Autumn is arriving as we speak, and it’s a good time to look at how the publishing industry is doing.
Let’s have a look at how the Big 5 Publishers of literature did last year. You will note that the top players have changed since my last Big 5 article. Some of the big fish have been absorbed by the even bigger fish since we last looked at them.
#1 on the list is Penguin-Random House. They’re headquartered in Germany and are still the big kid in the schoolyard. Last year they reported earnings of 3.3 billion US dollars.
#2 is Hatchett Book Group. They are headquartered in France. Their reported earnings were 2.7 billion US dollars.
#3 of our top 5 is a corporation called Springer Nature. They publish periodicals and magazines like Nature and Scientific American. They’re headquartered in both the UK and Germany. Their reported earnings were 1.9 billion US dollars.
#4 is Wiley (John Wiley and Sons), a US company publishing academic and instructional materials. They reported revenue of 1.7 billion US dollars.
#5 is McGraw-Hill Education, with reported earnings of 1.7 billion US dollars.
So, did you notice the trend? Only two of the top five traditional publishers are focused on publishing fiction.
EPSON MFP image
And what is affecting the profits for these companies? According to Publishers’ Weekly, supply chain issues combined with inflation and dropped earnings in the first quarter of 2022. However, strong backlist sales propped things up at Penguin-Random House, titles like Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens and Atomic Habits by James Clear. They also report that the late Dr. Seuss’s titles sold more than 5.7 million copies in that period.
As always, audiobooks also performed well. Penguin-Random House’s global CEO Markus Dohle said the ever-expanding international audio business has become a strong growth pillar of their publishing efforts. He also noted a technology- and data-driven transformation of their sales, marketing, and publicity strategies.
This side note about the backlists propping up the Big 5 reminds us to be careful when we’re offered a contract. Legacy book contracts are a terrible danger zone for the author. A hastily signed contract means you might never receive back the rights to your intellectual property (your books), even if the publisher is no longer publishing it.
Quote from the Authors Guild post of July 28, 2015:
Diamonds may be forever, but book contracts should not be. There’s no good reason why a book should be held hostage by a publisher for the lifetime of the copyright, the life of the author plus seventy years—essentially forever. Yet that’s precisely what happens today. A publisher may go bankrupt or be bought by a conglomerate, the editors who championed the author may go on to other companies, the sales force may fail to establish the title in the marketplace and ignore it thereafter, but no matter how badly the publisher mishandles the book, the author’s agreement with the original publisher is likely to remain in effect for many decades.
Most of us are not attorneys. If we go the traditional route, we should consider hiring a lawyer specializing in literary contracts.
This is good advice, even if you are represented by an agent. The complexity of negotiating a literary contract is both confusing and intimidating. By not having the advice of a professional, you risk unwittingly signing away secondary and subsidiary rights to your own work forever.
Many well-known authors were smart or had good lawyers. They either weren’t offered or didn’t accept a legacy contract. These authors regained the rights to their work when the contract terms were fulfilled. They’re now self-publishing their backlists and earning more royalties even though they sell fewer books.
On the indie side of things, we’re in the same boat financially as the Big 5, but we’re better positioned in some ways. We’ve always relied more on digital sales, which have no upfront cost outlay. Many indies are moving to audiobooks too. However, we do need paper books.
Significant cost increases for paper and production (and for distribution and freight) will affect our costs and profit for the foreseeable future. Per an email I received from Draft2Digital, due to supply chain issues and the rise in material costs, their print partner will be increasing D2D’s costs. This means that effective October 1, 2022, the cost of author copies via D2D Print will increase.
I suspect the same will be true for Amazon KDP and IngramSpark.
For indies, our most reliable royalties have always come from digital sales, although we do sell some print books. But the best route to gaining loyal readers has been book fairs, conventions, and signings at bookstores.
We pay upfront for our stock of books and have to keep an eye on our inventory to ensure we have enough on hand for each event. So, with printing costs going up, we will either raise prices or see a drop in our already-slim profit.
