiate for yourself, but a good agent will also retain foreign rights and then negotiate with overseas publishers and translators. If you do not have an agent, then your initial publisher will keep those rights for itself and then do whatever it wants. I am not sure how much money I have made over the years from overseas editions of my books, but a rough guess would be $50,000. Not a fortune, but nothing to sneeze at.

Now, about trade publishing KK makes one essential true point:

BTW, you should not have concerns about taking a larger advance than you ever earn out, because a publisher will earn out your advance long before you do. They make more money per book than you do, so their earn-out threshold comes much earlier than the author’s.

Two of my books (Original Sin and Breaking Bread with the Dead) have not earned out their advances, but the publisher has made money from both of them.

About self-publishing I know absolutely nothing, but KK makes me wonder whether I might want to try that at least once in my life. But, as he makes clear, when you’re DIY-ing it all the work is on your shoulders, including the following things that in traditional publishing others do for you:

Editing
Designing
Printing
Binding
Storing
Selling
Shipping
Promoting

You may say “Well, I can hire people to do those things for me” — but that process will itself be time-consuming, and you might find that at a certain stage you’ve simply re-created the traditional publishing model.

April 26, 2024

advancing

Elle Griffin seems to have carved out a niche for herself telling hard truths to would-be writers – which is an unpleasant but useful service, I think. But there’s one troublesome point I think she actually understresses — though it will take me a few minutes to get to that point.

Griffin cites this chart from Penguin USA:

Category 1: Lead titles with a sales goal of 75,000 units and up
Advance: $500,000 and up

Category 2: Titles with a sales goal of 25,000–75,000 units
Advance: $150,000-$500,000

Category 3: Titles with a sales goal of 10,000–25,000 units
Advance: $50,000- $150,000

Category 4: Titles with a sales goal of 5,000 to 10,000 units
Advance: $50,000 or less

Four times in my career I have received Category 3 advances; in two of those cases (The Narnian and How To Think) I ended up with Category 1 sales, thus significantly overperforming my advance. In one case (Breaking Bread with the Dead) I have achieved sales to match the “sales goal,” though not (yet?) enough to earn back my advance; in the fourth case (Original Sin) I underperformed the sales goal.

All this assuming that the above information is correct, which, I dunno.

Anyway, this track record should make it possible for me to get another Category 3 advance, should I want one, and if I can come up with the right proposal. I’m not a sure-fire winner, but I’m a decent bet when I do get a big-house contract. (My academic books don’t figure into this discussion, because while they sell well for academic books, even taken together they don’t make enough money annually to pay my property taxes.)

And if the numbers Griffin cites are correct, the sales of my more successful books put them, to my surprise and puzzlement and discomfort, in the top 5% of published books. It’s true that How to Think has sold more copies than books from the same period by Billie Eilish and Justin Timberlake, which should tell you something – mainly that fans of Billie Eilish and Justin Timberlake don’t read books. I should also add that How to Think really took off for a little while because Fareed Zakaria loved it and hyped it on CNN. Funny old world, ain’t it. But still … the “top 5%” thing just feels wrong.

Anyway, let’s imagine that I receive a $100,000 advance for a future book. Not impossible by any means. The thing is, and this is the point I think Griffin should lean on more heavily: “advance” is a misleading term. Advances don’t come all at once, they come in stages, either three or four of them, for instance:

$25,000 at contract signing;
$25,000 at submission of an acceptable (but still to be edited) manuscript;
$25,000 at publication of the hardcover;
$25,000 at publication of the paperback, or, if the publisher chooses not to make a paperback, one year after the publication of the hardcover.

(Sometimes the unit payments vary: for instance, for Breaking Bread with the Dead my agent negotiated bigger payouts for the first and third stages, smaller ones for the other two.) In a typical situation, after you sign the contract you might need two years to write the book. Supposing that your manuscript is pretty good and just needs editing, that process can take several months, and then getting the book ready for publication can take several more months. And the final payout will come a year after that initial publication. So while a $100,000 advance sounds like a lot of money, it often ends up being $25,000 a year; not nearly enough to live on.

The moral: Writing books can be a nice supplement to your day job, but it is virtually impossible for it to replace your day job, even if you’re in the top 5% percent of sales. That I, several of whose books appear to be in that category, couldn’t make a decent living if I sold three times as many of those books as I do, should suggest … not, as Griffin keeps saying, that no one buys books, but that the whole industry is smaller than most people think and a money machine for only a handful of writers. You probably have to get into the top 1% of published-by-publishers writers to make a living solely by writing. Probably only a few hundred, or at most a few thousand, people in the entire world manage that. (Griffin seems to think Substack offers a better chance for success, but I bet the percentages there are roughly the same.)

P.S. I’m probably not going to get another significant advance, because I doubt I will ask for one. I can’t at the moment imagine wanting to write a book that a Big Five publisher would want to pay for. That could change, of course, but I don’t expect it will. I decided to write my Sayers biography for a university press rather than a trade house primarily to write the book I wanted to write — not the book I needed to write to earn back an advance.

