While the publishing industry well-attuned to the existential dangers facing the written word, from generative AI or the decline in reading for pleasure, a November 5 Authors Guild webinar suggests that many authors are facing yet another, under-discussed threat to their profession.
At "Making Sense of 21st-Century Book Publishing," Mike Castleman, author of the self-published The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing (2024), painted a picture of a book business where demand can't keep up with supply. In conversation with Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger, Castleman discussed how, in the past quarter-century, the ease of self-publishing combined with persistent distribution challenges have made it difficult for authors, agents, and publishers to make money off of publishing books.
The crux of Castleman's argument, which was based on the research he did for The Untold Story of Books, was that the digital publishing ecosystem that has emerged in the last 25 years has "booted publishers out of the driver's seat, much to their chagrin," and shifted the focus to sales and distribution.
"Today for $100 any author can take a manuscript, create an e-book, and distribute it worldwide, essentially for free, one lone individual can do that, which was unthinkable until digital technology emerged," Castleman said. He emphasized that Amazon is a key factor in this equation.
The result is 2.5 million books published every year in the U.S., a number equivalent to the total titles published in the entire 20th century, Castleman said. Given this, the fact the number of books Americans buy has remained essentially steady over the past 20 years, hovering between 900 million and 1.2 billion copies per year, bodes poorly for authors, he added.
Where authors are struggling to make money, so are editors, agents, and others who, in the 20th century, built an entire business model around book sales. This system, where "the convention was that publishers bought manuscripts from authors, and authors didn't pay to publish," in Castleman's words, really didn't take root until after World War I. "Authors were like contract employees, cogs in a big machine, and it was publishers who were at the center of the industry," he added.
That this "industrial publishing" model is growing unsustainable is evident in the conglomeration processes that swept the book business in the second half of the 20th century and continue today, Castleman said.
Speaking historically, Castleman said that 21st-century book publishing is making a "high-tech reversion" to the era that preceded industrial publishing, when the norm, for centuries after the advent of the printing press, was for authors to pay to publish. His advice to the authors in attendance was to employ hybrid publishing services when possible, as well as independent marketing consultants who specialize in sales on oversaturated digital marketplaces like Amazon.
"Nothing can kill books," Castleman said. "Reading is not in danger.... What's in danger is authors ability to bring any attention to their little books."
