Publishing: An Anxious Industry

Hey, y'all. It's Karen A. Parker here.

And this is another off-the-cuff style blog post/podcast where I'm just going to be talking about something that just popped into my mind, actually. But I wanted to talk about the connection that I'm seeing with the publishing industry and just anxiety in general.

So, I'm glad I wrote down these talking points because as I was trying to record it first,

I couldn't think of anything. But once I wrote it down, I was like, "Oh, yeah, there's a lot to talk about here!"

So, first, what do I mean by publishing being an anxious industry? Well, first of all, we're kind of all under a lot of anxiety right now with all of the tariffs kind of coming up from the United States and just the stock market crashing.

And the fact that in the publishing industry, you have all of these catalogs of books that are hoping to make a ton of money and line the pockets of stockholders or even salary holders for entry level all the way up through senior level.

So, there's always going to be some level of anxiety in any industry, especially one that involves so much risk.

Like, I don't picture an industry like the food industry, like, McDonald's having a whole lot of anxiety. They got a product—They've got people that order pretty much every day, they have, uh, food, like special food items that come out every few seasons or so.

There's a lot less risk, I think, with food because people need to eat, but with books—

People don't necessarily need to read books. They can get their education from other sources. They can get their entertainment from other sources. There is so much competition out there competing with books that it really, really is cutthroat, and with the, tariffs being slapped to China and other places, there are going to be printers that are going to be affected by this, and the price is going to go up. And once price goes up, demand goes down, and you have your Economics 101 class kind of showing you what's happening.

So there's that level of anxiety just in general.

But the main anxiety that I wanted to talk about was within the industry itself rather than outside of it. The pipeline I want to talk about starts with, kind of, like, anxiety at the level of acquisitions.

So, in case some of y'all didn't know, I was a participant in the Sourcebooks BIPOC Editorial Training Program in 2023. And I had the amazing, amazing opportunity to kind of learn what it's like to be an editorial assistant and to guide a book project from design to launch and to really get an understanding of what actually happens in acquisitions meetings.

Like, I sat in on actual acquisitions meetings and I saw dreams crushed, like, right there and then. I signed an NDA so I can't talk about all of that, but just...

The way that acquisitions works, and the way that the publishing industry works, is that your book has to be similar to something that they already have in their catalog, but different enough so that it's fresh and interesting. And so, you start to have this chicken-and-egg conundrum where they don't want anything super-fresh and super-new because they don't want to take a risk on it, but they also want something that's similar to what they have or similar to what's already out there so that they can find a place to put it on the shelf.

That's what they mean.

You might have heard, if you're a writer listening out there or if you want to learn more about publishing, you might have heard the term positioning.

That's literally what it's talking about.

It is positioning your book on the shelf so that it is competing for that shelf space in an actual bookstore. Again, kind of bringing in my own personal and professional experience here. I worked in a bookstore, and I had to put books on a shelf.

So, I literally was, like—I have that -view of, like, being in an acquisitions meeting and working at a bookstore. From ground zero to ground up, I understand how much pressure there is in that industry just on that scale. So that's the first source of anxiety that I found in the publishing industry in general.

The second source of anxiety that I thought of was pre-order anxiety. Because pre-orders are used to... They're used to kind of gauge whether or not a book will sell well. And they're used to kind of generate buzz. And, you know, that makes perfect sense.

Like, I rarely pre-order books. Like, I would have to, like, absolutely fall in love with the author. Like, know them and absolutely want that book. Like, I've...

I think I tend to pre-order games more than books.

Again, kind of harkening back to the competition between books and other forms of entertainment.

But the thing about pre-order sales is that they kind of contribute to that anxiety because they give a kind-of-accurate-but-not-really-accurate picture of how the book is going to do well.

It might be that the pre-order hype and the pre-order campaign is really effective, but what if people cancel their pre-orders? What if they, you know, what if they read the book and then they leave like a terrible review? You know, like, all of that work could be just for nothing.

