My thoughts on that "No One Buys Books" piece
::cracks knuckles:: OK, we're doing this.
A couple of days ago, Elle Griffin, a person I don’t know, published “No One Buys Books,” a Substack essay offering what would have been a hot take on the PRH trial had it come out in the summer of 2022 when the trial actually happened. The essay craps all over the finances and overall value proposition of traditional publishing and predicts the industry’s demise.
Reader: I hate this piece. I hate it. I hate it with a fluorescent, projective, righteous, obsessive hate that’s completely unfair to its author.
My hatred isn’t about Griffin or even the contents of her essay per se, although most of what’s in there did make me roll my eyes. It’s more about the vast store of trapped poison gas this essay fracked open inside me.
I fear that I’m about to subject you to my gas.
I’m so fucking tired of reading essay after essay like this: line after line of confident, dismissive misunderstanding about traditional book publishing, a field I revere, and one to which I have devoted my entire adult life.
More broadly, I’m so fucking tired of encountering this vaguely Silicon Valley Bro attitude in the wild: a combination of slapdash, single-source “research;” “innovative” ideas that literally thousands of people have already tried and failed; and unearned certainty in the valuelessness of things one doesn’t personally understand, all packaged under a fairycore aesthetic and aegis of utopian futurism.
Yes, and.
Even through the literal tears of rage this piece summoned to my eyeballs—just a minor ooze, rest assured1—I did see Griffin get some things right.
She’s right: traditional book publishing is an exasperating and anxiety-provoking enterprise.
Yes: authors who feel delighted and secure at every step in the publication process are so far from typical as to be freakish.
Yes: book income is not enough to live on for the vast majority of authors, whether or not they publish with the big conglomerates.
Finally, yes: Substack—where I get the sense Griffin makes most to all of her writing income—has been a remarkably remunerative boon for us writerly types with niche but motivated readerships.
Yes, and. I still hate this piece.
Before I talk more about how much I hate this piece, here’s a quick summary of what’s in it.
Using charts and statistics from The Trial—the $113, 700,000-word PRH/S&S antitrust case record published by Publishers Lunch in 2022—Griffin advances the following arguments:
Book sales are on the whole surprisingly low, at least in her eyes.
More people read hit internet articles than buy hit books.
Only a small fraction of authors make six-figure-plus advances.
Traditional publishers only make a profit on a minority of the books they sell: at PRH two years ago, the figure was 35%, with the vast majority of income coming from just a tiny fraction of that fraction.
Publishers’ marketing budgets can be surprisingly small, especially when authors are already so beloved by a huge group of fans that they don’t really need outside marketing help in the first place.
In Griffin’s eyes, all of the above means that traditional publishers justify their existence only by paying some authors decent advances. And authors who don’t make decent advances have very little to gain from a traditional publisher.
Griffin is confused why traditional publishing hasn’t “gone Netflix,” selling ebooks on a subscription model. If they did that, she believes, no one would ever buy a print book again.
Griffin is sure that Simon and Schuster is going to go out of business now that it’s owned by a private equity firm.
QED: Griffin is a wise person for avoiding traditional publishing altogether and publishing her work serially via Substack. (Says Griffin.)
RRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH.
SCREAM ONE: Griffin might be grateful she’s not published traditionally, but I can think of some ways a traditional publishing apparatus could have improved her writing.
First of all:
If she’d published this essay in a traditional outlet, someone would have copy-edited it.
Jennifer Rudolph Walsh is not just a literary agent or—as Griffin says at various other points in her piece— “former Agent.” She’s the former global head of literature, live events, and lectures for WME, the enormous Hollywood agency. She represented people like Oprah, Brené Brown, Glennon Doyle, and Sheryl Sandberg.
I don’t know Walsh personally, but something tells me she doesn’t leave out crucial prepositions when she speaks. I’m pretty sure she said “giant celebrities like or such as Michelle Obama” in her actual testimony.
Since I took the above screenshot, Griffin has edited most (but not all!) of the misspellings of Walsh’s name from her piece. A professional copy editor, on the other hand, would have whacked all of the Walsch-a-moles…the first time.
“How to Glow in the Dark” is not professionally copy-edited AND IT SHOWS, so it’s pretty rich of me to razz Griffin about this. But I’m not the one dismissing the value of in-house editors and the hordes of other publishing professionals who pour their expertise into every traditionally-published book in America, am I.
Which brings me to my second gripe:
Even if they were unfamiliar with the publishing industry, any halfway decent structural editor would have noticed the glaring failures of curiosity and context in Griffin’s draft, encouraging her to go deeper and figure out exactly where her quotations came from.
The vast majority of publishers do not offer in-house fact checking on authors’ books—primarily, I think, for liability reasons. This is really unfortunate and a real issue for authors, who must pay for fact checking out of pocket or out of their advance or otherwise be at the mercy of their own fallible human brain.
Nevertheless: you don’t need to be a professional fact checker to spot the red flags in Griffin’s piece; you just have to be an editor, practiced in reading draft material against the grain and with skepticism. Any professional editor, for example, could have looked at Griffin’s multiple renditions of Rudolph Walsh’s name and job title and thought, hmm. Perhaps this author did not do any basic googling to establish what and whom she was quoting.
Jennifer Rudolph Walsh—like another agent Griffin quotes, my former boss of 14 years, Gail Ross, who’s now a partner at WME—was an expert witness for the defense. Her whole reason for speaking at the trial was to help the case advanced by O’Melveny & Myers, PRH’s lawyers. Ditto Jonathan Karp and Jennifer Bergstrom, both S&S executives, and Markus Dohle, then the global head of PRH, all of whom Griffin also quotes.
Having been personally subpoenaed by O’Melveny & Myers to turn over all of the deal-related emails I’d ever sent at Neon, I can tell you with some confidence what their overall line of defense was. It went like this: Publishers need to unite, or else big bad Amazon will kill us all. Finances in this industry really aren’t as hot as one might think. Books fail a lot. We’re all vulnerable, especially the little guys. And the only way we can protect the little guys is by uniting two of the industry’s biggest players. Monopoly, shmonopoly: We can’t afford not to!!!
I repeat: Walsh and Ross spoke at the trial specifically to support this narrative—one that Kent and I didn’t support ourselves, although the narrative was not wholly unsupportable. Amazon is indeed much more of a monopoly than PRH/S&S would have been, at least for many years. It’s going to take at least five years or so to know whether what happened instead—S&S’s sale to KKR—was a good thing or not. And yeah, actually, a merged PRHSS could have probably intimidated Amazon more effectively than it can now as two separate companies.
Still: I think the PRH/S&S merger would have been terrible for authors. So does Kent, who offered supporting expertise to the DOJ on Neon’s behalf. The solution to monopolization isn’t the realpolitik of more monopolization. We do not have to get on that escalator to nowhere if we don’t want to; with some effort, we can actually shut the escalator down.
Outside the publishing houses in question, the vast majority of publishing pros agreed with us on this. More crucially, so did judge, Florence Y. Pan, who ended up blocking the merger. She saw that the defense’s take was kinda disingenuous. Publishing actually is pretty profitable. Simon and Schuster is the most profitable publisher of them all.
Too bad Griffin didn’t go looking for any of that nuance.