An experienced senior editor explores the dire state of the publishing industry.
9.
A writer writes a manuscript. They aren’t independently wealthy or fortunately partnered. It wasn’t an easy thing to do—they sweated over those words, hated them and hated themselves, cursed the well-meaning but misguided adults who taught them to read—but they got there in a reasonable amount of time, because they weren’t fitting in the work between the demands of a full-time job or cobbling together various sporadic and insecure forms of employment.
The writer is a regular person, and they are also an artist, so they observe things keenly and feel things deeply. They have a regular-person number of followers on social media, to whom they sometimes communicate their observations and feelings—their sense of despair about an ongoing and measurable genocide, say—and these expressions do not result in any pecuniary punishment for the writer.
The manuscript isn’t perfect, as the writer is quick to acknowledge, but it shows enough promise that an editor wants to help shape it into a book. The writer and the editor work together to make the book as good as it can be, with sufficient time and compensation for that process to unfold.
The book is published, to modest acclaim and even more modest sales. The writer writes another, with the benefit of all they have learned from the process of publishing the first one, and the editor loves this book too, and works with the writer to make it as good as it can be, with sufficient time and compensation for that process to unfold.
The reception of the second book is even more muted, but the writer writes another, and the editor helps them make it the best book it can be, and this happens again and again until eventually, with all the work they have done and all the support they have received, all that precious time, all those precious resources, the writer writes their masterpiece, the finest book they are capable of writing, and it is read widely, and the writer writes more books after that, and those are read too, and the culture is saved.
And they lived happily ever after. Or: And then they woke up and it was all a dream.
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7.
Words and numbers: not natural enemies, nerd v nerd, but certainly prone to conflict. Among the most obvious battles is art v commerce, and its various subsets: creative work v paying rent; arts-job workload v waking hours in a day. Having worked as a book editor for more than a decade (and in the book industry for two), and seen many a colleague fall (read: escape to more lucrative, less wearying pastures), I can attest to these being long and bloody campaigns.
It’s easy to think that numbers have the upper hand in any stoush. They get to be facts, immutable, hard and cold; numbers are serious. Words are soft and pliable. But anyone who has ever wheedled their way out of a fine on public transport or endured the fallout from strategic consultancy knows who is in service to whom. Numbers don’t mean much without stories, and words tell a more convincing story.
8.
When the tote bags and the mugs say ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’, it sounds like an uplifting message about the centrality of narrative, a paean to the power of books—which I guess is one story you could read into Joan Didion’s The White Album, if you skim the part about shifting phantasmagoria and fracturing narrative and self-delusion and how tenuous can be a hold on reality, among other things.
‘You think something is in shape to be published or you don’t, and Hemingway didn’t,’ wrote Didion in a 1998 New Yorker essay about a posthumously published Hemingway novel. ‘The publication of unfinished work is a denial of the idea that the role of the writer in his or her work is to make it.’
Numbers don’t mean much without stories, and words tell a more convincing story.
In April this year, Knopf published, posthumously and without Didion’s prior approval, the journals in which the writer chronicled sessions with her psychiatrist, covering her anxieties about her daughter; her guilt, depression, health concerns; and the significance of her work and legacy. The cover copy calls it ‘unprecedently intimate’.
Notes to John debuted at #6 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestsellers list and #4 on the combined print and e-book nonfiction list.
1.
Publishers are in the business of stories, so they must be fluent in numbers, but they need at least ostensibly to give primacy to words, or they may as well be in the far more lucrative business of shoes or weapons manufacturing. They’re advantaged in this by the obscurity of data—Nielsen BookScan tracks most book sales over the counter but it’s prohibitively expensive to access, and broader sales figures remain commercial-in-confidence—which means their stories are told with minimal accountability.
The business of publishing has remained cosily discreet, at least until the US Department of Justice hearings into the proposed acquisition of Simon & Schuster by Penguin Random House in 2021. (How different a story reads when it’s told under sworn testimony.) The DOJ’s argument was that a PRH–S&S behemoth would have a market share of approximately fifty per cent, more than twice that of its nearest competitor—and this would be bad for authors, with less competition between publishers driving down their advances. Absent face-saving exceptions, publishers pay the largest advances to the books they anticipate will be the biggest sellers and invest their resources accordingly.
‘Everything is random in publishing,’ responded the CEO of Penguin Random House US, Markus Dohle, in his testimony. ‘Success is random. Bestsellers are random. That’s why we are the random house!’ Much of the publishers’ defence relied on this winsome anti-business framing of themselves as underdog romantics, gambling on art for art’s sake, mere flotsam in the market’s ocean, amazed and gratified when they find themselves washed up on the shores of bestsellerdom.
Both things are true, of course. Success in publishing is a crapshoot, and publishers can load the dice. The government won the case, though.
7.
A publisher wins the Powerball jackpot: $3 million.
News gets around town, and when he’s out drinking that evening the other punters gather round to congratulate him. ‘Mate, what are you gonna do with it?’
The publisher takes a sip of wine and thinks for a moment.
‘Dunno. Reckon I’ll just keep publishing till it’s all gone.’
6.
