How’s this for a business plan?
- Write something.
- Print up multiple copies and sell them.
- Become rich and famous.
Simplicity itself, I think you’ll agree. But authors still struggle with it. Especially Step 3.
Dear Reader, I ask you: What’s the difference between an author and an extra-large pizza?
Answer: An extra-large pizza can feed a family.
Believe me when I tell you the book business is tough.
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Fortunately for us literary lions, historical perspective is close at hand, courtesy of Michael Castleman. The author of many books, both fiction and non-fiction, Castleman has had a ringside seat to the book business for decades. For the last eighteen years, he has been working on a book about it. Now, after three rejected drafts and much revision, he brings us The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing (The Unnamed Press, 2024).
This volume is indispensable reading for any author, publisher, agent, or bookseller. It covers the waterfront. The author’s nuanced and occasionally sardonic view of the industry may be inferred from a few of his chapter heads:
- “Gutenberg Went Bankrupt”
- “How to Reduce the Price of Books: Piracy”
- “Goodbye Forever, Mrs. Weathersby, I’ve Joined Book-of-the-Month”
- “Everyone Struggles With Amazon”
But though Castleman presents an unvarnished chronicle, one feels somehow encouraged: After hundreds of years of commercial publishing, replete with blighted dreams and corporate connivery, we still want to make books and people still want to read them. There must be something all right with a business like that, even if most of its denizens are going broke.
Castleman touches lightly on the period from troglodyte narratives offered around the fire through the production of medieval texts by hand copying. But his real focus is on the business of printed books, from Gutenberg till now.
He says there has not been one book business. There have been three.
The First Book Business
“The first book business,” Castleman writes, “began with Johananes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type and lasted 450 years through the end of the nineteenth century.” It was an author-centric cottage industry. You wrote a book, hired someone with a press to print it, and hawked copies to the public on the streets if need be. All authors were what today we call self-published. A few got rich, but most had to settle for the satisfaction of seeing their words in print.
The Second Book Business
“By World War I,” the author says, “industrial publishing produced the second book business, now called ‘traditional publishing,’ though it lasted only eighty of the book business’s six hundred years.”
This second book business was publisher-centric. Now, instead of paying a printer to print his manuscript, the author, likely represented by an agent, could sell publication rights to a publisher. This professional publisher then would pay the printer, market the books through bookstores, and feed back to the author a fraction of the revenue as a royalty—keeping the rest as profit.
This “traditional publishing” model is the one we think of as normal. You know, where the author pockets a huge advance and goes on a nationwide promotional tour arranged and paid for by the publisher. But in reality, only a few authors receive large sums of money in the form of advances or earned royalties. Even authors whose books sell well usually have to take their publishers’ word on how much money they are owed. And successful books have always been subject to piracy by foreign publishers.
In the second book business, a few got rich, but most had to settle for the satisfaction of seeing their words in print.
The Third Book Business
“Around the millennium,” Castleman notes, “the digital revolution launched the third book business.” This business—the one we work in now—is still in its birth pangs. Huge conflicts and controversies abound. No dust has settled, and great clouds of it are being kicked up by everything from Kindle and audiobooks to print-on-demand and artificial intelligence.
It’s enough to make a literary luminary swoon, Gentle Reader. We are all—from Stephen King down to Your New Favorite Author—all of us are treading warily through terra incognita.
Only a few make any serious money; but that’s how it always was.
The late John Steinbeck, who wrote The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, The Pearl, Travels with Charley, and a long shelf of other highly acclaimed books during the middle part of the previous century, once said:
“The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.”
And these days, in the time of the third book business, still it can honestly be said: A few get rich, but most have to settle for the satisfaction of seeing their words in print.
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Don’t underestimate that motive, Dear Reader. There is something wonderful about seeing your words in print. It’s a thrill, no matter how much it costs.
So now, having vented my thoughts about the book business, thanks to the spur of Michael Castleman’s wonderful book, I shall retire to my library full of leather-bound volumes, don my herringbone tweed coat with leather patches on the sleeves, pack and light my Kaywoodie briar pipe, and bang away at my trusty old Underwood typewriter till dawn.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
