The Problem of Too Many Books (Part 1)

(Warning: my first newsletter is a little long – 3700 words, so I’ve broken it into two parts to be published a week apart. Thanks for taking the time.)

I’ve worked as a literary agent since 2003 when I set up my own agency after a career swerve. Mostly, I fucken love the job: finding new authors, helping them create first-rate proposals, selling their books to publishers, negotiating the deal, reviewing the publisher’s plans, keeping the author apprised of what’s really going on, handling crises, relishing successes - just being at the centre of building a writer’s career. It’s engaging work with a diverse and often fascinating bunch of people.  

The core part of my job is to help writers make a living but my first piece of advice to almost every new author is: don’t look to books to make a living. 

For the vast majority, the best you can hope for is to make a minor financial ‘killing’, on one book or a few. You might supplement another income with book royalties over a bunch of years. But very few authors are raising children, holidaying and wearing the warm smile of a debt-free life solely from royalties income.  

It’s not easy to find someone to blame for this situation.

The frustrated unpublished writer may point to the agents who either rain down rejection notes or don’t respond at all. The published author might point to their publisher’s shortcomings. The publisher might gripe about an indifferent media or booksellers who don’t take the time to understand the merits of a particular title. When we agents get fingerpointy, we tend to gesture towards publishers.

But I’m not here to pick on publishers.

Almost all the editors I know work hard. Most don’t earn particularly great money – given London, Dublin or New York living costs.

The issue is less about individuals or even groups. It’s systemic. Yes, for sure, there are structural corporate (late-capitalist, if we must) dimensions to the publishing business that put the squeeze on authors. Every industry has got more skilled at squeezing its ‘suppliers’. Most publishers, like any profit-motivated enterprise, are hungry for extra margin wherever they can find it.

This often comes at the author’s expense because they can’t do anything much about the office leasing cost, energy charges or their printing bills. But book publishing is still a distance from Big Supermarket’s treatment of farmers, where most food growers subsist while the biggest supermarket chains choke on a surfeit of money.  

Publisher’s margins are not excessive. Arguably some overspend on central London offices (don’t tight margin businesses belong in the sticks?) but that’s about it.

Publishing is not a ‘racket’.  

Sure, there are some rackety publishers out there, but they are rare and on the margins. I rarely come across any.

Plus, salaries in the industry aren’t excessive for the most part. Entry level salaries and early-years income in publishing are pretty dire and certainly need to be increased.  I was paid more in my early career by Reuters London than most young editors get after three years in the job today. And no, I wasn’t overpaid. I just made enough to live in London, independent of family support.  

At the top of the tree, the owners, directors and top management at publishing companies make a good living. To a struggling author (and to their junior staff who work beneath them) they can sure look comfy and smug. But their rewards, when compared with the upper echelons of other media industries, couldn’t be fairly labelled as exploitative. Considered against the salary, bonus and dividend earnings of top management in finance or technology, the publishing managing director’s salary is chump change.  

The publishing problem is not an individual or group.  Though there are some poor behaviours that are too common in the industry. More on that later. The core issue is deeper rooted.

The cause is too many books.  

photo by Tilly Vercoutre

We all want to belong, to be accepted by at least some of those around us.

We also dream of being seen – standing apart from the crowd – being admired.

We want to express what we feel, what we have learned, what we know.

Those who have a gift for language want to make something beautiful – because they can. Those who have experienced agony want to communicate their pain to another. If we triumphed, it means so much more when it is recognised. When the lesson is hard won, we’d like the world to know, perhaps partly for applause, partly to spare someone else the same mistakes.

If we have accumulated ideas that feel original – maybe even significant – we yearn to share the fruit of our curiosity. Most of the time we share things in story form. Some even see their life as a story, with distinct phases, with themselves as lead character. Others might reject the notion of each life as a story arc, instead feeling each moment as a separate pulse, a sliding door that could lead anywhere – to wisdom or death. But either way, the yearning to communicate is strong.

Imagine you have something to say and a font of ideas gushing out of your mind.

You think about how you should express it. You can upload videos and short text pieces onto social media, as billions do daily. But the format is limiting. You get a moment of passing attention from the scampering audience. You want to rivet their interest, have them think about what you are saying - to feel it. You’re not musical, so that’s out. You don’t have the resources to make and distribute a film, even if you could learn to write a script.

You settle upon writing a book.

Even if you might need the help of a ghost writer, it’s really the only choice.

When people write or talk about “the death of the book”, I find it hard not to sneer (they’re rarely book readers themselves, so a snooty instinct grips me.)

What better format than a book is there for long-form yet concise exposition of ideas?

Try imagining Science or History without books. What other medium offers the depth of engrossment that results from transposing fictional characters from the page into your mind? Sure, it’s not for everyone. Accepted, novels are not central to the intellectual culture in the way they were fifty years ago. No medium or artform works for all. Books take more effort to land in your mind. Patience is often needed. It also depends how you are wired. My father was dyslexic. He yearned to read and did it in his own way – scribbling reminder notes all over each book’s end pages.

Perhaps a third of the population read regularly, half of us (one sixth) with a constant pile of books - bought and not yet read - on the bedside table. The next third might read one book a year, the final third not buying a book in their lives.

It’s a taste thing, nothing to feel superior about, though we readers tend to polish our elite status in our minds (I must write about books and snobbery at some point.)  

