What goes around comes around.
But somehow, the book boomers didn’t see the book boomerang coming.
In 2021, avid readers notably increased their reading.
However, in the first six months of 2023, print book sales in the US declined by 2.7% compared to the same period in 2022, decreasing from 363.4 million to 353.5 million.
That was in June. Publishers Weekly reported that print book sales fell 5.7% in the second week of September.
But back to the OP:
US bookstore sales were about $9 billion in 2021, up from $6.5 billion in 2020.
However, sales in the first four months of 2022 were down 23% compared to the same period in 2019.
In the first half of 2023, sales increased by 6.9% over the previous year, reaching $3.86 billion from $3.61 billion.
So we’re seeing a yo-yo effect that had book sales fall by almost a quarter last year, rise slightly, then dip again.
It’s not just print, either.
The trend is evident in the eBook sector, too.
In the US, eBook revenue saw a growth of 11.7% in 2020 compared to 2019, and by October 2021, it had reached $84 million, as reported by AAP.
However, by February 2023, eBook revenues experienced a decline, being down 4.8% for the month compared to February 2022, amounting to $87.5 million.
On a personal note, I’ve been in publishing for eight years, and conditions on the inside are getting weird.
We’ve seen previous slumps take out backlist writers and small publishers before. But now there are rumblings of name authors and established houses feeling the pinch.
There are rumors of high midlist authors losing their contracts and at least one substantiated report of an editorial layoff at Baen.
Then you have Amazon going even farther off the reservation than usual.
On its own, each of these developments might warrant a raised eyebrow, but wouldn’t be cause for panic.
Taken together?
Let’s just say that everybody who’s still dependent on the Amazon model should be sweating right now.
So what’s driving the downturn?
Ask around online, and you’ll hear theories ranging from algorithm shenanigans to the end of virus lockdowns sending commuters flocking back to audio, to series burnout.
But there’s a major factor everybody’s missed.
A factor that coincides with the late summer/early fall sales decline documented above.
One that’s been a frequent topic of debate around here.
The end of the pandemic brought another change besides a possible shift back to audio.
It brought an end to the student loan payment pause.
And the October restart date is just for federal loans. Private loans reentered repayment a couple of months ago.
Millions of people suddenly getting additional 3-figure monthly bills for the first time in 3 1/2 years is going to affect discretionary consumer spending.
That sucking sound you hear is money being vacuumed out of the book market and into the government’s coffers.
Now add in runaway inflation, rising interest rates, and outrageous housing costs.
It doesn’t pain a pretty picture.
The old economic saying had it that the entertainment industry was recession proof.
What does that make the current state of affairs, then?
A dose of poetic justice for MammonCons who answered fraud victims’ pleas for relief with “Just pay it off, snowflake!”
That’s what.
If your income depends on consumer spending, and the largest cohort of consumers must suddenly divert a big chunk of their budget to paying Uncle Sam, your income will go down.
The Facebook Boomers’ chants of “Muh taxes!” in response to debt relief plans shows their inability to consider second and third-order consequences.
There’s around $2 trillion in outstanding student debt now on the books. north of 90% of it is held by the federal government.
So insisting that debt slaves pay off their usurious burden equates to advocating that they pay the government, which most BoomerCons claim to hate.
Plus, the whole “Student debt relief has to be paid for with taxes” meme was always a canard. Tax increases have to be passed by Congress. The Executive could just write down the debt, and Congress just not raise taxes. It is in fact that simple.
But let’s assume legislators did pass a tax hike to “pay for” erasing a bunch of numbers off a spreadsheet. Guess what? John Q. Taxpayer is already on the hook for that 2 trillion anyway. He was the second the feds bought the debt.
If you are a taxpaying American, your choices are:
- Let the Dept. of Education forgive the debt, let Congress pass some kind of symbolic tax increase, and pay more in taxes.
- Thwart all attempts at student debt relief and see your wallet shrink as consumer markets contract and inflation rages.
