Interesting history but what's going on now is so crazy as a reader. Amazon kindle publishes 7500 new books daily. There's no longer gatekeepers like in the article.
About two years ago I was searching for a new sci-fi book to read - I routinely rotate genres. I did my research in goodreads and started reading a trilogy that was highly rated. Holy crap it was so bad a quit about halfway through the second book. I went back to goodreads and the rating since my last visit had dropped drastically. A bot campaign or something fooled me, I guess.
I've since just started reading older stuff, before the 2000s. I'd try to find a gatekeeper to filter newer stuff for me but everything seems corrupt - even the Hugo awards gets scammed by influence campaigns.
> I did my research in goodreads and started reading a trilogy that was highly rated. Holy crap it was so bad a quit about halfway through the second book. I went back to goodreads and the rating since my last visit had dropped drastically. A bot campaign or something fooled me, I guess.
Sites like Goodreads and Rotten Tomatoes are targeted by marketing firms.
Every popular outlet that become a proxy for reviews gets targeted. The New York Times best seller list has been gamed for decades by publishers who will mass-purchase their own books to get on to the list.
When getting a high score on Product Hunt was viewed as impressive it was standard practice for startups to have all of their friends and family register accounts and then have everyone spam their LinkedIn to beg for Product Hunt upvotes in a coordinated campaign. Now you can just buy Product Hunt upvotes for negligible prices from people in other countries who maintain hoards of sock puppet accounts. Anyone who posts to Product Hunt gets DMs from these companies offering their services. Nobody takes Product Hunt seriously now.
That's putting it mildly. I'm not normally about doing this sort of thing, but I went out of my way to find and install an extension to block google results for producthunt and alternative.to specifically.
Influencers, and people with zero talent, but who have a public audience, are the new target for publishers, so expect a fuck-tonne more rubbish to be pushed by the usual channels and algorithms.
This is not a good time to be an indie author (I should know) writing the book is only the start of the journey, if you want people to now read it you have to fight a system dead set against your success. Word of mouth eventually gets you a few readers, or sales (thankfully) but there are plenty of really good indie authors out there, and you will never find them in the normal algorithms or book recommendation sites.
What about finding indie authors on traditional recommendation systems such as Gnod?[0] The less utilized and forgotten parts of the internet are probably a good set of places to push.
Pushing by any chance your own project? And forgetting to mention gnod is yet another midwit AI recommendation system for bland averaged out taste for the masses?
I have no idea I barely use it but has been around for ages, just figured it was a forgotten part of the net.
If you read my comments you will see I am skeptical towards AI and for the record I beleive that Gnod is algorithmic not necessarily the AI of “today”.
I wish gnod was a project I could pimp but the truth is that I got nothing. Go after the nerds who post their start up in comments. Me, I have never done so and I am too young to be the gnod creator.
I used to (years ago) find new sci-fi and other fiction by going to the library and looking inside at the cards and seeing which had been checked out the most, and grabbing one.
Unfortunately that's all digital now and so you kind of have to go by how worn the copy is.
Not that this is the perfect fix, but at least for sci-fi books you can usually look the Hugo Award winners[0] for ones that are solid. Not all of them are my cup of tea, but I have found that I definitely love some of the series that are found there. I'm sure there are other award types per genre that could help point you to some as well. Not that these can't be gamed, or sponsored or whatever, but at least it is a good starting point that is (¿maybe?) less prone to bot bias campaigns.
The Hugo and Nebula winners (and shortlists, do not forget those) aren't perfect, but they're almost always worth a look. Pretending that they're total garbage is doing yourself a disservice.
Publishers served a really valuable purpose of curation and keeping good authors productive.
Now we have the double whammy of a consolidated publishing system pumping out whatever James Patterson’s assistants churn out and and a long tail of drivel, both AI and regular slop.
> I'd try to find a gatekeeper to filter newer stuff for me but everything seems corrupt
Word of mouth is the best way to do this, among friends who read similar things to you.
Even if you're recommended something you end up not liking, it's not because they're malicious, their tastes are just not the same as yours - and after awhile, you learn to adapt. Friend A recommends a space opera? Great, you have very similar tastes. They recommend a horror novel? Eh, you know that what they consider to be good horror isn't what you do, so you skip that one.
Yeah... for new stuff, I follow authors I already like on social media and see what they recommend from other folks (and why). I've had a miss or two, but that's generally a good start.
