The stagnancy of publishing and the disappearance of the midlist(honest-broker.com) |
The stagnancy of publishing and the disappearance of the midlist(honest-broker.com) |
About two years ago I was searching for a new sci-fi book to read - I routinely rotate genres. I did my research in goodreads and started reading a trilogy that was highly rated. Holy crap it was so bad a quit about halfway through the second book. I went back to goodreads and the rating since my last visit had dropped drastically. A bot campaign or something fooled me, I guess.
I've since just started reading older stuff, before the 2000s. I'd try to find a gatekeeper to filter newer stuff for me but everything seems corrupt - even the Hugo awards gets scammed by influence campaigns.
Sites like Goodreads and Rotten Tomatoes are targeted by marketing firms.
Every popular outlet that become a proxy for reviews gets targeted. The New York Times best seller list has been gamed for decades by publishers who will mass-purchase their own books to get on to the list.
When getting a high score on Product Hunt was viewed as impressive it was standard practice for startups to have all of their friends and family register accounts and then have everyone spam their LinkedIn to beg for Product Hunt upvotes in a coordinated campaign. Now you can just buy Product Hunt upvotes for negligible prices from people in other countries who maintain hoards of sock puppet accounts. Anyone who posts to Product Hunt gets DMs from these companies offering their services. Nobody takes Product Hunt seriously now.
That's putting it mildly. I'm not normally about doing this sort of thing, but I went out of my way to find and install an extension to block google results for producthunt and alternative.to specifically.
This is not a good time to be an indie author (I should know) writing the book is only the start of the journey, if you want people to now read it you have to fight a system dead set against your success. Word of mouth eventually gets you a few readers, or sales (thankfully) but there are plenty of really good indie authors out there, and you will never find them in the normal algorithms or book recommendation sites.
Unfortunately that's all digital now and so you kind of have to go by how worn the copy is.
I think the old publishing model is dying. self-publishing is routing around it.
As a reader, it is sort of amazing. I've been reading more than I ever have before in my life.
If I like a book, I can read the next in the series, and there's a good chance there are 8 other books in the series. When I was younger, scifi novels would rarely have follow-on books, and if they did, maybe max 3 at that.
The hard one for me is continuing a book after I see a typo.
Looking at award shortlists and nomination lists is also a good filter providing you know a little about the award (I wouldn’t go to the Clarke Award shortlist for mil sf stuff, for example).
Now we have the double whammy of a consolidated publishing system pumping out whatever James Patterson’s assistants churn out and and a long tail of drivel, both AI and regular slop.
Word of mouth is the best way to do this, among friends who read similar things to you.
Even if you're recommended something you end up not liking, it's not because they're malicious, their tastes are just not the same as yours - and after awhile, you learn to adapt. Friend A recommends a space opera? Great, you have very similar tastes. They recommend a horror novel? Eh, you know that what they consider to be good horror isn't what you do, so you skip that one.
These are some of my most recent conversations: "try Raymond Feist's Magician series" "I'm reading the Book of the New Sun series now" "I read the Pendragon Cycle (she's English and obsessed with King Arthur stories) in high school and liked it but now it's a weird right-wing tv show"
These are all old books but still super enjoyable. (Except maybe book of the new sun - kind if a bummer)
That meant that poorly selling books were destroyed to realize a taxable loss, which killed the ability for books to slowly "pick up steam" over a year or two to eventually generate a profit for the publisher. If you didn't make a profit fast, the backlog got destroyed and the book lost its chance to make money.
For anyone else who was intrigued by this statement: The essay links to another Medium essay[0] which links to a book critic's blog[1] which links to a 2014 article from Publisher's Weekly[2]. That article reports, e.g., that in the week after winning the Pulitzer for general nonfiction, "Tom's River by Dan Fagin, went from 10 copies to 162 copies sold (6,266 copies sold to date) on BookScan." The poetry winner that year had sold 353 copies at the time the article was published. It came out about six months earlier.
So perhaps for some poetry books, an author could win a Pulitzer and "sell just a few hundred copies." But that seems like it would be rare.
Anyway, these aren't great numbers, but maybe not as abysmal as the author makes it sound.
[0] https://aaronschnoor.medium.com/does-winning-a-pulitzer-priz...
[1] https://malwarwickonbooks.com/how-much-is-a-pulitzer-prize-w...
[2] https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/a...
This is a modern edition: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Peter-Wendy-AmazonClassics-J-Barrie...
They could have just left it alone - "fired the design team". But no - they spent time and money to vandalize it. Look at the Museum of Modern Art (conveniently also in New York): https://museumsexplorer.com/museum-of-modern-art-moma-in-new...
https://loving-newyork.com/museum-of-modern-art-new-york/
The paintings in the most lauded modern art museum in the world are indistinguishable from those garish book covers. That's what gets recognition in the "art" world.
The author posts a collage of litfic novel covers and wonders why they're all so similar, but to me the answer seems obvious: litfic is a genre, whether its devotees want to call it that or not, and so it needs a consistent visual language to guide people's eyes in increasingly genre-ified bookstores. He says "every title I see" is like this, but I strongly suspect he'd agree that this is only true because he spots the romantasy section from a mile away and averts his eyes before he has to learn anything about the adventures of Violet Sorrengail.
https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/SPPA_Comprehensive_...
by a human...
