Is There Room on this Bandwagon??

The publishing industry's scramble for sure bets: a rant

Have you heard of Theo of Golden? The author, Allen Levi, self-published the novel in 2023. The novel has since sold almost 100,000 copies. And now publishers are in a bidding war to acquire the rights to republish the novel, and to publish his next however many novels.

How much would you pay to acquire a novel that has already sold 100,000 copies?

The correct answer: more than three million dollars.¹

This is a tremendous success story for the author, and for self-publishing as an enterprise. For traditional publishing, this is an unacknowledged humiliation.

With apparently no marketing budget, no publicist, no sales team, no blurbs, no professional editing, and no insider knowledge of the industry, Allen Levi sold 100,000 copies of his novel. Instead of scrabbling tooth and nail to acquire the rights to said novel, maybe the publishing industry should take a beat to try to understand why a self-published novel outperformed 98% of traditionally published novels.

We’ve been complaining that no one wants to read anymore, no one wants to buy books, no one has any attention span left for the written word. When it turns out that no one wants to buy our books.

And our reaction to this is to line up foaming at the mouth to acquire Theo of Golden. This doesn’t surprise me—the industry is notorious for jumping on the bandwagon of whatever succeeded most recently—but it does surprise me that no one seems at all embarrassed. Our job as publishers is to find talented writers, develop their skills, and bring their work to the reading public. Here, we have a writer whose work has already succeeded with the reading public, and we (publishers) want to pay arm leg and appendix for the privilege of putting our name (belatedly! meaninglessly!) on that success.

Seen one way, this is a great example of an author getting discovered: he wrote a book that really resonated with readers, he developed a fan base, and now he’s going to get backing and support from a traditional publisher.

What doesn’t work for me about that narrative is the idea of “discovering” someone who has already sold a hundred thousand copies. The value add of a traditional publisher is their ability to strengthen the work and transmit it to readers. If that part has already happened, the publisher’s late-stage involvement seems more like a play for retroactive credit.

There can be no clearer admission of publishers’ lack of self-confidence than a bidding war over a sure bet. We know that we are missing the mark on the majority of published books. And yet, whenever something succeeds, we take the wrong lesson from it. Theo of Golden is a success? Let’s acquire it! And soon, for the publishers who lose the bidding war: Let’s acquire something just like it!

I’m not saying I know what made Theo of Golden such a success compared to all its traditionally published competitors. I haven’t read it yet. But I feel confident that the next breakout success is going to be nothing like Theo of Golden. There isn’t some magic formula of content + vibes that publishers are going to finally identify and cash in on. People want good books. If they’re defining “good” differently from how the publishing industry defines it, then the industry has a choice: either we double down on the work we consider good, or we try to understand and replicate what readers consider good.

What drives me crazy is that we’re doing both at once, and neither particularly well. We throw Amazon ads and publicity blitzes at books that barely creak past 5,000 copies, and we shell out huge advances for books we don’t actually like that readers apparently do. We act like this is an industry of passion, but we finance it with cash grabs. (And then we pretend to be passionate about those cash grabs.)

Theo of Golden might be a wonderful book—I hope it is—I think that would be an amazing and heartening story of good work reaching readers despite the long odds.

But I think the publishing industry should be at least a little bit embarrassed to stand in line to purchase something that they supposedly make. And I wish we reckoned more honestly with that embarrassment. Clearly, we don’t really know what we’re doing! Maybe we should work on that?

It’s not that I think publishers are making a mistake in bidding on Theo of Golden. Someone should definitely acquire the rights to this guy’s next book, and while they’re at it, they should clean up and repackage and ship out more copies of his first book. That all makes perfect business sense.

The mistake comes a lot earlier. The mistake is that, despite the decades we’ve spent honing our marketing strategies and our editorial skills and our distribution partnerships, despite the salaries we pay and the relationships we maintain and the elaborate gatekeeping system we’ve developed, we still don’t know how to sell books. We don’t know how to pick books that will sell; and we don’t know how to get readers on board with the books that we pick.

One reaction to this is to draw a line in the sand and to say: We publish books that we believe in. We may not sell a ton of copies, but we stand behind our taste and we insist that there’s a place in the world for the books that we love.

Another reaction is to say: We give readers what they want. If readers tell us that they want something that we’re not producing, we find a way to produce it.

The great hypocrisy of the publishing industry is that we try to have it both ways. The fifteen or however many publishers bidding on Theo of Golden will insist that they love the novel. They’ve been looking for a novel just like this. They fell head over heels for it. This is exactly the kind of novel they would have supported and believed in from the beginning, if only it had reached their desks in time. And yet, of all the books that do reach their desks, the ones they choose to publish look nothing like Theo of Golden, nor like any of the self-published bestsellers they’ve scrabbled to acquire (see: the explosion of romantasy).

Everyone loves a sure bet. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to make them any more capable of spotting the next sure bet, before it’s, you know, sure.

So if you’re hoping to sell your novel for a three-million-dollar advance, my advice to you is to do 100% of the work a publisher is supposed to do for you and become an overnight success. I guarantee that publishers will be interested in you then.

1. Last I heard, publishers are bidding more than three million dollars per book, which means this might end up being a nine-million-dollar three-book deal.