P.P.S. I see Freddie has weighed in also. Some good thoughts there, but I’m not sure about the title: “Publishing is Designed to Make Most Authors Feel Like Losers Even While the Industry Makes Money.” Maybe that’s right. It’s certainly that advances used to be smaller for the biggest sellers and larger for the mid-list writers, which made it possible for mid-list writers to make a modest but firmly middle-class living — especially when they could supplement their book income with writing for periodicals that, in inflation-adjusted dollars, paid much more than they do now. (Why could so many magazines back in the day pay so much more? Because they got much higher ad revenue in periods when ad money didn’t have nearly as many places to go.) The publishing industry has clearly borrowed the Silicon Valley venture capitalists’ practice of hoping for one or two hits in a thousand investments, but I don’t understand how that affects their decisions about how to distribute the money they have available for advances. I wish I did.

December 15, 2022

This has some useful reflections on the (often unfortunate) powers of literary executors — a subject about which I have written — but it doesn’t make a sufficiently clear distinction between the impediments imposed by executors and those erected by publishers. You can have the most compliant executor imaginable, but publishers will insist on their rights (which to them are best expressed through the medium of currency).

August 22, 2022

the publishing monoculture

Why We Need Independent Publishers:

The process of creating art and then asking others to assign it a somewhat made-up market value is admittedly one of the most bizarre aspects of a writer’s job, for all that it is necessary for those of us trying to make a living. It seems likely that the math could prove even less favorable to authors — especially debut authors, especially those from marginalized backgrounds — if smaller publishers cannot thrive and maintain their independence. Indies routinely bet on daring literature and play a crucial role in launching, building, and sustaining the careers of writers whose work we need. The work being published by these presses — places such as Tin House, Graywolf, Milkweed Editions, Coffee House, Akashic Books, New Directions, Melville House, and The Feminist Press — is one thing that gives me hope for the future of publishing. Whether or not one industry giant is ultimately able to acquire another, whether we end up with a Big Five, a Big Four, or a Big One and Everyone Else, the publishing ecosystem needs strong, flourishing independent presses — and authors and readers do too.

Nicole Chung is right. And (as a Penguin/Random House author) I really hope the proposed merger with Simon & Schuster is quashed. Indeed, I’d love to see a devolution in the publishing industry. Back in the 1970s, when I worked as a receiving clerk in a bookstore, shipments came from everywhere; it seemed that we got books from a thousand presses — though maybe it was just a hundred — all of which had their own niche, their own style, their own mission. The homogenization of the publishing world is sad, and, like the dominance of a handful of social media companies, bad for our intellectual and moral environment. Down with monocultures!

So, cue Ted Gioia:

When I was publishing my first three books … my editor had my trust and vice versa. We worked together closely as individuals on every issue, from writing to marketing, even down to the tiniest details. I knew publishing was a business, even back then, but it didn’t feel like one. That started to change in the new millennium, and every aspect of that downstream process became more acutely corporatized.

Fortunately, the rest of the world has changed too, especially technology. And authors have options that didn’t exist years ago. Or, in some instances, they have options that didn’t even exist just a few months ago.

Substack is one of those options.

So I’ve decided to publish my next book on Substack.

This is interesting to me, because Ted and I have similar writing trajectories: We’re about the same age, we’ve published roughly the same number of books over the same number of years, and we’re both “midlist” writers (though he has more consistently been at the upper end of the midlist than I have). I’ve also experienced the “corporatizing” that he speaks of, but perhaps in slightly different ways: the chief factor making my life unpleasant has been the outsourcing of much of the editorial business to freelance copyeditors and production companies, which has led to extreme problems with quality control. (One reason I enjoy working with Princeton University Press is that they still keep most elements of the process in-house — though the freelance copy-editor for my Book of Common Prayer biography helped me allow some embarrassing errors to slip through.) I have several books that I want to write but I find myself thinking, mournfully: Do I really want to go through all that yet again?

I tell you, Ted’s post makes me fret — and not for the first time — about all the money I might be leaving on the table by not moving to Substack. But I love being on the open web; and in any case I would only have a fraction of the subscribers that Ted has. (I just don’t know how small a fraction: 1/10? 1/100? 1/1000?) I think I’m better off where I am. Probably. Maybe.

April 19, 2022

The 9 Biggest Myths About Nonfiction Trade Publishing, Debunked. These are all spot-on. I would only add that even when you get a larger advance, it’s typically divided into either three or four installments. So, for instance, I’ve had some divided this way:

First part on signing the contract
Second part on delivering a complete manuscript
Third part on publication of the hardcover
Fourth part on publication of the paperback

You can’t “live off your big advance” when you only have a quarter of that advance — or maybe a third (the divisions aren’t always equal) — during the period of writing.