Did publishing fail its midlist? Spoiler alert: Yes. (Misshelved #4)
When you work in a bookstore, one of the things customers ask about most frequently are bestsellers. “Do you have a section for the New York Times bestseller list?” “What are the books that sell best for you?” “Are bestsellers on sale?”
Back in a Twitter thread in 2018, literary agent Patrice Caldwell discussed the pressures many authors feel to become bestsellers and the reality that plenty of authors don’t hit “The List” with their first book—or at any point throughout their career. Plenty of books sell consistently and well over time without ever hitting “The List.”
But as the PubCrawl podcast team of authors and literary agents observed, while “[m]iracles and Cinderella stories do happen [...] for every rags to riches publishing fairytale there are hundreds—if not thousands—of authors who cannot earn a living on their first (or fifth) book deal.” For many authors, writing is a hobby they hope becomes a career—but it’s not something they can immediately give up their day job to pursue. Many books make barely a splash in the market before the publishing world moves on.
But why?
You might have heard about how, in the summer of 2020, book printers had to churn out so many copies of Barack Obama’s highly anticipated memoir, A Promised Land, that it delayed the printings of other books. (If that’s news to you, this write-up from the New York Times will catch you up.)
There’s no doubt that millions of readers were going to be interested in what the former president wrote—but massive printings of “guaranteed” bestsellers is something the mainstream American publishing industry now thrives on. The enormous first printing, of course, is part of what guarantees a book its bestseller status, as it ensures the publisher will do all the right things to promote the book: They’ll put it in the right publicity hands, launch pre-order campaigns, and receive the sort of bumps in digital traffic that mean it’ll benefit from optimized web search algorithms.
In fact, bestseller is a status bestowed before the book has even been printed. It is decided when the book is acquired by an editor, often based on how well the author is already known. The logic behind the thinking is not, “This book is so good it will become a bestseller.” The idea, instead, is, “We will make this book a bestseller, and therefore readers will think it’s good.” It’s a self-perpetuating cycle. The book sells more copies because it’s a bestseller, which makes people think it’s good and therefore want to buy it; and books that sell fewer copies are ignored by readers, who reason that they must not be good, because if they were, they would be a bestseller.
Algorithms only support the cycle. Algorithms suggest books to readers based almost exclusively on sales data.
Algorithms used by online retailers like like Amazon.
Stacy Mitchell explained this cycle best when talking to Chris Hayes on his Why Is This Happening? podcast:
The other thing that's happened in the book industry is that the books that are selling tend to be the bestsellers, the well-known names. Sort of the top-tier books are selling more and the mid-list is selling less.
That's because Amazon is good for search if you know exactly what it is that you want to get, you can find it there, but it's not great for discovery. There's some data that shows that if you're in a physical bookstore, you're in a local bookstore in particular, you're about three times as likely to discover some book that you didn't know about that you'd like to read than if you're shopping on Amazon.
That's one of the consumer impacts of Amazon is that there's this narrowing of the products that we see, and thus a narrowing of that we might find.
The publishing industry has done nothing to break this cycle.
What’s added to the cycle? The compounded expectations from publishers for authors to contribute their own resources and labor toward marketing and promoting their books. Yet authors who aren’t already well-off usually can’t afford to invest money in book promotion, or to take time off from their jobs for author events and networking. Authors who don’t receive large advances are further separated from the opportunities that would enable them to succeed because of their publishers’ refusal to support them—and so the same handful of bestselling authors then receive even more opportunities for even greater success.
Because the authors of midlist books have less time before publication to build buzz (because they’re busy doing the jobs that actually enable them to live and write), publishers will often settle on smaller print runs for their books. It’s straightforward math. If a publisher doesn’t print enough copies of a given title to allow it to sell a significant number of copies in the space of a week, it is impossible for that title to get on a bestseller list—and most titles don’t get big print runs.
(Let’s not even get into a discussion of small presses, who don’t always have the ability to print large runs or even to distribute galleys in time for pre-publication reviews. They’re doing great work, but their efforts are too often eaten up by the larger publishers who dominate the market!)
This is all made harder for marginalized authors, especially BIPOC and queer authors, who are put under all this intense pressure while also navigating publishing’s systemic racism, though publishing is s l o w l y rolling forward to spotlight and support BIPOC authors. Malinda Lo talked a bit about her experience on Twitter—of having enough of a market to keep publishing but never being considered mainstream until this year, and certainly never hitting The List.
The cycle continues, intentionally or not: Bestsellers write more bestsellers, and the midlist is necessary … but marketing and publicity are discouraged from focusing on it too much. As that focus shifts, the midlist shrinks and becomes increasingly difficult for authors to survive. The end result is that it becomes harder for readers to find books they like.
Has publishing failed its midlist?
The short answer is yes. Publishing dug itself an Amazon-influenced hole and, as an overall industry, is barely making an effort to try to get out of it, at the expense of its midlist authors.
What could help the midlist?
Independent bookstores.
Stacy Mitchell said it herself: You're three times as likely to discover an under-the-radar read in a local independent bookstore than you are if you're shopping on Amazon. Professor Ryan Raffaelli confirmed that observation in his Harvard Business School study: Independent booksellers succeed by helping customers “discover up-and-coming authors and unexpected titles” rather than by only recommending bestsellers.
Purchasing midlist titles at independent bookstores helps both bookstores and midlist authors more than it would if you bought those same books at an algorithm-driven online retailer like Amazon. A single copy sold by Amazon doesn’t mean anything to Amazon’s bottom line or to its algorithm. Five copies doesn’t mean anything. Fifty copies might make the tiniest dent. But a single copy of a midlist book sold at an independent bookstore means that bookstore is more likely to order another copy of that book to put on its shelves—maybe even more than one copy. Buying five copies almost guarantees that the bookstore will both order more and feature it prominently. Buying 50 copies? Everybody who works at that store knows is going to know what that book is—and exactly how to handsell it and support the author’s future career.
The publishing industry has a long way to go before it can break its own bestseller cycle, but if both readers and folks inside the industry can shift the focus away from Amazon and algorithms to independent bookstores, it would be a fantastic first step. If we begin taking staff picks as seriously as we do bestsellers and put our money toward the independent stores that support the midlist rather than toward the online retailers that perpetuate the bestseller cycle, we might just see a shift in the publishing industry.
And, if we’re lucky, writers won’t need to become Cinderella stories to survive and thrive.
Have you been listening to the Misshelved podcast? Take a peek into the minds of independent booksellers and their favorite authors with the new biweekly podcast series from award-winning bookseller Nicole Brinkley. (That’s me!) Each episode, meet an independent bookseller and listen in as they talk to one of their favorite authors about books, publishing, and the world we live in.
Since our last newsletter, we've featured an incredible line-up of booksellers and authors: Spotty Dog Books's Kelly Drahushuk with award-winning sci-fi author Sam J. Miller, Megabrain Comics's Jean Michel with comic and television writer Marc Bernardin, Square Books's former bookseller Sami Thomason-Fyke with New York Times bestselling YA author Emily A. Duncan, and Wellesley Books's Rachael Conrad with Hugo-award winning author Alix E. Harrow.
Start listening now on your favorite podcast platform to meet your next favorite independent bookseller.
Nicole Brinkley has short hair and loves dragons. The rest changes without notice. She is the manager of Oblong Books. Her opinions are her own. If you like this newsletter, consider supporting her on Patreon.
This essay was edited by Stephanie Appell. Read more of Stephanie's work at bookpage.com, where she is the children's and YA editor, or say hi on Twitter @noseinabookgirl. Her opinions are also her own.