Some genuinely fascinating insights from Elle Griffin’s analysis of the filings in the 2022 antitrust case that blocked the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster:
The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).
We might not need more blogs but we definitely don’t need more books.
No one buys books elysian.press
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