I actually do do that and we all recommend each other older stuff we read years ago. :)
These are some of my most recent conversations:
"try Raymond Feist's Magician series" "I'm reading the Book of the New Sun series now" "I read the Pendragon Cycle (she's English and obsessed with King Arthur stories) in high school and liked it but now it's a weird right-wing tv show"
These are all old books but still super enjoyable. (Except maybe book of the new sun - kind if a bummer)
7500 books a day… what percentage are AI slop? Half the non-fiction and children’s books I see are clearly just free tier ChatGPT with poorly generated AI imagery.
true, but what percentage a ghost-written fodder?, what percentage are best-sellers milking their fan=base with derivatives of the same slop? It has always been the problem for the reader to sort out the good stuff from the rubbish, it has just gotten a hundred times harder as the bar for writing is now a lot lower. When I meet a new person who I get on with I ask them what are their favourite books and why, it has opened my eyes to some great books I would not otherwise have found, I really wish I had kept a proper book/reading diary so I could pass these on myself, hindsight it great!
People who don't see any issue with writing novels with LLMs probably correlate heavily with those that also don't see any issue using a botnet of them to promote it. So it's always the worst slop that ends up being pushed the most. We could call this "the Openclaw effect".
One thing that people rarely discuss about book publishing is a change to US tax law in the late 70s that meant that publishers couldn't write down the value of unsold inventory, but could write off that inventory by destroying it.
That meant that poorly selling books were destroyed to realize a taxable loss, which killed the ability for books to slowly "pick up steam" over a year or two to eventually generate a profit for the publisher. If you didn't make a profit fast, the backlog got destroyed and the book lost its chance to make money.
This is not specific to publishing. The diagram tells the story: it's consolidation. Consolidation is bad. Giant companies are bad. In publishing as in other domains.
I'm willing to believe this but the explanation given in the article doesn't make sense to me:
> When Random House was a tiny independent company, it could make a tidy profit by publishing books that sold just ten thousand copies. But when you’re part of a billion dollar corporation, those books don’t move the needle—you need something bigger and splashier.
What? There's no rule that every item sold by a megacorp has to "move the needle." If I order some unscented shampoo from Amazon that doesn't move the needle for Bezos, and neither do all the orders for that particular brand put together.
And, with publishers, you can get both monopoly _and_ monopsony problems. The latter is, I believe, one reason the attempt to consolidate from Big Five to Big Four failed -- I'm forgetting which two publishers were trying to merge, but angry authors talking about having difficulty selling books, and reduced pay for them, was a key argument.
CBS/Viacom was trying to unload Simon & Schuster. PenguinRandomHouse wanted to buy, but it ended up selling to a private equity company. A rare instance where that was actually the better option.
Bookstores themselves are a good example. Borders and Barnes & Noble put all the local bookstores out of business. Then Amazon put them out of business. Now most towns don't have a bookstore at all.
This is a good example of something that sounds true but is actually not. Private equity put Borders out of business (famously). Barnes & Noble is now private but by all reports (still) doing fine. There are more independent bookstores today (in more towns) than ever before.
people give books away here in California with "tiny house" library stands. In a major college town, previously full of specialty and trade bookstores, now very empty.
Correct. That's why even though the specific complaint from the article no longer applies, and small-volume books are easier than ever to publish, things are still shit, only in different ways. Consolidation in a market is just about the worst way to run anything; all the worst elements of a government agency and a profit-seeking business with none of the moderating factors of democracy or competition.
I'm curious how much this is the cause or effect, though?
The publishers have been saying that their ability to promote books has drastically reduced with the internet, along with changes in reading and information habits.
It seems like a book needs a far bigger push today to rise above the noise of the internet (and people's over-abundance of content to consume), and this unfortunately meant that small publishers struggled unless they "joined together" to make a bigger push.
There's extremely small (self published) books and extremely large hits, but the middle is increasingly less viable, it seems. Similar to films.
It's almost like competition is critical for a healthy marketplace! (Seriously, I _don't_ understand why this is such a hard concept for a lot of people to understand...)
> "Writers win the Pulitzer Prize and sell just [a] few hundred copies."