The mythology of the quixotic publisher, enraptured by art above all else, is as self-serving as it is seductive. ‘We are angel investors in our authors and their dreams, their stories,’ said Dohle in his testimony. ‘That’s how I call my editors and publishers: angels.’ So much of the infrastructure of publishing depends on this image: we do the work because we love it, because it’s a calling. It’s a vocation in the divine sense, not in the prosaic compensation-for-labour sense.
An aleatoric industry can’t be expected to control its workforce being overwhelmingly white. (Less than ten per cent of publishing industry professionals identify with an Asian culture, and fewer than one per cent identify as First Nations.) If eighty-four per cent of publishing workers are women—a proportion that falls, naturally, with increased job seniority—and nearly half of all workers went to private school, well, that’s another quirk of this whimsical sector.
‘If publishing isn’t really a business, but an investment in people’s dreams,’ wrote Constance Grady in Vox’s reporting on the DOJ trial, ‘then there are no structural inequalities that publishers have to worry about that might have led to this state of affairs.’
1.
Increase in paper costs over the past 15 years: 51%
Increase in printing costs: 34%
Increase in the retail price of a trade paperback over the same period: 23%
Average income of an Australian writer: $18,200
Award rate for a book editor: $62,700
Total value of grants awarded by the Literature Board in 1981: $1.68 million; in 2021 money: $6.95 million
Total value of literary grants awarded by the Australia Council for the Arts in 2021, in 2021 money: $4.7 million
Proportion of Australian adults with a Year 11 or higher literacy level in 2012 (the last international assessment): approximately 56%
Worldwide revenue of Penguin Random House in 2024: A$8.5 billion
Worldwide profit increase of Penguin Random House in 2024: 11.3%
Number of independent Australian publishers recently acquired by multinationals: 3
Estimated cost of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’s recent wedding: A$116.5 million
Proportion of workers in Amazon UK warehouses who skip bathroom breaks so they can meet their target numbers: 74%
Proportion of Australian book-industry employees who reported ‘always’ or ‘regularly’ work overtime: 47%
Proportion of Australian book-industry employees who have experienced burnout: 52%
Proportion of book-industry workers who think publishing is a viable long-term career: 55%
Average annual income required to comfortably afford to rent a unit as a single person in Australia: $130,000
5.
In another telling, publishers are beholden to data. Publishers look at the manuscript in front of them, but one eye is on the numbers: previous book sales, followers on social media, other quantifiable markers of success. The market has spoken; the numbers do not lie. If the numbers say that books by authors of a certain ethnicity don’t sell, publishers can hardly be faulted for deciding not to publish any more books by authors of that ethnicity: blame the book buyers, not the marketing spend, or the packaging decisions, or the book itself.
An analysis by the New York Times found that ninety-five per cent of the books published in the United States between 1950 and 2018 were written by white people. I guess ‘People aren’t interested in buying books that aren’t by white people’ is one story you could tell about that number. But I can think of some more compelling ones.
6.
From Books+Publishing, 19 March 2025: ‘Macmillan has acquired rights to seven new titles from internationally bestselling author Aaron Blabey. The deal, worth eight figures, encompasses seven titles in two new middle-grade series […] The first of Blabey’s new series, Game of Pets, “poses the important question: What if life on Earth is merely a board game being played by giant animals whose avatars happen to be…our beloved pets?” said the publisher.’ (Emphasis mine.)
3.
The role of an in-house editor varies substantially depending on whose house she is in, but is usually best described as project management: it’s the editor’s job to keep everyone informed and everything on schedule. The editor might liaise with the production, design, publicity and marketing teams; be the point of contact for authors and agents; write and polish cover and sales copy, solicit praise quotes, brief cover designers, and give presentations. Lots of emails, meetings, admin; less reading and the actual editing of books than you might think, at least during paid work hours. There isn’t that much editing done in-house these days anyway—many publishers send it out to freelancers.
The market has spoken; the numbers do not lie.
Editors are allies, advocates, therapists, cheerleaders, collaborators, mentors, managers, midwives (I hate that particular one); they are readers, writers, number crunchers, first-aiders, seconds in a duel. I think most editors would say that their principal job is to ensure that each book is as good as it can possibly be, on its own terms. Aim for perfection, acknowledge inevitable defeat, try anyway. You love words, and the people who make them and entrust us with them.
9.
I once worked for a literary publisher who, when I asked for time in a book’s publication schedule to allow for a single round of copy-editing, said, ‘You moving a few commas around isn’t going to sell any more copies.’
3.
I’m not even going to touch AI.
5.
Last year, the British trade publication the Bookseller announced its inaugural ranking of acquiring editors, based on a metric that takes into account book sales and prizes. Fifteen points are awarded for sales of more than a million units according to Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market Top 5000; a Booker shortlisting is worth twice as much as a TS Eliot Prize win. The top-ranked editor scored twenty-four points. Forty per cent of all sales came from one publisher (Penguin Random House).
What do we value, and how do we value it; who do we value? When you operate in a system that needs value to be quantifiable—a number, often preceded by a dollar sign—as opposed to something more nebulous, something priceless, it changes the story, and it changes who tells it. We make bigger numbers in order to live.
