I spent the past year reading the transcripts from The Trial, the antitrust case between Penguin Random House and the Department of Justice. I wanted to understand more about the publishing industry, something that has previously been opaque to me, so I took notes and published what I found interesting. I called it “No One Buys Books.”
I could not have foreseen how viral that post would go, and how angry it would make some who work in the publishing industry. I get why. I wrote the article from the standpoint of an author and each individual author doesn’t sell a lot of books. In 2020, there were 2.7 million books published in print, digital, and audiobook, but 96% of them (2.6 million books) sold fewer than a thousand copies. Only 268 print titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and only eight sold more than 500,000.
Read Full Article »
