Here are 24 things publishing should change in 2024. (Misshelved #13)
It’s October, and in the retail world, this means it’s basically Christmas, which means it’s almost 2024—and 2023 was a weird year for publishing.
A private-equity company has wormed its way into one of the Big Five publishers. Authors are waging a war on numerous fronts over their rights to their work, from battling against AI in their contracts to Bill Willingham releasing Fables into the public domain. According to Shelf Awareness’ Alex Mutter, ABA CEO Allison Hill declared in an ABA Community Forum event that her meetings with publishers in 2023 seemed the “most dire” compared to her past three years of meetings.
Yet publishers have experienced gains in recent years. As many consumers turned to books for entertainment, comfort and enlightenment during the COVID-19 pandemic, the industry saw record-breaking sales. These profits continue to level off or drop in 2023, though the declines are mostly due to rising production costs.
However, many problems within publishing are, in fact, the result of an industry that increasingly sees books as merely another form of Content™, into which minimum effort is directed so as not to diminish the possibilities of maximum profits, and that’s simply an unprecedented way of doing things when it comes to book publishing. But books aren’t Content™; they’re works of art that, within capitalist systems, must be monetized, and there’s a difference. YouTuber Zach Kornfeld memorably described the distinction between these two concepts in an interview in late May. “You scroll through TikTok, that’s content. You read some tweets, that’s content. It’s meant to satiate you. It’s meant to help you through life because life fucking sucks, work sucks, I need to shut off my brain and watch some content,” he explained. “We make content a lot. That’s a necessity of our job. But I don’t necessarily feel good making content. That’s the struggle I feel when I lay down at night.”
Alone, I cannot solve the problems of books as Content™ and the sacrificing of art on the altar of the algorithm, but I can offer some suggestions to help us rethink how we approach books—as art, and as content, and as a hybrid of the two—and how we treat the people who create and work with them.
Publishing needs to change. Publishing is awful at changing. But there are some things traditional publishing in America can do that will help it in both the short term and the long term, and I think we ought to discuss those things.
Thanks for reading.
Oh, hey, a quick aside! Today is the launch of my Bonfire T-shirt and tank top campaign in support of the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (aka BINC), which supports independent booksellers across the country. The design is one that I have been wearing for years, and people keep asking me how they can get one. Well, this is your chance.
You have until November 1 to get yourself a statement shirt. Click here to order yours.
Okay. Back to the list.
1. Pay employees more and scale compensation accordingly.
It’s not a secret that publishing company executives make more money and earn bigger bonuses than the people doing the actual work. The most recent Publisher’s Weekly Publishing and Jobs survey lacks information on just how well such executives are paid, but the 2016 article “How Much Top Publishing Executives Earn” allows us to imagine what their salaries might look like in 2023.
When companies want to increase shareholder profits, especially with so many companies still following the proven-to-fail compulsory layoff strategy popularized by former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, executives often make the choice to lay off talented people in less successful (yet still profitable) areas of a business. This forces remaining employees to do more work for the same amount of pay.
It’s a terrible long-term strategy. When people are underpaid, they underperform, and they often leave their jobs, which results in time and money wasted on hiring and training replacements. Anecdotally, my bookstore started doing better financially when we started paying people more, because our booksellers felt more invested in their work and we weren’t wasting time and resources on hiring and training.
2. Hire project directors.
Some imprints may have managing editors, but publishing could really use project directors: people tasked to make sure everyone in all an imprint’s various departments are getting their jobs done—and that no one is duplicating work. Such positions exist in many other industries and enable a more streamlined focus on work while relieving existing positions of unnecessary labor. Marketers, publicists and editors are all stretched too thin and responsible for too many things—and they often don’t have anybody to help coordinate their work, which leads to some tasks being neglected and other tasks being duplicated. Project directors could help with that.
3. Decentralize from New York City and focus on remote positions.
Publishers love to have employees in the office, even when those roles don’t need to be in an office to get the work done. They also love being in New York City, one of the most expensive cities in the world. Give it up, publishing. If you want to save money, stop keeping wages artificially low. Start giving up your offices, move to more affordable cities and offer more remote positions. This will have the added benefit of making the industry more diverse. There’s really no downside here.
