https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books
"In 2022, Penguin Random House wanted to buy Simon & Schuster. The two
publishing houses made up 37 percent and 11 percent of the market share,
according to the filing, and combined they would have condensed the Big Five
publishing houses into the Big Four. But the government intervened and brought
an antitrust case against Penguin to determine whether that would create a
monopoly.
The judge ultimately ruled that the merger would create a monopoly and blocked
the $2.2 billion purchase. But during the trial, the head of every major
publishing house and literary agency got up on the stand to speak about the
publishing industry and give numbers, giving us an eye-opening account of the
industry from the inside. All of the transcripts from the trial were compiled
into a book called
The Trial. It took me a year to read, but I’ve finally
summarized my findings and pulled out all the compelling highlights.
I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing
houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like
Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk
of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like
Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like
The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the
backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their
vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we
think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less
than 1,000 copies).
But let’s dig into everything they said in detail."
Via Carsten Raddatz and Muse.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