- Block usury relief as in 2 above, but half the debtors default, and you’re left holding the bag for $1 trillion anyway.
- Support a debt jubilee, pay no extra taxes, and enjoy the deflationary effects of removing $2 trillion from the money supply.
It still baffles me why, but some people find this a tough call.
Whatever. Enjoy $8 a gallon gas and cascading stock market crashes wiping out your retirements.
At least you taught those entitled kids to take personal responsibility for the consequences of basket weaving degrees at Starbucks.
Or something.
The ray of hope in all this doom and gloom is that the Neopatronage model has proven quite resilient.
It’s a bit early for definitive conclusions, but diversifying your income streams to cover the blockbuster, mid-market, and long tail segments seems to insulate creative enterprises from downturns in one or more areas.
My blockbuster novel, The Burned Book, is funding now on Indiegogo.
Thanks to my awesome backers, we hit our first goal within five hours and our first stretch goal within a week.
Speaking of which, my first Soul Cycle short story in seven years, “The Voyage of Egeria” is now available to Indiegogo backers!
So claim the new story, the new book, and tons of other sweet perks. And stay tuned for the big reveal of our second mind-blowing stretch goal!
Bonus: In this week’s patron exclusive post, I review the 1999 cinematic icon Fight Club. Neopatrons get exclusive access to notes, outlines, and first drafts from me and participating clients, plus the chance to leave structured feedback. To get your choice of recurring bennies, including each week’s exclusive post and access to our elite Discord, join my Patreon or my SubscribeStar today.
Option 5: seize the endowments of every university and college, pay off the debts of their students and former students for as far as it will go, then, on the off chance there’s any money left, give it back to the colleges. Then ban government involvement in student loans. Man’s gotta dream.
The moral point you’re missing is that that 2 trillion went someplace – to the colleges and universities. Those institutions then used it to hire diversity directors and studies teachers and so on, in a patent effort to destroy western Civ, or, as we called in saner times, Christendom. The debt is not neutral – it was and is used to fund efforts to destroy people like you and me and our families. That practice must be stopped.
I have little beef with the students, who it’s easy to say should have known better, but they were getting ‘must have college degree!’ propaganda from the cradle, so I can cut them a lot of slack.
But your plan lets the colleges and universities get away with not just defrauding the tax payer, the students, parents, with zero negative consequences, but using that money to try to destroy us. Harvard, etc., should burn for this, and the ground salted. The smallest justice would be tar and feathering of all faculty; some, plus most of the administration, should be hanged.
So focusing only on the student borrowers is missing, I think, the major point of student debt debacle – it’s really a higher ed debacle, and I’m loath to take steps that let those bastards off the hook. (While recognizing the unlikeliness of any justice happening short of a civil war – and nobody wants that.)
(Also, as a relatively minor side note, you don’t really get economics if you think pretending debt can be waved away doesn’t have major negative consequences. For starters, it’s a more subtle way of debasing the currency – which given the current administration, is almost a joke, since they’ve done everything possible to debase the dollar and tax asset holders, such as old men who hold retirement funds (me, for example). Then there’s the moral hazard – you think it stops with student loans, once the precedent has been set? But again, in the context of our rule under this batch of insect overlords, all that stuff is comparatively minor. But eventually, the piper will be paid. Let’s hope it’s not in blood.)
I think it was Tucker Carlson who suggested seizing the university’s endowments. And I’m on record supporting that plan. You’ll find few harsher critics of higher education, AKA Death Cult seminaries.
What’s odd are the exceptions made to the common understanding that crime victims should be made whole regardless of whether the perpetrators are punished. But only when the crime is usury.
I’m curious why you focus on the usury aspect. The crime doesn’t go away if one charges reasonable interest or no interest at all – because the basic crime is fraud. Colleges and Universities are selling students and their parents something presented as being of great value – $120K and up – when, in fact it is worth much less, if anything, in almost all cases.
