Inside the World of Big Publishing
The truth about those diabolical plans you've heard of
Last week, I saw a writer bemoaning the evils of what they called “Big Publishing.” It made me giggle, because it was the first time I’d seen someone call the traditional publishing industry “Big Publishing” (like “Big Pharma” - not like “the Big 5”). But I see similar complaints about traditional publishers often in the writing world.
Usually the allegations follow these themes:
Traditional publishers don’t pay authors enough. They’re paying authors less and less these days to line their own pockets and cheat authors out of as much money as possible.
Traditional publishers are out to steal authors’ intellectual property.
Traditional publishers don’t market their books.
Traditional publishers are elite gatekeepers who only care about publishing celebrities and people with massive platforms.
And because of these points, writers often continue, publishers better watch out, because pretty soon no author in their right mind is going to allow themselves to be taken advantage of in this way and will choose self-publishing instead.
I believe that behind these sentiments are very real concerns—primarily, that it’s harder and harder for passionate, hardworking, and talented writers to get book deals that will make their dreams come true. Industry-wide trends can lend the impression that there’s some secret, diabolical scheme being concocted in fancy conference rooms and that everyone in the industry is enjoying a collective haughty cackle every time they “win” against the authors. Unfortunately, that impression doesn’t reflect a true understanding of how the traditional publishing industry works. Or the incredible respect for authors, gratitude, and true delight that most book people feel because they have the best job in the world: making books!
So I wanted to try to address some of these misconceptions so that you can have a more balanced, complete understanding of the actual dynamics at play.
Advances are a reflection of what a publisher thinks they can sell.
I think what’s hard for writers to accept and understand is that advances and royalties are not a reflection of the hard work you put into the book. There is no merit-based pay. If there was, publishers could not stay in business. Publishers are creating a product, and just like any other manufacturers of any other product, they are paid (and can therefore pay you royalties) based on the demonstrated sales of that product.
Authors actually have it better than most, because they’re not just paid on the demonstrated sales of the product (royalties), as publishers are; they’re also paid on the expected sales of a product (advances). And human editors are not the greatest at predicting a book’s success; in most cases, their passion and excitement around a book leads them to overestimate what that book will sell.
Generally, you have one force pushing the dollar amount for advances down, and one force that helps to push advances up.
What’s pushing the advance amount down is the realistic number of copies a book will sell. In case you weren’t aware, it’s really hard to sell books, even for big publishers. There are a lot of rumors that most books sell less than 12 copies, less than 250, or whatever. I think what’s closer to the truth is that most books, particularly all the ones you’ve never heard of (which is most of them), sell around 1000 units. (No, I haven’t done a comprehensive analysis of BookScan; this is based on looking up thousands of comps throughout my years. If you want to understand why it’s actually really hard to predict what a book will sell—and how that ties to advances, read this Slate article.) Whatever the exact truth is, I can assure you that it’s less than what authors and publishers alike hope for. So low expectation of sales = low advance. I can’t pay an exorbitant amount of money for a book that’s not going to recoup that investment.
But there is another force that counterbalances those low expectations: the competition for that book. If I am competing in an auction against other publishers for the rights to publish an author’s work, then I know I can’t offer a lowball advance or I’ll definitely lose. So I have to offer an amount high enough to be competitive and low enough that it remains realistic.
A lot of publishers are overpaying on purpose right now. Yes, truly! This means that they are offering advances that are disproportionately higher than the number of actual copies they think they can sell. They’re willing to take that loss to gain market share and build the kind of list that will attract other prominent authors, like Amazon taking losses on books as products and Costco taking losses on their rotisserie chicken.
So, all that to say—no, I don’t think authors are getting underpaid in advances by publishers. I think most authors are getting very reasonable advances commensurate to the actual number of books they will likely sell, and many authors are getting extravagantly higher advances than their books will probably end up actually earning out.
Some believe that publishers offer lower royalties (percentage of book sales—either based on list price or net revenue) than authors deserve. In fact, higher royalty rates are one of the top “pros” of self-publishing. Royalties are calculated based on all of a publisher’s operational costs, like the cost of everyone’s salary who works on the book—the editor, the copyeditors, the proofreaders, the production editor, the audiobook team, the marketing folks, the sales reps, etc.—as well as the cost of printing/shipping/warehousing/discounts/returns/remaindering/etc (some of which is going to get more expensive with tariffs, btw). After all of those expensive endeavors, publishers do have to make some money in order to stay in business and continue fronting money for future books. Royalty rates are fairly standard across traditional publishing and they vary based on format and number of copies sold.
Publishers acquire the rights to publish your book—and nothing more.
To further clarify, publishers acquire the rights to publish the exact manuscript that you give to them…
In specific formats (trade paperback, hardcover, mass, ebook, audio, etc).
