Publishers experience this bias, too, because they know the stats are bleak on men reading books written by women.) The need to chase profits also limits the types of books publishers are willing to publish. (I will spare you stories of how many times men have told me that it’s nice someone finally wrote “a FIRE book for women,” talking about Work Optional, assuming it was only for women just because I am a woman. Despite a big push to diversify publishing, New York Times data show that roughly 90% of books published are still by white authors, and men are still much more likely to be published despite women accounting for the majority of book sales in many segments, and two-thirds of overall books sold. The vast majority of books that have gone on to be bestsellers were written by white men, and thus many more books by white men continue to be published. Which is why publishing has such a well-documented diversity problem. The problem is that chasing books you expect to be profitable means mostly publishing books that look a lot like books that have come before it. And that makes sense! Their goal is to stay in business, which means staying profitable, and to do that, you have to be good at picking books to publish that will sell a lot of copies, and minimize the number of low-selling books you publish. This means that, for as much as people who work in publishing love books and wish they could publish all the good books and proposals that cross their desks, publishing is absolutely driven by what the people in charge think has the best chance of being a big seller. (Though it’s not true that a book that doesn’t earn out its advance – more on that in the next section – has necessarily lost the publisher any money.) So it’s the mega bestsellers that pay salaries and keep the lights on and kick profits up to shareholders. Though big publishers aren’t clamoring to open their accounting ledgers to the public, it’s generally understood that most books don’t make money for the publishers, and break even at best. Every book is different: different author, different genre, different content, different audience. But books aren’t like t-shirts or microwaves where most of them are pretty much the same. On the surface level, the economics of books are straightforward: publishers make money when people buy books. You can listen in Apple podcasts, or in your favorite podcast app. I’m also doing a giveaway for Cashing Out as well as both of my books on Instagram, so go get in on that.Īlso new today: a new episode of the Wallet Activism podcast, featuring a conversation with Kiersten and Julien about doing work that’s aligned to your values and your life priorities. And if you want to grab it from the library, or in ebook or audiobook form, keep reading for how to do that in the most ethical way possible. If you want to order Cashing Out now, you can use this link. It’s exactly the right mix of hope and realism that we need in a deeply inequitable and unjust world. Kiersten and Julien take a super-realistic view of both personal finance and the work world, and offer a plan for exiting a workforce that doesn’t care about most of us, especially Black folks and other people of color. If you love my books Work Optional or Wallet Activism, you’ll love this book, too. I was lucky enough to get an early read, and then honored to get to blurb the book (when you provide a quote in advance of publication). Speaking of books… today marks the release of a book I’ve been so excited about for so long, Cashing Out by Julien & Kiersten Saunders. So today, I’m sharing everything I know about the economics of books, and what all of that means for you as a reader (or listener, because audiobooks are books, too!). At the same time, I rarely get questions about things I wish more readers knew, like some of the ways that the publishing industry exploits libraries, or the ways social media perpetuates harm to authors. I often get questions about the economics of book publishing, and about the best ways to support authors.
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