4. Work with fewer “influencers,” but compensate non-trade professionals for promotion.
Too many “influencers” receive galleys. I say this as a former book blogger who received too many galleys, who watches publishers fling e-ARCs at anyone who seems vaguely interested in a title, not realizing that they’re eating into their own target audiences. As I discussed in my BookTok essay, many “influencers” are hobbyists who feel pressured to become professional influencers in order to validate their love of books. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be in professional spaces, and there’s nothing wrong with hobbyists, but in refusing to distinguish between the two, publishing wastes too many of its own resources and the book world cannibalizes itself by inviting everybody into the industry.
Publishers need to work with fewer “influencers.”
Many BookTokkers and BookTubers and Bookstagrammers and bloggers and podcasters do want to do this professionally, and they can bring a level of attention to a book that publishers could not do alone. I refer to these people as non-trade professionals. They’re not booksellers or librarians or directly involved in the industry, but they do a level of professional work that publishers have come to rely on in order to promote many books (especially if we take the focus off of individual authors’ and publisher-run social media accounts).
Publishers can never ethically pay reviewers to review books, but I would love to see more publisher sponsorships of non-trade professional accounts. If a non-trade professional reviews a book they like, publishers should pay them to promote it multiple subsequent times. This would require creating a new and complicated system for working with influencers that I am not smart enough to invent, but I do think it needs to be done.
5. Streamline galley distribution.
Every month, a hundred or so galleys arrive at my bookstore. Even with a staff of a dozen people, it’s impossible to read them all. Some titles just don’t interest any of us, while others that are of interest might be deprioritized in favor of our current TBRs. And if a publisher really backs a book, we often get three or four advance copies … and no copies of other books.
Author Erin Bowman recently wrote about how physical galleys can be an asset in book promotion because people are conventionally supposed to need to see something at least seven times before they will decide to engage with it. However, how they see it matters—if they see it at all. I love physical galleys, but right now, too many physical galleys are wasted, and they cost a lot of money to produce. I would love to see galley distribution streamlined so that potential recipients are asked before a galley is shipped to them, duplicates aren’t sent, and galleys aren’t wasted on people who won’t read them.
6. Switch from galleys to complimentary copies for non-trade professionals.
While we’re thinking about galley distribution, let’s print fewer galleys and send non-trade professionals complimentary finished copies instead. Not only can these arrive earlier than publication date, the same way galleys can, but they look better on social media and will cut down on the number of galleys being hoarded as collector’s items or sold on eBay. This will also save publishing money in the long term since printing galleys actually costs more than printing finished copies.
7. Invest in media outlets that focus on books.
Do you want more attention given to books outside of social media and websites like Goodreads? I do. Though the return of USA Today’s book section (in partnership with one of my favorite independent bookstores!) was a great start, we need more publications and websites that focus on books, and investing in them is a great way to start. Much like how LitHub began spotlighting new work after its founding in 2015, this will allow for wider, more diverse book coverage. I would especially love to see a publication that covers kidlit for kids and YA for teens, rather than the helpful but limited adult-focused trade publications we have now.
8. Minimize publisher presence on social media—and stop relying solely on social media for book promotion.
Look, I don’t like the extent to which authors are obligated to do their own promotion through social media, but publishers who promote midlist titles solely via social media are wasting their own time. Publishers don’t see high engagement on platforms like Instagram or whatever Twitter is called today, especially now that we’re seeing the collapse of social media. Though publishers invest much of their energy in TikTok, sales figures for “BookTok” picks are beginning to drop as readers report picking up books more because of YouTube. Yes, publishers should be using social media as a promotional tool, but it cannot be the tool they focus on the most, and it cannot be the only one that they use to promote midlist titles—especially given the racism found on BookTok.
9. Switch to simultaneous paperback and hardcover releases or paperback-first printings, and bring back low-cost paperbacks.
This is the one item on this list that is least likely to happen because of how book printing works, but it’s also a problem exclusive to American publishing. Did you know that paperbacks and hardcovers cost publishers nearly the same amount of money to print? A hardcover costs only $1 or $2 more than a paperback, yet publishers mark hardcovers up at substantially higher rates than paperbacks, which helps their bottom line. (In children’s publishing, this has helped to keep the price of paperbacks artificially low. It’s why you’ve seen prices for middle grade and YA paperbacks jump in the past few years.) But hardcovers are financially inaccessible to many readers, which is part of why U.K. and Australian publishers focus on paperback originals unless they think a book is going to be huge.
I love when publishers make books available in hardcover and paperback at the same time. This allows libraries and collectors to buy nice hardcovers for their shelves and folks on lower budgets to bring home a copy of a book they were excited for. I especially miss mass market paperbacks. Fewer and fewer books are being published in this cheap, delightful format, and as somebody who owns more mass market paperbacks than any other kind of book, I would love to see them return.
