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Steven Womack Shane McKnight Steven Womack Shane McKnight

This Crazy Writing Life: Some Random Reflections On The Reality of This Crazy Writing Life

In this candid and insightful column, Steven Womack dives deep into the overwhelming realities of the publishing world—from sobering statistics to the evolution of indie publishing. With wit and honesty, he unpacks the frustrations, surprises, and small victories that come with living this crazy writing life.


A couple of weeks ago, I did a Zoom panel for the Middle Tennessee chapter of Sisters in Crime called Indie Pubbing Mistakes And How To Avoid Them. Chapter President Beth (Jaden) Terrell moderated the panel, and Lisa Wysocky, Jenna Bennett and I had a very lively and engaging exploration of how to survive this crazy business. As I was prepping for the panel (an hour or so before we were scheduled to go on), I came across a couple of statistics that left me kind of gobsmacked.

For some reason or other, I started pondering how many books were published around the world every year. I wondered if it were even possible to find an answer to that question. More importantly, did I even want to know how many books were published every year? I feared that the number might be even more daunting than I expected.

So I cranked up my local internet search engine and wound up going down a rabbit hole that I haven’t managed to pull myself out of yet…

The first step was UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. I don’t know much about UNESCO and have no connection personally to the organization beyond dim childhood memories of collecting money for them at Halloween back in elementary school (oh wait, that might have been UNICEF). One of UNESCO’s missions is to compile statistics and information on the number of books published because it’s an important index of how world literacy is progressing and our level of education, which is directly related to the standard of living.

According to their best estimates, 2.2 million books were published around the world last year.

Let’s all take a moment to get our heads around this.

Two-point-two million published books a year means that, on average, 6,027 books are published every day, seven-days-a-week, around the clock.

So if that doesn’t make your head spin, let me add their disclaimer: this doesn’t include self/independently published books. While I can’t imagine there’s a completely accurate way of determining how many indies are released every year, UNESCO estimates that adding these to the mix raises the number to nearly four million books a year.

That takes us up to nearly 11,000 books a day.

I don’t know what else to say beyond Holy Crap

* * *

Continuing on down this rabbit hole, I turned to one of the best Substack writers I’ve found in the past couple of years. . . Elle Griffin. Elle, based in Salt Lake City, writes The Elysian, a newsletter that examines the world and the future through the eyes of an essayist and fiction writer trying to stay centered in the shifting sands of publishing, culture, and life. Her stuff is top-notch, and I highly recommend tracking her down and subscribing (her March 2021 essay No One Will Read Your Book, is essential reading).

In April 2024, Elle wrote an exhaustive and fascinating essay on the publishing business—called No one buys books—set against the backdrop of Penguin Random House’s attempt to acquire Simon & Schuster. The merging of these two publishing houses—who between them make up nearly half of the entire market share of American publishing—would have meant the Big 5 would now be the Big 4 (along with Harper Collins, Macmillan, and Hachette Livre).

The Department of Justice brought an antitrust case against the proposed acquisition and a judge ultimately ruled that the 2.2-billion-dollar merger would indeed create a monopoly, thereby putting the kibosh on the deal.

This was no real big surprise, but what was an eye-opening surprise was the testimony of all the experts called at the trial. It was like in the middle of all the flashing lights, booming sound effects, flame jets, sound and fury, somebody pulled aside the curtain to reveal the shriveled up little mean-spirited man who was pulling all the strings. The truth about the publishing industry was stripped naked and exposed for all to see in its hideous ugliness.

And while what I’m putting in front of you now may seem negative and pessimistic in nature, I’ve always believed that in almost any of life’s endeavors, most of the time it’s better to know what you’re up against. And as Matty Walker said in Larry Kasdan’s great Body Heat, knowledge is power.

So some essential, if ugly, truths:

One expert called to testify in the PRH anti-trust lawsuit collected data on some 58,000 titles. Ninety percent of those titles sold less than 2,000 copies. Fifty percent sold less than a dozen.

Gulp

The contemporary traditional publishing business model is more like a Silicon Valley venture capitalist’s model than the old myth of a small family firm publishing books they love. In this model, you throw a bunch of money at a bunch of projects and hope that a few of them manage to survive, and even fewer become unicorn breakouts. The ones that do become breakouts get even more money thrown at them. The very top successes get a truckload of money thrown at them. At this level, one consultant reported, this means about 2 percent of the published titles.

Celebrity authors—whether they’re real authors, athletes, movie stars, politicians, or just famous for being famous (Kardashians, anyone?)—get a big hunk of all advance money (and therefore, support) from traditional publishers. Franchise authors—the ones who show up on best-seller lists time after time after time—also get a huge share of the pie. Even then, celebrity authors don’t always sell. Fame doesn’t guarantee a best seller: just ask Andrew Cuomo, Billie Eilish, and Piers Morgan—well-known celebrities whose books flopped like freshly landed catfish.

In evidence provided during the trial, Penguin Random House produced an infographic that revealed for every 100 books they publish, 35 are profitable. Profitable might mean a huge success with truckloads of money coming in or it might mean $.01 over breakeven. As few as 2 of those 100 books account for the lion’s share of profitability.

A traditional publishing house’s backlist, however, is a constant revenue stream of profit. Backlist means all the books the house has ever published that are still in print. Classics—from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to more recent contemporary books like Stephen King’s Carrie—are money machines that houses can count on. Popular children’s books can hang around forever as a new generation of young parents reads the books they loved as a child to their own children. Elle Griffin noted in her essay that Penguin Random House’s edition of Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar has been on Publisher Weekly’s bestseller list every week for the past 19 years.

But to get on that backlist, you’ve first got to succeed on the frontlist. 

So with all the discouraging news and mountain-high obstacles, what’s one to do?

For the past year-and-a-half, I’ve been writing monthly columns for Killer Nashville Magazine on independent publishing. If you take nothing else away from this, then understand that indie pubbing (and as I’ve yelled over and over again at the top of my lungs, don’t call it self-publishing) is not just a phenomenon or a ripple in the history of publishing. It’s nothing short of a movement, even a revolution. Publishing houses (and for that matter, literary agents) who acted as gatekeepers in times past are through; they just don’t know it yet.

Run the numbers I cited earlier. If 2.2 million books are published around the world by traditional houses, then you add in indie pubbed books and the number approaches four million, that means that nearly half the books published in the world are indie pubbed. We’re about to cross a Rubicon here if, in fact, it hasn’t already been crossed. In some genres—romance, for instance—it has already been crossed. The mass market Romance paperback is gone, dethroned by the eBook.

This is not, by any means, to suggest that indie pubbing is a panacea, or the answer to all our problems as writers. I turned to indie pubbing because I had projects or out-of-print trad pubbed books that no house would take. When you work that hard on something, you shouldn’t leave it lying in a desk drawer to yellow with age. So I stared indie pubbing and only afterward learned that I liked having control of titles, cover, editorial, etc. And I liked not having to wait years to see book come into print. But it’s an enormous amount of work and I’m still not making anywhere near the money I once hoped to make as a writer of commercial fiction.

So if one of the Big Five (or for that matter, a smaller house) came to me and offered me a sweet deal to publish a book of mine, would I take it?

Hell, yes.

That’s it for this month’s This Crazy Writing Life. Thanks for hanging in there with me.

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