For anyone else who was intrigued by this statement: The essay links to another Medium essay[0] which links to a book critic's blog[1] which links to a 2014 article from Publisher's Weekly[2]. That article reports, e.g., that in the week after winning the Pulitzer for general nonfiction, "Tom's River by Dan Fagin, went from 10 copies to 162 copies sold (6,266 copies sold to date) on BookScan." The poetry winner that year had sold 353 copies at the time the article was published. It came out about six months earlier.
So perhaps for some poetry books, an author could win a Pulitzer and "sell just a few hundred copies." But that seems like it would be rare.
Anyway, these aren't great numbers, but maybe not as abysmal as the author makes it sound.
The clickbait title refers to a day in fall 1995 when a Random House editor was told by his boss that the business could no longer afford to publish modestly-selling books (~10,000-40,000 copies), marking the moment when corporate scale killed the old risk-taking culture of publishing.
The article mentions music and movies as following a similar route; but why no mention of software?
Once upon a time, a small startup could build something and get off the ground by selling a few thousand licenses at $20 apiece. Nowadays, it seems like version 1.0 has to be a bestseller or no one will touch it.
The opera, symphony, and ballet sell out every performance where I live. Me, my friends, wife, etc all read multiple books per month. To me it feels like the problem is in the supply-side - there's just endless content being constantly published - more than could ever be read.
As somebody whose first book came out last month from a (very) small indie press... yeah. In trad publishing, once you've got an agent (not an insignificant step), you only have a handful of shots at the Big Five publishers with your manuscript. If they don't want it? It's small press or self-pub, and good luck getting your book above the sea of mediocrity.
The novel I've got out is urban fantasy, but what I _really_ want to get out there is the hard science fiction series entirely from the aliens' points of view... which is very much not a fit with the current zeitgeist. Because that's unlikely to be a blockbuster, if I ever want to see it in print, I'll probably have to do it myself, with a proportionately diminished chance of finding readers.
(And all this is one reason why writers have day jobs. I'll be pleasantly surprised if my novel income hits even 1% of my tech job salary this year.)
Please post your books here, rough draft / advance copies welcome, I'd love to read more things from the tiny subset of people who contribute to interesting topics like this on HN
The paintings in the most lauded modern art museum in the world are indistinguishable from those garish book covers. That's what gets recognition in the "art" world.
If they are "indistinguishable" from those book covers, I strongly suggest visiting an optometrist.
You may not enjoy modern art, and that's fine - but most of it runs circles around modern book covers. The latter are optimized to grab attention, without any artistic merit. They're the equivalent of shouting loudly.
Modern art may be the equivalent of speaking in esperanto or lojban to you, but at least it's still trying to say something.
No, luminism and romanticism are the equivalent of esperanto or lojban. Modern art is pre-verbal vocalizations, after it had deconstructed language because having syntax and pronunciation are unoriginal and "academic", and fooled itself that higher language is no longer worth exploring. What is it trying to say - how severely language can be mutilated while still sparking some semblance of an idea in a sufficiently imaginative listener? Glorified Rorschach blots. I'll let MoMA make my case for me:
I'll offer a hopeful rejoinder. Perhaps, when AISlop generates enough of the same old story "guaranteed" hits for the mass market (and book covers to go with same), the editors will switch back to something that is novel and unlikely to be generated.
Think about what happens when you feed the first few books of a series into long context llm, along with their audience interests, pitch lines, plot summaries and character guides. When each element is multi-shot rather than zero-shot.
One medium where this isn’t really true is video games. Why hasn’t Steam or Itch fallen in this trap? Because they are honest stewards? Or because the software plane isn’t as large? Only news publishing and written word and movies. In fact movies even have a set number of prestige “risk” directors so they never have to reach too far out of the norm, see Yorgos Lanthimos.
It's the same point though. Steam/Itch haven't fallen into the trap, which I think is because the friction and barriers tonentry in video games are less of an issue than other mediums.
But video games in general have fallen into that trap. There were certainly more variety in the mainstream/AAA scene in the 90s and 00s than there is now. No more major publisher really is in that mid tier wacky but interesting 6-7.5/10 game space anymore.
It goes back to the point that consolidation long term ends up being bad and the smaller/indie press is good for culture (and that is a big part of what Steam is, and I'd argue where the most interesting things in gaming have come from lately
The article doesn't apply to Steam because Steam is a marketplace, not a publisher. Valve takes on no financial risk in accepting a new game into Steam.