The novel I've got out is urban fantasy, but what I _really_ want to get out there is the hard science fiction series entirely from the aliens' points of view... which is very much not a fit with the current zeitgeist. Because that's unlikely to be a blockbuster, if I ever want to see it in print, I'll probably have to do it myself, with a proportionately diminished chance of finding readers.
(And all this is one reason why writers have day jobs. I'll be pleasantly surprised if my novel income hits even 1% of my tech job salary this year.)
Now I'm a production editor for a uni press. For a while, it seemed to be a bit of a haven from the madness, but it's coming for us now too.
Think about what happens when you feed the first few books of a series into long context llm, along with their audience interests, pitch lines, plot summaries and character guides. When each element is multi-shot rather than zero-shot.
And there has been a fair bit of consolidation going on among publishers. IIRC there are only about a dozen giant corporations left that finance AAA games and they have been losing appetite for risk over the past year, cancelling many games in development and shuttering many game studios.
But video games in general have fallen into that trap. There were certainly more variety in the mainstream/AAA scene in the 90s and 00s than there is now. No more major publisher really is in that mid tier wacky but interesting 6-7.5/10 game space anymore.
It goes back to the point that consolidation long term ends up being bad and the smaller/indie press is good for culture (and that is a big part of what Steam is, and I'd argue where the most interesting things in gaming have come from lately
Once upon a time, a small startup could build something and get off the ground by selling a few thousand licenses at $20 apiece. Nowadays, it seems like version 1.0 has to be a bestseller or no one will touch it.
The number of new books available exploded after 2000 (yes, way way before AI).
Readers are arguably better off than they ever have been in terms of variety.
The publishers have been saying that their ability to promote books has drastically reduced with the internet, along with changes in reading and information habits.
It seems like a book needs a far bigger push today to rise above the noise of the internet (and people's over-abundance of content to consume), and this unfortunately meant that small publishers struggled unless they "joined together" to make a bigger push.
There's extremely small (self published) books and extremely large hits, but the middle is increasingly less viable, it seems. Similar to films.
> When Random House was a tiny independent company, it could make a tidy profit by publishing books that sold just ten thousand copies. But when you’re part of a billion dollar corporation, those books don’t move the needle—you need something bigger and splashier.
What? There's no rule that every item sold by a megacorp has to "move the needle." If I order some unscented shampoo from Amazon that doesn't move the needle for Bezos, and neither do all the orders for that particular brand put together.
You may not enjoy modern art, and that's fine - but most of it runs circles around modern book covers. The latter are optimized to grab attention, without any artistic merit. They're the equivalent of shouting loudly.
Modern art may be the equivalent of speaking in esperanto or lojban to you, but at least it's still trying to say something.
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79892
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/101471
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81527
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/35054
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79816
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/35548
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80712
Bias, though, is going to be inevitable and the Hugos are going to represent the taste of the Worldcon voters. It seems like overall there's been a happy confluence for awhile now between their taste and general sf taste.
I've discovered three of my favorite contemporary sf authors through recent Hugos: Ann Leckie, Arkady Martine, and Tamsyn Muir. I've read other recent nominees where I was unmoved or even questioned their inclusion.
I've also read a decent selection of historical winners, by no means exhaustive or even the majority, and the worst was without a doubt Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer.
- It's a major transition point in abstract art, moving from painting that still have an echo of representation to the purely abstract. You might not like it, it's still an important part of art history. It's talking (with fairly sophisticated language, if you're able to listen) about art in and of itself. About the removal of nuance in favor of structure. About the use of white space.
- It influenced and shaped modern architecture, via Bauhaus and "International Style" skyscrapers. That painting (and Mondrian's approach) shaped every major modern downtown, to some extent.
- It's the precursor of the entire field of graphic design.
Again, you may not like it. Art has always been in the eye of the beholder. You may dislike what it says. But it does say a lot, clearly and in a well thought-out way.
It says even more if you see it in the context of his earlier tree paintings. For folks who care, a rough sequence:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evening;_Red_Tree
- https://www.piet-mondrian.org/the-gray-tree.jsp
- https://www.piet-mondrian.org/the-flowering-apple-tree.jsp
- https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79816
(Most art gains if you see it in the larger context of the artist's work. Most modern art exhibitions fail to make that clear)
Everyone knew it was gamed a little, but there was some organic traffic.
Then it steadily got worse and worse until the front page was just random products that nobody actually used.
If you read my comments you will see I am skeptical towards AI and for the record I beleive that Gnod is algorithmic not necessarily the AI of “today”.
I wish gnod was a project I could pimp but the truth is that I got nothing. Go after the nerds who post their start up in comments. Me, I have never done so and I am too young to be the gnod creator.
Big cities I'm sure still have some, they have enough population to support them even if most people don't patronize them.
I see a fair number of them, scattered around, not even in ultra-populated areas, but the last 3 or 4 times I've stopped in to try and buy things for e.g. holiday gifts, they've had none of the things I was looking for in stock, and they always seem empty.
I hope that's not a national trend, but I suspect it is.
On top of that, Barnes & Noble is closing their larger locations, and replacing them with tiny ones that simply aren't compelling if you're looking for something specific.