So, that is the industry’s current state as of this week. The Big Traditional Publishers are still consuming each other as fast as possible. At some point, there will only be one Big Traditional Publisher owning thousands of popular imprints worldwide, and they will be based in Europe.
The publishing industry is currently in a downturn because of inflation and production costs, but little has changed for indies. We’ve always been at a disadvantage, so in some ways, we’re better equipped to deal with change. We adjust and go with the flow whenever the market goes up or down or moves in a new direction.
Credits and Attributions:
Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:Nature volume 536 number 7617 cover displaying an artist’s impression of Proxima Centauri b.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Nature_volume_536_number_7617_cover_displaying_an_artist%E2%80%99s_impression_of_Proxima_Centauri_b.jpg&oldid=675402098 (accessed September 20, 2022). ESO/M. Kornmesser (photo displayed on the magazine cover), CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
Cover of Scientific American, the September 1848 issue Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:SciAmer.gif,” Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:SciAmer.gif&oldid=655833071 (accessed September 20, 2022).
I am a planner, but I’m also a pantser. I’m just writing to a loose outline. All I need is a little free time in advance of November to let my mind wander.
Next, I ask the creative universe who the protagonist is. I create a brief personnel file, less than 100 words. It’s a paragraph with all the essential background information. Sometimes it takes a while to know what a character’s void is (a deep emotional wound), but it will emerge. I note the verbs, adjectives, and nouns the character embodies, as those give me all the necessary information.
Meditating on mood words often precipitates a flash of brilliance that has nothing to do with anything. What if …
Artist: Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902)
I just finished reading a sci-fi book set ten years from now, in 2032. It was a free Kindle book, but I felt overcharged.
Never once did the super-heroic and uber-capable protagonist fear for her life no matter what ridiculously dangerous situation popped up.
Take a look around in your local secondhand bookstore. A brilliant source of information on low-tech agricultural life and culture came in the form of a book I found at a second-hand bookstore in Olympia in the mid-to-late-1980s. It was called ![Fairy of Eagle Nebula By NASA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://conniejjasperson.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/fairy-of-eagle-nebula-by-nasa-public-domain-via-wikimedia-commons.png?w=500)
The second master class was on the how of creativity. Those of you who follow my blog know how the subject of creativity fascinates me. If you haven’t read any of Jeff Wheeler’s work, here is the link to my 2013 review of his first book, the 
First, Lindsay pointed out that thinking is an action scene, as are conversations. He asked what a character does while thinking. He pointed out that Humphrey Bogart had a way of tugging on his ear when thinking, a habit that carried over into his movies. A side character with a certain amount of screen time but isn’t the POV character can be shown as real when they have a small personal habit that appears from time to time.
When a character’s facial expressions take over the scene, they become cartoonish, two-dimensional displays of emotion with no substance. A landslide of microscopic showing can make your characters seem melodramatic. All that physical drama doesn’t show a character’s emotions. What is going on inside their heads?
And this brings me to the core of this post. During NaNoWriMo, when I write new words as quickly as possible, I lean too heavily on the external, relying on a lot of smiling and shrugging. Conversations are action scenes, but too much “face time” is too much.
In some circles, 40,000 words is a novel, but in fantasy, it is less than half a book.
A detailed history of everyone’s background isn’t required. As a reader, all we need is a brief mention of historical information in conversation and delivered only when the protagonist needs to know it.
Rather than obsess about my lack of creativity, I decided to have fun with it. Several young writers in my NaNoWriMo region have said they used a plot generator to jumpstart their ideas, so I thought I’d give that a try.
Cursed
This plot generator has clearly been studying J.R.R. Tolkien, as it has managed to plagiarize the first paragraph of The Hobbit right down to the punctuation.
When I write poetry, I look for words that contrast vividly against each other. I choose action words that begin with hard consonants, emotion words that begin with softer sounds.
Concise writing is difficult for me because I love descriptors. So, I have to make my action words set the mood. To do that, I must use contrasts.
The drive to understand why some books enthrall me and others leave me cold keeps me reading and looking for new stories.
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 