In specific languages (maybe all languages? In which case, you’re giving them the right to market the book to foreign publishers for translation and give you a percentage of those deals.)
In specific territories (maybe just North America, or the UK/Commonwealth, or maybe the whole world)
No, publishers do not own your ideas after you sign a contract with them. You can still create new keynotes around your work. You can still create courses. You can still create that spin-off journal or the planner or the calendar or whatever else you want to create based on your work—as long as you didn’t give them “paper product” rights. If you don’t want them to have certain rights, ask your agent or your editor to have those rights struck from the contract. They only have whatever rights are explicitly written into the contract. If it’s not in the contract, they don’t have the right to it.
The contract also covers questions like:
Is the copyright registered in my name or the publisher’s name?
What if I have a bad experience and I want the rights to my book back so I can publish it elsewhere?
What if I submit my manuscript and I don’t hear from my editor for six months?
What if I hate my book title/cover?
It’s all in the contract, so read carefully, find an agent or lawyer if you can, and ask lots of questions.
Traditional publishers employ multiple teams of incredible marketing folks, including publicity experts, digital media strategists, and more. But they’re overwhelmed. And the BEST marketing comes from authors to their communities.
It takes a lot of work to get the word out, and even then, most marketing efforts barely scratch the surface because there’s simply SO much out there competing for your attention. A team could spend hours pitching you to shows and magazines and the New York Times and Oprah, but they’re not guaranteed to get it. Think of how many requests Oprah’s Book Club gets—even just from publishers! The competition is beyond what you or I can fully comprehend or appreciate.
On top of that, marketing teams have a lot of books they have to market. One imprint may publish anywhere from 10 books to 100 books a year—that’s a lot of ads to coordinate and schedule, emails to send, social media posts to run, pitches to make, etc. The work adds up fast. (Back to royalties… this is all part of the services you’re getting when you work with a publisher, and why they need to still make a profit.)
The real question is: Who is most likely to buy a book?
And the answer is: the people who already know and love/follow/trust/subscribe to that author. Every time.
Publishers want to publish great ideas from authors whose books are highly likely to sell.
No, we don’t just want celebrities or high-profile influencers, although those are great because they are more likely to sell more books than the average unknown writer. But every editor can also tell you about the writers they took a chance on simply because they fell in love with the writing, or they just knew deep in their bones the book would sell. Every editor delights in finding that hidden gem—i.e. the unknown author who is going to be a breakout star.
In the past year, I have seen authors with over a million followers offered advances in the low five figures, and I have seen authors with under 100,000 followers (but really, really good ideas) offered advances of almost a million dollars! 😱 For reals, people. It’s wild out there. As my coauthor Liz and I wrote in Hungry Authors, platform (or lack thereof) is not the sole determinant of your chances of a book deal, or your chances of success in publishing.
Publishers are not threatened by self-publishing; they’re stoked about it.
What’s better than an investment that’s been completely de-risked by the creator doing a bunch of work to PROVE that this investment will be profitable?? In other words, if you were looking to invest in a new book, which would you choose: A never-before-published book that is based on an idea and a potential, theoretical audience (most of the proposals we get), or a book that’s been self-published where we can see the sales history and we KNOW that it’s selling to a lot of people (and we can even read their reviews of the book!!!!!!)?
Answer: the self-published book.
Investors want to capitalize on existing momentum. If you’re still not sure about this, go watch the show Shark Tank.
In fact, self-publishing your book is kind of this golden loophole in acquisitions, because if it does really well—amazing! A traditional publisher will probably want to pick it up, like what happened with Jeffrey Mason’s Hear Your Story books, or Freida McFadden’s novels, or Jim Murphy’s Inner Excellence.
And if your self-published book doesn’t sell well? Publishers shrug. No big deal. It’s not really held against you, at least in my experience.
I could go on. Here’s the most important thing you need to remember, if you’re interested in traditional publishing:
Publishing is just people who love books.
Sure, there may be unscrupulous bad apples - even powerful bad apples - who do nefarious things. Just as there are in any industry.
But in 14 years in publishing, I literally haven’t met any of them.
Liz and I have said it before on the Hungry Authors podcast, and we’ll say it again. Publishers are just people. We’re people with busy lives and demanding schedules, working in publishing because we absolutely adore books. Many, if not most, of us dream of being writers ourselves. And the chance to work with authors whose work we admire? Wouldn’t you jump at that chance? Trust me, most of us are grateful every single day for the work we get to do. It’s a privilege to do this work, and we take it seriously.
Thrilled to see the book proposal course of happening!! It doesn’t make sense for me to take it at this stage of my process but I’m so stoked for all of your students!!
This is exactly why I just do it myself. :)