And there has been a fair bit of consolidation going on among publishers. IIRC there are only about a dozen giant corporations left that finance AAA games and they have been losing appetite for risk over the past year, cancelling many games in development and shuttering many game studios.
I worked in NY publishing in the 1990s and also did some small press stuff, and even then the 'death of the midlist' was already an old topic. And yeah, consolidation had someting to do with it: publishers were owned by bigger businesses that saw them as black boxes to extract value from. Distribution was changing: the big 'superstores' and Amazon/online sales starting to be a thing. Mass-market was getting crushed. Obviously, not everything that got published was a bestseller, or even expected to be, but authors couldn't get the same space to grow a career. If it didn't work, they'd be cut.
Now I'm a production editor for a uni press. For a while, it seemed to be a bit of a haven from the madness, but it's coming for us now too.
Extremely weird cover selection. Books like Stag Dance, Project: Hail Mary, The Emperor of Gladness, etc. None of them have that. Some of the books listed there are several years old (The Death of Vivek Oji was published in 2020). A Map Is Only One Story isn't even fiction?? I think its very cherrypicked of a complaint. Not to mention the author doesn't talk at all about the rise of romantasy and finding bets like Alchemised and Fourth Wing (neither of which have these covers complained about).
I don't understand what the problem is. TFA makes many references to "literary culture" degrading.. does he mean that readers were better off when the big 5 or 6 controlled the mast majority of new books?
The number of new books available exploded after 2000 (yes, way way before AI).
Readers are arguably better off than they ever have been in terms of variety.
About two years ago I was searching for a new sci-fi book to read - I routinely rotate genres. I did my research in goodreads and started reading a trilogy that was highly rated. Holy crap it was so bad a quit about halfway through the second book. I went back to goodreads and the rating since my last visit had dropped drastically. A bot campaign or something fooled me, I guess.
I've since just started reading older stuff, before the 2000s. I'd try to find a gatekeeper to filter newer stuff for me but everything seems corrupt - even the Hugo awards gets scammed by influence campaigns.
Sites like Goodreads and Rotten Tomatoes are targeted by marketing firms.
Every popular outlet that become a proxy for reviews gets targeted. The New York Times best seller list has been gamed for decades by publishers who will mass-purchase their own books to get on to the list.
When getting a high score on Product Hunt was viewed as impressive it was standard practice for startups to have all of their friends and family register accounts and then have everyone spam their LinkedIn to beg for Product Hunt upvotes in a coordinated campaign. Now you can just buy Product Hunt upvotes for negligible prices from people in other countries who maintain hoards of sock puppet accounts. Anyone who posts to Product Hunt gets DMs from these companies offering their services. Nobody takes Product Hunt seriously now.
That's putting it mildly. I'm not normally about doing this sort of thing, but I went out of my way to find and install an extension to block google results for producthunt and alternative.to specifically.
This is not a good time to be an indie author (I should know) writing the book is only the start of the journey, if you want people to now read it you have to fight a system dead set against your success. Word of mouth eventually gets you a few readers, or sales (thankfully) but there are plenty of really good indie authors out there, and you will never find them in the normal algorithms or book recommendation sites.
[0] https://www.gnod.com/
If you read my comments you will see I am skeptical towards AI and for the record I beleive that Gnod is algorithmic not necessarily the AI of “today”.
I wish gnod was a project I could pimp but the truth is that I got nothing. Go after the nerds who post their start up in comments. Me, I have never done so and I am too young to be the gnod creator.
Unfortunately that's all digital now and so you kind of have to go by how worn the copy is.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel
Now we have the double whammy of a consolidated publishing system pumping out whatever James Patterson’s assistants churn out and and a long tail of drivel, both AI and regular slop.
Word of mouth is the best way to do this, among friends who read similar things to you.
Even if you're recommended something you end up not liking, it's not because they're malicious, their tastes are just not the same as yours - and after awhile, you learn to adapt. Friend A recommends a space opera? Great, you have very similar tastes. They recommend a horror novel? Eh, you know that what they consider to be good horror isn't what you do, so you skip that one.
These are some of my most recent conversations: "try Raymond Feist's Magician series" "I'm reading the Book of the New Sun series now" "I read the Pendragon Cycle (she's English and obsessed with King Arthur stories) in high school and liked it but now it's a weird right-wing tv show"
These are all old books but still super enjoyable. (Except maybe book of the new sun - kind if a bummer)
That meant that poorly selling books were destroyed to realize a taxable loss, which killed the ability for books to slowly "pick up steam" over a year or two to eventually generate a profit for the publisher. If you didn't make a profit fast, the backlog got destroyed and the book lost its chance to make money.
