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Please join me and my incredible writing group for our pre-launch conversation to celebrate Ashley E. Sweeney’s latest: THE IRISH GIRL.
December 3, 2024 - 5:00 PM Pacific
Inspired by Ashley's great grandmother, The Irish Girl is a rich family saga of history, heritage, and matters of the heart; a story of adventure and resilience with universal themes of immigration in America.
Dear Friends,
Yesterday, I listened to a great episode of my friend and publisher Brooke Warner's "Write Minded" podcast. Her guest was Michael Castleman about his latest book, The Untold Story of Books. It was both fascinating and illuminating! To both readers and writers.
Castleman describes three eras of publishing, each prompted by changes in technology. First were scrolls written by hand by scribes. Second was the Gutenberg invention of the printing press and each of those books sold for the equivalent of $2500 in today's terms. Ben Franklin got that price down to $600 a book by souping up the Guttenberg. Third came the steam-engined presses and the price/book dropped to $75. Now, books average about $25/copy, with that price declining with the advent of digital printing.
I need to read this book and maybe you do too. It will help us readers and writers understand what we're getting when we buy a book. Here are a few facts I thought worth noting here:
Last year 2.7 MILLION books were published by publishers and self-published authors or 7400 RELEASES EVERY DAY or 5 BOOKS EVERY MINUTE!!
Since 2000 the US population (of potential readers) has grown by 20% while the number of books released has gone up 4000%. Publishing houses (the big few and the many little) released 395,000 books while self-publishers added 2.3 MILLION. So the VAST majority of all new books are self-published with widely varying quality.
MOST books, especially those self-published, garner no more than 100 - 200 sales over their lifetime. If you sell around 1000-2000 copies of your book, you're in the top quartile of all authors.
With this TIDAL WAVE of books every year, each new book is getting harder to sell—there is so much competition. And increasingly authors are having a hard time even giving their books away. It is often cheaper to shred them. the idea of which makes me very :-(
According to Castleman, publishing has always been "a very tough business, a dogfight, a barroom brawl" and it still is.
This information may help some of us better predict our likely sales even if our books have sold well (I appreciate every person who has bought one or two of my books!). But it also prompts me to step up onto my soap box about the incredible value in a $10, $15, $25 book. A lot of books these days are purely formulaic and authors toss them out annually, sometimes every six months. It's astonishing to imagine doing that since it took me nearly 20 years to write Poetic License and a good five years to write The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy. If I'm very lucky, and very diligent, I might cut those years a little with my third book, but perhaps only by a year.
And when you think that for all that time, you sell a book for 20 bucks, get to keep a small fraction of that, and then when the reader has finished it s/he/they can return to Amazon for a refund.
And there are sites where my books have shown up, fully stolen and sold for a buck.
Publishing really is a crazy business model and its only getting worse.
When we hear about an extraordinary advance for an author ($100,000 and up) we may think that all authors get advances but in any given year only 10,000 authors (out of 2 MILLION in the US) get any advance at all. Castleman predicts this will radically change the agenting industry since they earn about 15% on a sale and sales are declining substantially.
So, what does this all mean...here are my takeaways:
I frequently get called by new or newer authors wanting to publish their book. The first question I ask is why? Why are you determined to birth a book into the world? If their answer is, I want it to be my career, I try to let them know about the stiff odds. If they say, I have a kickass story or a unique life or it would mean so much to me, those are all good reasons for pursuing being an author. But for $$, not so much.
Because authors are — generally — respected in our world, there is nothing as satisfying as becoming one if that's what you really want. Castleman wouldn't claim it's not worth trying, afterall he just wrote a new book! But it is worth right-sizing our expectations, both in terms of size of readership and in profits.
I can't think of another form of art (painting, sculpture, metalwork, etc) where the artist is paid so poorly for their work. That said, we live in a time when nearly ANYONE can publish a book (as long as they want to publish it themself), so the gates are wide open to the opportunity (this circles back to the questionable future of agents since they were always the gatekeepers). And I know authors who've made fantastic $ self-publishing fairly formulaic books. More power to them!
Now and then, whatever field we're in, it's worth stepping back and looking at the facts. I look forward to engrossing myself in The Untold Story of Books.
From My Stack
Dawn Promislow
Wan
I get my best book recommendations from friends. This was the case with Wan by the Canadian author Dawn Promislow, recommended by my new writing friend from my year long studio, Sarah Byck, in Toronto. This is a spare, lovely, interior meditation of a woman artist living in Johannesburg during Apartheid. Married to a lawyer husband, the couple is asked to shelter an anti-apartheid resistance attorney in their back garden room. The result of that decision brings a hard look into the protagonist's own privilege, the meaning of her once-thriving art, and an attraction to the housed attorney. I really loved the slow burn of this book. The depictions of the couple's children, their servants, and her parents are equally engrossing. Very good read! "A masterpiece...beautiful, painterly, sublime, and sonically exquisite" said Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer.
Elizabeth Strout
Tell Me Everything
Having just finished Wan the day before the election, I was befuddled about what to read the day after. I picked up five books (my usual approach) and reread the first page of each, searching for the right one for my mood. None worked. Then I remembered that another great friend Penny McConnel (prior bookstore owner) had told me she greatly enjoyed Strout's new book. I'm a sometimes Strout fan, but I'd bought this book, so fetched it off the TBR shelves and it immediately fit the bill. How could it not, since its located in Maine, with wonderful and quirky characters, scenic beauty, and singular reflections on life, love, politics, and place. I needed this last week!
With the holidays upon us, let us all be civil and generous and find beauty in our families, friends, and homes. Ours will be very low-key this year. And do join me, Shelley, and Deb to talk with Ashley about her new book, Irish Girl. Details at the top.
All best,
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