Given how desperately American publishers say they need money, I don’t think this change is going to happen, but gosh, I would love to see it. I think it would actually lead to more sales and more books being read overall … and also, I miss mass market paperbacks. Just give me more SFF in mass market paperback. Please?
10. Invest in independent bookstores.
This isn’t surprising, coming from me, and I get it: Amazon moves a lot of books. If you’re a publisher, you need Amazon on your side, because Amazon is a corporate behemoth that seeks to control everything and everybody. But if we think about that strategy in the long term, well, you don’t want one company to control what you sell entirely. And the best way to avoid that?
Invest in independent bookstores—and in Barnes & Noble, and in libraries, and in non-Amazon stores that sell books, but mostly in independent bookstores. Ditching Amazon links and encouraging readers to get into their physical stores will also encourage them to invest in their bookish communities and encourage more book shopping in an era when the thrill and fun of in-person shopping is dying.
At a bare minimum, I’d like to see publishers link to independent bookstores when they work directly with authors on preorder campaigns. Whether publishers take their investments in bookstores to the next level in the form of direct education, as advocated for by sales rep Lanora Jennings, or better margins for independent bookstores (50% discounts, please!), or more co-op payment options for booksellers—I don’t care where publishers start, as long as they start somewhere and stick to it.
11. Stop retailer-specific special editions, but give first editions an extra shine.
Amazon doesn’t need special editions, but lots of other retailers do. Independent bookstores, Barnes & Noble, and even vendors like Books-A-Million or Target can all use the help of special editions. But let’s not pull a Maas: Not every vendor needs a different edition with different exclusive content. This strategy might slightly increase sales, but the additional books sold tend to be purchased by people with copious amounts of discretionary income. Fandom shouldn’t be pay to play.
Rewarding dedicated fans with beautiful first editions, however, would be a good compromise between publisher interests and fandom interests. It would incentivize preorders from hardcore fans and give them a little something special without making the primary content of books inaccessible to folks with lower incomes. We saw how successful this could be with Fourth Wing, and this strategy yields far more preorders than swag, which often doesn’t move the needle at all. Bonus content can always be dropped later, in paperback editions or as part of collector’s editions that come out months after the book’s original publication, when fandom already knows how much they love or want it. (I love the work of Grim Oak Press.) But for first printings, this would create a more level playing field for fans and vendors.
12. Publish fewer books in order to better pay and support midlist authors.
There are too many books. I don’t mean this in a bad way. Abundance is a good thing, and the many avenues of publishing allow for a plethora of books on the market. (Hello to all the self-published authors who might be reading this!) But publishing is drowning in books. Part of it has to do with the consolidation of publishers, but regardless of the reasons, traditional publishers are simply publishing too many books. Many will not receive the time and attention they deserve from editors or publicists, resulting in poorly executed and marketed products that will never earn out, stopping careers before they have a chance to begin. (Please, Penguin Random House. Your catalogs are so long already …)
The only fair solution is to publish fewer books. We need to publish more books by BIPOC authors and queer authors and disabled authors and authors who identify with multiple traditionally marginalized identities, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do that too. As author Kat Cho recently reported on Bluesky, “Heard a from a pub professional that publishing didn't give up white book spots to BIPOC books after 2020. They just incr # of books pubbed overall & gave new slots to BIPOC. BUT now kidlit is contracting. Pubs are acquiring less books, so which books do you think are the 1st on the chopping block?” Acquiring these titles only to shove them into the slog with hundreds of others, never giving them a chance to shine, is just tokenism under a different capitalist guise.
Publishers need to stop buying books they’re not able or willing to invest in. They’d save money and sell more books overall by choosing acquisitions more wisely—and the industry would stop drowning in traditionally published books that nobody buys.
13. Remember who your actual audiences are in kidlit age categories and adjust where books are published accordingly.
I’d like to say that I don’t know why the kidlit age categories have gotten so messy in the past few years, but I’ve written too many essays about the state of YA to not be painfully aware of the situation. Since many YA books are being (incorrectly) aimed at adults (to the detriment of sales), age categories beneath YA have had to scale up to compensate. Middle grade has become bloated with “upper middle grade” books that are actually YA books about teenagers, and much of younger middle grade has gone missing, leaving a yawning gap between chapter books and middle grade.