My point is that writing a book costs nothing but time. It needs no resources beyond a pen or a computer. So, a massive number of people have a go at writing a book or at least producing a book proposal. I suspect there are near a million (literally) bits of possible books sitting on hard drives in the UK and Ireland alone.

A great many of those manuscripts make their way to agents and publishers. The writers are keen to win some reaction to all their labour. Most of their efforts are not well written enough to be a pleasure to read. But a sizable minority are.

Sometimes it feels like there are more publishable books than there are readers needing something new for the bedside table.

photo by Tilly Vercoutre

The publisher who has hired a new editor will counsel them to buy cautiously.

The editor might listen and wait a long time for the right things to be brought to them by agents. Or they may bypass the agents and chase down public figures and people with an established following (I’ll write again about authors signing directly with publishers – for now, don’t ever do it without speaking with an agent first. The publisher could be ideal, and their deal might even be fair market value. But check. Seriously, check.) 

The newly hired editor acquires carefully, but ultimately, they will still fill a list, perhaps publishing ten new titles each year.

The following year, ten more. 

All their colleagues are doing the same. Their competitors likewise. 

In London, amongst the larger established publishers, well over five hundred editors are buying adult fiction and non-fiction titles. There are then dozens of smaller publishers, many of them good and some exceptionally fine. Now, add the flood of self-published authors.

A fuckton more books are being published than could possibly succeed in finding a decent sized readership.  

Publishers deal with this reality in different ways.  

All the smart ones try to publish less. They only buy books that offer the blend of qualities that seem likely to appeal to the market. But what they can’t normally do is buy only a very few books and lavish big budgets for marketing, publicity, and sales attention on each title. The market is too uncertain.  They would be in serious financial difficulty if none of those few titles became a massive bestseller. They must spread their bets. If they invested the money to maximise the impact of every book – publish to achieve its fullest potential – they’d go bankrupt.  

In a dream world, if you publish six books in one month, you ideally ought to have six seasoned senior publicity managers. Plus, six experienced marketing managers, plus an assistant for those twelve people. The twelve seniors should perhaps focus on the books fulltime for a month. The twelve juniors should all be in place for at least three months prior to publication and three months from publication. That’s a staff of twenty-four people, just in publicity and marketing, twelve for one month and twelve for six months…. to publish just six books. A year or two of that and it’s bye-bye to your publishing business. 

There are some rare exceptions I should note: niche divisions (“imprints”) of big publishing companies who have been funded to buy few books and invest strongly in each title, or small independent houses who cherry pick a few titles carefully and spread their attention evenly across them.   

Most publishers make hard choices as they get close to publication. They choose to spend most of their budget on just some of the titles they have acquired and minimise the investment in others. Then they scrutinise the early book sales results. If a book starts generating buzz or sales or media attention, they throw more resources at it. If it withers, as it likely will by being left in the shade, then it is left quietly to die. This is how it works. This is why an author needs an agent. Not because we have a magic wand – of course, I too sell books that end up marginalised. But we do know how to play the game to maximise the chances of a book being seen as a worthwhile investment at publication time.  

This is why publishers are so poor at delivering bad news – the hard straight talk of failure. They have so very much of it. Every publishing office has bookshelves packed with financial failures. 

This is why publishers switch between different numerical measurements when talking with authors about the impact of their book. They use a confusing parade of numbers. It hard to even get a simple statement of copies sold. You are told about ‘book sales’ but also ‘firm sales’, ‘copies out there’, ‘print run size’, ‘reprint size’.  This is why no editor will give you a pre-launch book sales forecast with precise figures of high, medium and low sales expectations. This is why publishers prefer euphemisms to facts, when talking to authors.  

Who could blame them? To relish their daily work, they must focus on success amidst failure, the few bestsellers amongst the neglected books, the hill taken, not the dead soldiers lying on its slopes.  

Sure I’d like to see publishers treat authors more like partners with whom they share the full story.  

Then again, until that day, authors have dire need of agents.  

[ENDS]

If you’ve stayed with me this far you may want to read concluding thoughts in Part 2 of #1 The Problem of Too Many Books to be published Tuesday 28th June 2022.

Disclaimer: It should be obvious but just in case it isn’t, anything you read in these newsletters is my thinking, my idea or my opinion at the time of writing. What I say has nothing to do with either my colleagues at Mulcahy Sweeney Associates Literary Agency or our colleagues at the associated agencies within the MMBCreative grouping. I myself might disagree with what I’ve written a week later. One purpose in writing these pieces is to garner responses from people who might know more or think clearer than me. Years ago, someone said a thing that stuck: “When I discover I’m wrong, I change my view. What do you do?”

Hint for writers: if you have a book proposal you want to submit to our agency, we’d like to see it. Please head straight to the submissions section of our website. We’ve tried to design our new submissions process to be as effective as possible. We’ve now created a system that ensures we can read everything we’re sent - promptly. I’ll admit that in the nineteen years that I’ve been an owner of this agency in its various forms (Mulcahy & Viney, Mulcahy Conway Associates and now Mulcahy Sweeney Associates), we’ve not always committed the resources to stay on top of submissions (we were smaller and there were a lot of them). The improvements put in place ensure your submission will be read. The best of them will be discussed by Sallyanne Sweeney, my fellow director, and Edwina de Charnace, our newly-acquiring young agent colleague and me.