Then, to compound the fraud, they offer to finance this insane purchase, with the usually explicit understanding that, once you buy their product, paying off the debt will be no problem. Fraud again.
The interest rate, which is what would make it usury, doesn’t really figure into the basic crime – fraud. If, somehow, they convinced people to pay cash, it would still be fraud. If they loaned you the money at no interest, it would still be fraud.
So, I’m concerned with the fraud here. I have no problem making the victims whole – provided we use the assets of the fraudsters to do so. Isn’t that how justice works? I’d want anyone who paid for a Studies degree, for example, to get made whole no matter how they paid for it – as long as they give evidence of being defrauded by denouncing what they learned.
It’s because usury is the root issue – not just underlying the student debt crisis, but much of the skullduggery in our economy as a whole.
To clarify, Scholastic moral theology defines usury as charging interest on a mutuum, AKA a consumption or full recourse loan. As you pointed out, the amount of interest has no bearing on the evil character of the act.
The reason usury is sinful – often gravely so – is that it charges money for that which does not exist. So it is a form of theft. Worse, it is a form of slavery since it presumes to make claims not just against a man’s property, but the man himself.
Large-scale attempts to profit from imaginary economic goods are behind every financial debacle from the dotcom burst to the 2008 crash to our current stagflation.
That’s not to say you don’t bring up a good point about the fraud. That’s just salt in the wound, though.
Linked to this post and expanded a bit over on my blog. This is a good and essential discussion.
Thank you.
You’re right on the student debt / usury angle. Of course, since the government owns the debt, those hypocritical “muh bootstraps” Boomers who are most adamantly in favor of debtors prison for their grandkids generation are also directly benefiting from the student debt payments as they suck at the government teat in their retirement.
On the subject of the book market, no offense, but part of it could be that there’s nothing new that is worth reading. Most of us were stuck for years with whatever Borders stocked on their shelves. It’s now very easy to download and read books, both public domain and otherwise, that pretty much no one has seen in print for 50 years or more. Especially in sci fi, because the best sci fi authors build on the genre history, there are thousands of pulp, golden age, and earlier books that “did it first”. Probably half or more of regular science fiction readers have never read anything by Doc Smith. Once they discover the Lensman series, can you blame them for reading that instead of buying something new? And I mean, Doc is dead. His children are ancient. Almost nobody feels any loyalty to whatever giant corporate media cesspit still holds the publishing rights to those books, and anyone can now find them online for free. There are thousands of examples like this. I feel bad for professional authors, but I don’t think there is a way out of this. The long tail of publishing is just too long. The only way you get out of this I think is for there to be some major new ideas in the genre, and there aren’t right now. Being a better writer doesn’t matter, because sci fi fans are always in it for the ideas first, not the prose, and if someone wrote about your idea decades ago and their book is available free…
One solution would be to return to the serial. Web publishing with some kind of single use encrypted key wouldn’t be too hard. There are fans for whom it would be appealing to be part of the special club that gets access to a fresh new chapter each Monday. That’s a different media consumption experience than slogging through Project Gute or trawling the torrents for some favorite author from a century past. People are already doing this with speculative fiction substacks, though AFAIK they just rely on the honor of their fans not to repost the stories rather than using encryption.
I was never a fan of his writing but I think I recall that Cory Doctorow may have explored this concept at one point. What do artists do when, from a consumer perspective, it’s all been done before, AND for the first time ever, all those past works are available at the push of a key? In the end, this is simply another consequence of the Spenglerian stagnation and decline of Faustian civilization. I doubt we’ll see a real revival of art until we see what comes next.
You could be on to something with serials. One disruptive force in publishing I didn’t bring up is the growing popularity of webnovels. Pulp Archivist is convinced that webnovels and light novels published serially are capturing younger readers. So oldpub and even indie sci fi authors’ aging fans aren’t being replaced with fresh blood.