Kids like to read up. YA is as much for voracious 11-year-olds as it is for 14-year-olds, and middle grade is as much for 7-year-olds who can’t put books down as it is for 11-year-olds looking for something funny to read. But since we’ve decided to target up instead of target down, the age categories have gotten all skewed and kids are reading fewer prose novels because of it, gravitating instead toward graphic novels and manga, formats in which age categories better suit their tastes.
We need to readjust who we are aiming YA and MG books at, and who we are publishing them for. We need more funny books for kids, and more younger middle grade and YA protagonists, and we need to stop chasing adult demographics in YA and teen demographics in MG, because the tastes of both of those groups have changed. This will lead to more sales—and a more literate community.
14. Address and adjust marketing issues involving adult fiction’s perceived target demographic.
It’s okay to read YA—and it’s okay to read adult fiction, too. Over the past decade, fans of fast-paced and tropey fiction embraced a narrative that asserted it was okay for adults to read kids’ books and young adult books, probably because it’s true! But another narrative cropped up alongside this one, openly joked about on social media platforms: Unless you want romance, adult fiction isn’t for readers who like fast-paced, tropey fiction. Literary fiction especially isn’t for you. It’s about old white college professors who moan about how they can’t fuck their students and white women reminiscing about World War II.
But this second narrative is just not true. The desire for “new adult” literature stems from the misperception that fast-paced and accessible literature about contemporary 20-somethings simply doesn’t exist in adult fiction. But it absolutely does! Most adult romance falls into this category already. Adult genre fiction is full of 20-somethings dealing with fantastical problems in contemporary settings. And literary fiction about 20-somethings struggling with life exists in abundance—it’s what all of the booksellers at my store read.
I don’t know whether this issue is something readers need to work on as they discuss books, something bookstores need to work on when they’re connecting with readers, or something authors and publishers need to work on when positioning their work, but something has to change.
15. Stop infantilizing readers.
Speaking of literate communities: Hey, stop infantilizing readers, okay? Although we live in a culture where some people do engage in malicious readings and assume that any discussion of a topic is an endorsement of it, the reality is that this describes only a minority of people. Prioritizing bad-faith readers creates an environment in which it is nearly impossible to create art. Even now, we’re seeing overly long books (most often in the kidlit and YA space) with bloated word counts because authors and/or editors feel a need to overexplain how the bad guy is bad and why bad decisions happen. It’s the other side of the banned books crisis. We don’t want to ban books, but we don’t want to support problematic ones, and we think that creating good, virtuous content is the way to go. But infantilizing readers by refusing to engage in complicated issues is a show of bad craft and a sign of poor faith. We have to do better by them. Readers, even young ones, know the difference between fact and fiction. They can recognize bad decisions on their own. They don’t need every narrative choice to become a lecture about morality; they need a story they can enjoy.
16. Stop treating identities as marketing strategies.
“Read Jonathan Franzen! He’s writing about the cishet white male experience!” would not work as a marketing strategy, nor should it. Yet publishing, in its drive to seem inclusive and its continual minimization of publicity and marketing divisions, frequently uses any traditionally marginalized experience as the central selling point of a book. Maybe the decision stems from how few of those books there are, but publicity and marketing too often stops with the declaration that a book contains, say, a character of color or a bisexual heroine, rather than starting there and building up the rest of the book. A character’s identity isn’t a plot and isn’t the whole story. Including these aspects of books in marketing strategies is great, but stop limiting marginalized authors and characters to just their marginalizations in promotion.
17. Invest in cover artists and designers, not Canva and AI.
“The tendency to think of A.I. as a magical problem solver is indicative of a desire to avoid the hard work that building a better world requires,” wrote Ted Chiang in the New Yorker. It’s also indicative of publishing’s deep desire to avoid paying artists and graphic designers. For proof, just look at the slew of book covers slapped together on Canva and mocked mercilessly by the readers who come into my store. Hey. Stop that. Pay artists. Your books look better when you do.
18. Invest in writers over AI.
No, you can’t train artificial intelligence models on the work of your writers. Get that shit out of your contracts. Stop publishing books “written” by AI. They’re not good. Stand up against programs that use the unpaid labor of authors to build their million-dollar machines. Writers are the backbone of this industry. Turning your back on them for a quick buck will backfire on everybody in the long run. This is NFTs 2.0: Don’t be an idiot.
