Look at the time (insert that old 4chan pyramidhead.gif here and wonder if anyone gets it) time for my bi-monthly bitching about publishing in the only outlet where you can have an honest opinion.
That's fucking gay and retarded one would think that having a ton of "comp books" would be a bad thing you given a saturated marketplace, but it does explain more than a few things about publishing.
Yeah, they are completely scared to do ANYTHING risky.
Although weirdly some are asking for LitRPG novels now.
Which reminds me of a funny story, deep in the fever-dream days of wokeness between 2016-2020, one Big 5 SFF genre editor was acquiring a LOT of works by loudly "diverse" and normally very niche lefty feminist POC writers and giving them the Full Ride In Trad Publishing treatment. I guess she/they thought it was the next big thing due to the turmoil of the era. T
None of the books caught the attention of mainstream readers enough to turn a profit and the editor ended up getting fired. There were a lot of cries of disbelief because she had been a big mover in the newly energized political literature-meets-fantasy scene and had done the equivalent of a pump-and-dump of a lot of people's careers, elevating mediocre writers above their station.
The acquiring editor has to be very careful who they put their company's money towards, and at the moment it's (vom in my mouth) still the queer shit that is guaranteed X amount of sales from the Borg hivemind. They might not be massive sales, but they will not mean you losing your job.
The necessity of recent "comps" is what's keeping me from seriously considering traditional publishing. The effort of finding a recently-published book that isn't dogshit awful is so much greater than just looking 20-120 years in the past and finding a recommendation for something amazing I'd never heard of until that moment.
To make it worse, you need to comp within 3 years.
I think we're kind of past the era where books as books, especially works of fiction, have much in the way of a cultural impact, personally. Certainly the days of an Uncle Tom's Cabin pushing public opinion in Europe to favor the Union in the US Civil War or Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther getting banned across Europe for setting off a moral panic seem in the past. Everything is niche, which I suppose can be both good and bad. Though I suppose a book made into a movie might work?
Something like a GoT or a Twilight will absolutely keep a publishing company in the black for years. The S&S merger also raised the uncomfortable specter on what books sell, and the profits that can be made from them. Authors were getting seven-figure advances (1-5 million), which is usually an indicator on how many books the publisher intended to print. But rest assured they were mostly Dad-gift slop like "A Life of Broadcasting Baseball". SFF lead titles were rarely more than about 100K. and 500K if they were proven to sell and turn a profit,
I agree with most of what you're saying, but Baen is actually distributed by Simon & Schuster. Baen even has a page on the S&S website.
Baen has certainly had some interesting covers through the years. Must admit that. Covers I doubt the Big 5 would allow.
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Still...this is Clyde Caldwell, a pretty well known artist.
FWIW, Kensington is distributed by Random House, etc.
The "person on cover" seems to be fairly common in US fantasy publishing, though not quite so fun.
publishing sounds like bullshit. I wish they focused on creativity like they say they do instead of whatever slop that sells.
Unfortunately slop that sells keeps the lights on. Someone who worked in publishing heard how much it costs to keep ONE office in NYC open and it was an astronomical amount of money. (*See my first reply on the consequences of bucking even a politically correct trend.)
An editor who has acquired enough projects may be offered the grace of some "vanity project" though, and a few have come in under the radar that way.
I don't think I'll ever read anything Booktok recommends again. Clearly their idea of good is far different from mine.
Even people of the BookTok demographic are starting to get really shitty with Booktok for skewing publisher acquistions of books into "what will BookTokers like" rather than "what will readers like"
Booktok and anti-intellectualism (ft. 'the booktokers who don't read')
How tiktok ruined reading + the "booktok book" formula
Are you referring to the presence of HR karen types who pick and choose which manuscripts to publish? Or just a general pervasive wokepozzed WEF agenda? What did you mean by this? Judging by other industries of big tech and government, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of useless nepobaby professional email writers in publishing and such.
Horribly, these are actually robots with no political agenda other than A) What makes money B) what is cheap to produce.
There is no person involved.
It literally is an Exel file that pumps out a yes or no at the end.
Publishers guard these evil robot sources carefully.
Every trad pubbed book is in a pipeline where it's going to get X amount of sales even if the pages were all blank, but the true cost to the publisher - and the eventual profit - is in marketing.
With the rise of booktok and queer book lists etc, there is FREE marketing for a very specific type of book. These books have become cheaper to produce for a nominal profit and skew the algorithm. There's a few discussions on how it's decimated the landscape in this thread. Say what you will about lefties and porn-sickos, there's no denying they can push the hell out of a book in terms of visibility.
So if there are ten slots open on a publishing cycle, the algorithm demands the most profitable books are going to go into those slots.... and if it's slop, slop is what it is.
I recall a lot of it felt "immersive" to me as a kid, even if Harry flying around on a broomstick or whatever wasn't exactly relevant to whatever Voldemort was doing this book. I'd almost attribute part of the popularity of the series to that, since readers could basically spend a year with Harry and his friends. But overall the books evolved into the template for some of those bloated modern YA books.
Yeah, unfortunately due to the P&L algo being primed by Harry Potter, there was a run for YEARS on overloaded YA novels.
Post Covid however, that has dropped. Agents/Publishers don't want anything larger than 80K for YA.
I believe there is even more divisions like the women writing gay romance for other women. I thought it was something more exclusive to Japan but it grew so much that even normal books are about the same stuff.
Its been massive in fanfiction for decades, although I remember it escaped containment in the 2010s, when Kindle and eBooks became widely available. Before 2009, there was no self-publishing ecosystem outside of the fanfic websites.
So we can have the left leaning novels that originates from harry potter, the reducionist tag orientated novels from twilight and the fag shit in the middle.
The tags ones infuriates me the most since it removes any semblance of development and already spoils the kind of content straight up to the reader, it is the mcdonalds version of literature, you are going to have slop and you know what kind of slop it is since you have in the synopsis:
-enemy to lovers
-grumpy & sunshine
-age gap
It is all slop, but to be this shameless about it is very very lame.
There's been a few recent realizations on how tags and tropes have caused book quality to decline. Authors are writing to tropes now if they want to get published traditionally. They have to, its not a choice.
I swear Booktok is more about showing off than actually reading or having meaningful discussion about books
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Although I doubt there is much meaningful discussion that could happen over that shelf of absolute garbage.
Exactly.
It's hard/expensive/annoying to print a single volume if it's too long. If someone wants to print a web novel, they can just split it into volumes, about 100,000 words each. I assume marketing doesn't like that for a book that's actually being published.
Yes, there's a lot of reasons. Paper is a huge cost, as well as unit shipping. A 80K word book (300 pages) and a 160K word book (600 pages) might have the same price and profit, but one will use more paper, cost more to transport, take up more shelf and storage space. The printing hopper at the book printer is limited to a maximum size per unit (so a GRRM book needed splitting into two books)
There's been a rise of people not really having the time to sink into a large book series any more as well, so it's not a guaranteed readership of people wanting bang for their buck in this year of our lord 2025.
