It’s been obvious for a while now to anyone who’s not chasing unicorns that the book industry is in chaos. The sworn testimony given by editors, authors, and agents in the Penguin Random House-Simon and Schuster merger trial revealed that only 10 percent of oldpub titles move more than 2,000 copies, and half sell only a dozen. Contrary to the hopes of new authors seeking a publisher to help build a following, the big New York publishers admitted that their whole business model is finding authors who’ve already built big audiences, then leveraging that notoriety–aided by Amazon payola–to prop up the 80 percent of books that aren’t profitable.
Related: Elle Griffin: Shooting Holes in Oldpub
Not that newpub has gotten by unscathed. Indie is still better for authors than the old ghost companies, but anyone who’s been self-publishing through Amazon these past few years knows how fickle the KDP platform is. A procession of net-savvy authors, book gurus, and Facebook groups have come and gone; each declaring they’ve found the one, true way to KDP riches. And all have fallen by the wayside as Amazon tweaks or breaks its algorithm.
There’s no getting around it. Making a living in the arts is tough. That doesn’t just go for books, but for comics, movies, and music. too. We’re coming out of historically anomalous times when postwar media cartels, aided by a cash-rich monoculture, could play gatekeeper. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, big publishers, studios, and record labels could impose artificial bottlenecks that controlled the flow of entertainment to the public. Now the dam has burst, and everyone is inundated with options that run the gamut from A.I.-generated noise to the 1 percent of top quality art.
What’s the solution to the choice deluge? How can all the countless entertainment offerings be filtered for public consumption? Those are just two of the pressing questions that author David Stewart and I discussed on his latest episode of Newpub Talk.
Watch the replay here:
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That was a good listen. I’d say the golden nugget among all of this was the mention of finding that seal of quality and the distribution channel for indie stuff.
It’s a conclusion I came to last year when studying how the animation industry was built. Reputation and distribution were key factors in building the industry into what people loved.
Tho not a lot of indie people I’ve talked to about this want to hear it because they’re still in the anarchy phase, celebrating that the mainstream is crumbling and we can now just make art in an anarchist utopia of a marketplace. The market is too saturated and there’s no filter to separate the wheat from the chaff. Whoever puts the time and resources into creating that gold seal of quality will be a rich man.
A lot of folks still being stuck in 2014 is the root of many of our woes.
inb4creativemafiasform
My wife and I just re-watched The Hobbit Trilogy. I hadn’t ever thought about all the stuff it interpolates as LoTR prequel material, but it fits. Likewise, I can see where folks stuck on how films should work would add things like the battle of the barrels, or the equally convoluted running fight with the Goblins. On the one hand, there’s some whimsy in those fights. On the other, they do get a little silly in places and start to feel like video-game levels.
I’d offer an alternative about the structure of The Hobbit. I re-read it recently for the first time in a long time, so it’s somewhat fresh in my mind. As you both note, it’s episodic, so The Odyssey is a good comparison. What y’all said reminded of George MacDonald’s Phantastes. While I don’t know whether Tolkien ever read Phantastes, and certainly don’t think he would copy its structure in any case, I do know he gave a lot of thought to what makes fairy stories work. If The Lord of the Rings is an epic, I would argue The Hobbit is a fairy story based on its more limited scale and lighter tone.