Advances, sigh

Advances took center stage in the proceedings of the trial between the Department of Justice and Penguin Random House. So much time was spent discussing whether or not a merger of PRH with Simon & Schuster would lead to lower advances, and thus hurt authors. There is lots one could say about whether or not this would occur, and the crazy “vibes only” way that Big Five publishers come up with advance amounts when bidding on potential projects. But there is little to no attention being paid to the definition of an advance per se, how advances per se hurt publishers, and how advances correlate to another topic often discussed during the trial: the number of copies most books sell.

Let’s start with how many copies of a book might sell. There are lots of statistics being published and discussed (1% of all books published in 2021 sold more than 5,000 copies; 90% of books sell fewer than 2000 copies). There is so little publicly available data—or data at all—to pin anything down. But let’s s…