19. Deprioritize the emphasis on preorders.
If you don’t work in a bookstore, this is a hot take. If you work in a bookstore, you are acutely aware of just how few readers preorder books. They usually prefer to walk in on publication day—and that’s often when we start promoting books to them. While preorders do give some indication of interest for a book, and those early orders do help bookstores, this simply isn’t how most readers shop. Judging books exclusively by their preorder campaigns is foolish.
Oh, and speaking of preorders …
20. Change your approach to promotional material and swag.
Can we slow down on the preorder swag? I love a signed edition, but art prints and keychains and enamel pins don’t convince 99% of readers to buy a book. They encourage readers already inclined to buy a book to order it early. These items are a waste of marketing material and energy, and unless an author really feels passionately about it, it’s not worth the energy.
As for other promotional materials, I genuinely don’t want to think about the amount of pointless plastic promotional items I have thrown away over the years. Publishers, I beg you, do not waste money on plastic tchotchkes in promotional boxes that will be forgotten in 20 minutes. They are bad for the environment and bad for your bottom dollar.
If you’re going to send swag, send things that are useful and sustainable. Send seeds! Send snacks! Send objects that aren’t in plastic packaging! Send things that can be recycled or reused! Send sticky notes! I always need sticky notes! But please don’t send sunglasses. Or plastic balls. Or cardboard boxes that make noise when you open them. Or art prints bigger than the book, thus guaranteeing they will get destroyed if we ship them to customers. Or plastic rings so small they would barely fit on a child’s finger. Or—
21. Promote backlist.
Discoverability never stops. If we decrease the number of books published each year, maybe that will give us a little time to promote the ones that already exist. Despite what publishers may think, while book sales slow after the first few weeks of publication, they don’t have to vanish at the rate they do now. After all, my bookstore mostly sells backlist. (All hail staff picks!) Taking the time to continue to promote backlist titles, whether by investing in their authors or in offering better discounts to bookstores or new books bundled with backlist books, is a thing that can and should be given more thought and effort.
22. Educate authors.
Some literary agencies already do this. Some don’t. Some publishers already do this. Some don’t. Regardless, every author’s situation is a little different and there always seem to be some lessons that get missed. For instance, don’t link to Amazon when pitching independent bookstores. Do include alt-text on your Instagram posts. Don’t post to Bluesky what belongs in the group chat. Do promote the events you agree to attend. Creating primers for your authors and sending them out once or twice a year would go a long way toward ensuring everybody stays on the same page and informed about the best ways to do their work.
23. Fix author advance payment schedules.
Author advances used to be split in two: Authors would receive one payment when they signed a contract, and a second when they delivered their manuscript. Then they were split in three, and payments were disbursed when contracts were signed, when manuscripts were delivered, and on a book’s publication date. Recently they’ve been divided further and further, with some contracts even including clauses that divert final payments to a year after books are published. How is that an advance? How are authors supposed to live on that? Publishers cannot advocate for diversity and inclusivity, and claim they want books that represent a wide range of experiences, and then pay authors through such a subdivided strategy that only people who are already wealthy can tolerate it, let alone live off it. Fix your nonsense, publishing. Pay authors fairly and promptly.
24. Get more vocally involved in the fight against banning books.
There’s that awful law in Texas. And that awful law in Arkansas. And whatever is happening in Florida. And that thing that happened in Idaho. And in Michigan. And those are just some of the biggest stories.
Look, the book-banning situation is bad. Penguin Random House launched a Banned Books resource site, and I appreciate how deeply involved they are in the fight against book bans, particularly the number of lawsuits they have thrown their weight behind. But it’s not enough. Publishers big and small need to get involved. They need to speak out against KOSA. They need to support librarians and teachers across the country. They need to advocate for laws that will protect the free speech rights of authors and other creatives. I know publishers are limited by the fact that they are often constricted by conservative corporate parent companies or publish conservative imprints alongside progressive ones, but if they want to survive, they need to do more.
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Nicole Brinkley usually has short hair, though it’s gotten remarkably long recently, and loves dragons. The rest changes without notice. Her opinions are her own. Follow her on Instagram at @nebrinkley. If you want to hear her giggle about ’90s and ’00s children’s books, check out her Novelstalgia podcast.
This essay was edited by Stephanie Appell, who left her job as the children’s and YA editor of BookPage this summer and is taking the remainder of the year to rest, spend time with family and friends, and read backlist. Say hi or let her know about interesting professional opportunities on Instagram at @noseinabookgirl.