My Friends Aren't Reading

What should a publisher do?

I’m teaching a book proposal course again in January. I’m giving away four free spots once six more people enroll. The free spots have been claimed, but there is room for those who can afford the fee.

---

I have had two conversations with friends recently that started like this: “so many of my friends don’t read books anymore.” These friends are people whose current jobs require them to have had read books to qualify: creative writing instructor, professor in an English department, publishing worker, writer, magazine writer.¹

Now, some things I’m not addressing here:

—Judging those who have lost the reading habit.

—Analyzing the reasons.

— Most Americans don’t read books much if at all, and that’s not new. I’m thinking about those who used to, a lot, and it led to their current careers, or is a key part of their identity.

—Lots of books are still bought and sold in America! So very many! Current trends in corporate publishing favor those who are already famous (celebrity memoirs, celebrity cookbooks, celebrity children’s books) and genre, especially romance, which is booming. There are clearly enough readers—or at least buyers—for those.

—The fate of the midlist author, fiction or non, has long been bemoaned, so it’s nothing new to say those books are hard to sell. Ditto for poetry, experimental fiction, and other always-minor genres.

— My friends in academia tell me that the reading comprehension drop-off since the pandemic is real, and quite significant. That’s also ancillary here.

If I now re-don my publisher’s hat, I’d have to conclude, anecdotally, from these anecdotal-based conversations, that many of the people I previously considered my target audience for Belt books are no longer targets. If in my head I think “This won’t sell a huge number of copies but someone like Susan would love this book” and then over drinks Susan tells me “I just don’t read books anymore. I’m tired of trying, or feeling ashamed. It’s just what it is.”

Then what?

To succeed as a publisher you have to, well, sell books. There are two broad routes to take: publish a lot of titles, or publish titles that sell a lot. That is, if my financial statements tell me I need to sell 10,000 books a year, I could do that by publishing 1000 books that sell 100 copies, or 1 book that sells 10000 copies.

Now this calculus might lead one to decide to publish 1000 instead of 1, since the audience for each book is small.

But the sheer volume of books being published in the United States is enormous, and with each passing year keeps going up and up and up. The supply/demand situation is out of whack, and it’s ever more difficult for one book to be found in the pile. Plus, audiences are segmented (cue a million previous things you’ve read). You have to use social media, and legacy media, knock on bookstore doors, pay for ads on Goodreads, jigger the Amazon algorithms by getting fake reviews to up their number, ask 20 people to do unboxing videos for your galley mailing, etc etc etc. to sell one little book. It is exhaustingly difficult to reach the 100 people for your book (unless you bring them in yourself: cue celebrities, rich people, hobbyists, etc.)

The same issue obtains if you go for the 1 title route: you still need to find those 10000 people. But in this scenario, you should have more resources to find them, because your budget would be shifted to selling that one title. This scenario makes sense is if you drastically increase your publicity and marketing budget, and have a killer sales team, and slash eating, design, and production.

This logic is, of course, very much the logic of Big 5 publishing, except for the shift in resources, and the reason there are so celebrity books: the celebrities do the lion’s share of the publicity, sales, marketing themselves . LET US NOW PAUSE TO THINK ABOUT HOW TAYLOR SWIFT IS PUBLISHING HER BOOK HERSELF!! This is exactly what smart celebrities will be doing more and more—and it’s the wisest route for them. They cut out any traditional publisher, which is what such traditional publishers deserve for making platform—a shorthand for “you do the work we would pay publicists to do for us”— a key part of their acquisition strategy.

Now let’s turn back to a press like Belt—or hundreds of similar presses. Or at least let’s turn back to me: if fewer people who, ten years ago, would have bought a Belt book are buying them, then, if we are not going to only sign up famous or rich people or someone with a “platform”, we need to do fewer books, and put more resources into marketing each one. Because the most important challenge is finding readers, if your previous ones have stopped reading. It’s like the Harris campaign knocking on swing state doors over and over again. You gotta really invest in finding those few people on the margin who will make the difference.

So what would this mean for the near term future of a press? If we do fewer titles and invest more in marketing, then we would need to cut the budgets for editing, design, and production.

I think this works for another problem caused by the downturn in reading: there are going to be fewer good manuscripts and proposals coming in if writers themselves aren’t reading (if I have any judgmental to make here, it’s that I believe the quality of one’s writing is correlated with the quantity of one’s reading).

So if I put this weird logic into effect, the next time this topic comes up—about how our friends who used to read a lot don’t anymore—I could respond by saying “That’s why the lion’s share of Belt’s resources are put into sales & marketing.” Which probably wouldn’t make sense to the friend.

My point here is not to say “this is what I am going to do” —this is definitely just me following my mind down a certain set of possibly logical steps. And longer term, one can’t but think that the publishing industry per se needs to contract, if its most loyal constituency is dwindling. It should become harder to get a book contract. There should be fewer jobs in publishing. There should be fewer creative writing programs. Monographs should not be required for tenure. Etc, etc—topics, again, that are not new, and the shifts have been in place for awhile. A certain kind of book—say those reviewed in the NYRB—will become like opera, or theater, or ballet, and their readers like their patrons. It’ll be an increasingly minor art. But as someone who always refuses the chicken little arguments—I wrote a whole ass book about it’s fine if people stop handwriting—I will admit I have been taken aback by these conversations—how quickly the future might be coming—and thinking about what it might mean for anyone whose job is connected to the production and consumption of new books.

1. I am not talking about you.