And speaking of reviews, that was the next source of anxiety that I wanted to talk about, which is blurb anxiety or review anxiety. Because in no other industry is it expected for a fellow author to get blurbs or promotional quotes for marketing purposes.

Like, you don't do that in the film industry. I mean, I guess you kind of get into the film industry with like film critics, but that's different. That's a little bit different, but it's still the same idea of getting someone else's opinion or someone else's view on a book before the book is even released to draw up buzz that creates so much anxiety.

And don't get me started on the anxiety that is involved at the expense of the author.

You know, they're wondering if they're going to earn out their advance. They're wondering if their marketing pushes are worth it, if their newsletter is worth it. And, like...

Everybody is just so—Everybody's so anxious and tight.

And I see that.

I mean, again, like there is no world currently where everything is guaranteed and everything is safe. There is always going to be some inherent risk in entrepreneurship.

And so the reason I kind of thought of this topic is like, well, what can we do to minimize that anxiety?

Because if I were to sit down with somebody who had anxiety or if I was sat down and talked about my anxiety, someone would say, you know, "Karen, you can't predict the future. You have to let that go."

If you told that to a publishing executive, that would be ridiculous. But if you told that to a regular person, it's not. And so, there's this disconnect that we allow for this anxiety to creep in and to drive so much of this push in the industry.

And I'm like, well, is there any way that we can minimize it?

Is there any way we can kind of just let go of the burden on all of this?

And I think that there are people out there doing it.

So Simon & Schuster publisher, Sean Manning has done something that no other publisher has really done. And he has basically said, "I don't want to ask for blurbs anymore."

Like I was saying before, borrowing from his talking points or his point is in the article that he wrote. Like, in no other artistic industry, quote, "is this common. How often does a blurb from a filmmaker appear on another filmmaker's movie poster? A blurb from a musician on another musician's album cover.”

So, like, he is making the case that authors should not be required to go out and get blurbs or be required to get blurbs because, one, it's an unpaid source of labor, and two, he would much rather have their authors write more books and, and spend less time doing that, so that's one thing off their plate.

If I get my book published, I would like to have a blurb from someone in my industry say nice things about it. Like, that just strokes my ego. But I can understand not wanting to place that additional burden on the author. I respect that choice.

And I think that it's going to be an interesting trend to see if other publishers follow suit, given that Simon & Schuster's flagship imprint is so powerful.

But that's one way I think that the anxiety can be lessened on both the part of the authors and that publisher in particular. And some other people might kind of follow suit with that.

But I'm wondering if there are other ways to reduce that anxiety. I'm wondering if there's... I mean, language and contracts that can say, you know, "You don't have to give us back your advance."

Or, you know, what if there were contracts with no advances?

You know, the contract was just, you know, you get paid when we get paid?

And that whole idea of trying to earn out your advance or trying to just constantly refresh your bank account and see if more money is there would be taken out.

I think the anxiety around pre-orders would just kind of still be there because the idea of buzz is good for marketing, but just—

I think on the level of like pre-orders and acquisitions about choosing which books think they're going think are going to sell—I see that as a much more difficult mindset shift to implement because as a society in general, we operate on so much anxiety.

And in society right now, there's so much stuff there that's producing anxiety.

So I don't have any solutions for that.

I didn't come on here to kind of, peddle my solutions and, you know, preach and make an argument.

I just wanted to, I wanted to kind of just pose that question.

Like, what does a, what does a regulated publishing industry look like

What does a publishing industry that is comfortable with itself look like

Maybe, maybe I need to talk to some like nonprofit publishers and see how they operate things if their kind of views around profit are different from like the regular publishing models, but, um, yeah, just something—Just something I thought about, and if you have any thoughts on the matter, I would like to hear from you.

But until then, those are just my ramblings, and I'll see you in the next one or you'll hear me in the next one.

Take care!