> When Random House was a tiny independent company, it could make a tidy profit by publishing books that sold just ten thousand copies. But when you’re part of a billion dollar corporation, those books don’t move the needle—you need something bigger and splashier.
What? There's no rule that every item sold by a megacorp has to "move the needle." If I order some unscented shampoo from Amazon that doesn't move the needle for Bezos, and neither do all the orders for that particular brand put together.
The publishers have been saying that their ability to promote books has drastically reduced with the internet, along with changes in reading and information habits.
It seems like a book needs a far bigger push today to rise above the noise of the internet (and people's over-abundance of content to consume), and this unfortunately meant that small publishers struggled unless they "joined together" to make a bigger push.
There's extremely small (self published) books and extremely large hits, but the middle is increasingly less viable, it seems. Similar to films.
For anyone else who was intrigued by this statement: The essay links to another Medium essay[0] which links to a book critic's blog[1] which links to a 2014 article from Publisher's Weekly[2]. That article reports, e.g., that in the week after winning the Pulitzer for general nonfiction, "Tom's River by Dan Fagin, went from 10 copies to 162 copies sold (6,266 copies sold to date) on BookScan." The poetry winner that year had sold 353 copies at the time the article was published. It came out about six months earlier.
So perhaps for some poetry books, an author could win a Pulitzer and "sell just a few hundred copies." But that seems like it would be rare.
Anyway, these aren't great numbers, but maybe not as abysmal as the author makes it sound.
[0] https://aaronschnoor.medium.com/does-winning-a-pulitzer-priz...
[1] https://malwarwickonbooks.com/how-much-is-a-pulitzer-prize-w...
[2] https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/a...
Once upon a time, a small startup could build something and get off the ground by selling a few thousand licenses at $20 apiece. Nowadays, it seems like version 1.0 has to be a bestseller or no one will touch it.
The novel I've got out is urban fantasy, but what I _really_ want to get out there is the hard science fiction series entirely from the aliens' points of view... which is very much not a fit with the current zeitgeist. Because that's unlikely to be a blockbuster, if I ever want to see it in print, I'll probably have to do it myself, with a proportionately diminished chance of finding readers.
(And all this is one reason why writers have day jobs. I'll be pleasantly surprised if my novel income hits even 1% of my tech job salary this year.)
This is a modern edition: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Peter-Wendy-AmazonClassics-J-Barrie...
They could have just left it alone - "fired the design team". But no - they spent time and money to vandalize it. Look at the Museum of Modern Art (conveniently also in New York): https://museumsexplorer.com/museum-of-modern-art-moma-in-new...
https://loving-newyork.com/museum-of-modern-art-new-york/
The paintings in the most lauded modern art museum in the world are indistinguishable from those garish book covers. That's what gets recognition in the "art" world.
You may not enjoy modern art, and that's fine - but most of it runs circles around modern book covers. The latter are optimized to grab attention, without any artistic merit. They're the equivalent of shouting loudly.
Modern art may be the equivalent of speaking in esperanto or lojban to you, but at least it's still trying to say something.
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79892
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/101471
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81527
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/35054
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79816
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/35548
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80712
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/32293
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/232
Think about what happens when you feed the first few books of a series into long context llm, along with their audience interests, pitch lines, plot summaries and character guides. When each element is multi-shot rather than zero-shot.
But video games in general have fallen into that trap. There were certainly more variety in the mainstream/AAA scene in the 90s and 00s than there is now. No more major publisher really is in that mid tier wacky but interesting 6-7.5/10 game space anymore.
It goes back to the point that consolidation long term ends up being bad and the smaller/indie press is good for culture (and that is a big part of what Steam is, and I'd argue where the most interesting things in gaming have come from lately
And there has been a fair bit of consolidation going on among publishers. IIRC there are only about a dozen giant corporations left that finance AAA games and they have been losing appetite for risk over the past year, cancelling many games in development and shuttering many game studios.
Now I'm a production editor for a uni press. For a while, it seemed to be a bit of a haven from the madness, but it's coming for us now too.
The number of new books available exploded after 2000 (yes, way way before AI).
Readers are arguably better off than they ever have been in terms of variety.