This stat about the publishing industry made my jaw drop

Um, raise your hand if everything you thought about the field was wrong?

Hi, friends!

It’s been a good few weeks of talking frankly about “disappointing” sales numbers and why the industry treats books so differently from other consumer products. The TL;DR is that publishers' (very profitable!) model includes throwing a billion things against the wall and expecting most to fail.

This is how I picture editors deciding whether or not to publish a book. (Photo by Ron Lach)

Then their profits roll in from their backlist (like, somebody's still getting paid for To Kill a Mockingbird) as well as the random lottery-ticket titles that pay off bigly. Our editors and teams hope a given title will do well, but from a corporate standpoint…it doesn't ENTIRELY matter.

To us, the system appears quite broken. But to the corporate overlords, it’s working as intended.

This led me to a few big questions we’ll discuss this week:

Why does it feel like the publishing industry is tanking if it’s actually raking it in?

And…

What can we do with this knowledge?

All the usual caveats apply: I work with but not in the industry, I love my publishing team, etc. I’m just out here trying to synthesize the many (many!!) emails and DMs I’ve gotten and move the conversation forward. We’re such a creative bunch, and I’m not down with throwing up our hands and declaring we’re all screwed.

Let’s start with the stat that left me shook: