I’ve written before about the indie moment, roughly three or four years ago, when the landscape seemed to provide real advantages to small publishing houses. Now feels like a good time to return to that general topic with a more ambitious question: What’s changed in publishing overall since the intense Covid era of 2020–2022?
Sales are a big part of the story. Smart observers like Jane Friedman and Meg Reid have noted that increased sales across book publishing at the start of the 2020s were an outlier. For all the horror of the early pandemic, it was a good time for books, which sold more than in the years before or after. (There were surely lots of reasons for the blip, including people staying home.) So part of what’s happening now is a return to earth—not a sales slump, exactly, but a reversion to the norm.
I think it’s important to see buzzy stories—high-profile labor organizing, layoffs of prominent editors—against this background. Increasing sales make possible investments that become more challenging when sales decline. So while it’s vital to hold publishers accountable for their choices (like winding down new editorial positions and lists that seemed appealing during publishing’s pandemic boom), it’s also important to cultivate conditions that support the overall growth of Bookworld.
Approached slightly differently, I think criticism of publishing sometimes reduces things to greed—but the context for publishers’ decisions is that most books lose money, and those losses are more acute now than during the early-Covid sales spike. As Reid put it on Twitter: “Not surprised to see layoffs and disinvestment across the publishing industry happening two-ish years after the historic high sales of the pandemic. Everything takes 18-24 months in this industry and I think a lot of spending was based on that money rolling in forever.”
Inflation and supply-chain woes are also big parts of publishing’s bumpy return to post(-ish) Covid normalcy. Rather than rehash those issues here (I’ve written previously about books not always being allowed to go up in price like other things), I want to gesture toward two issues that strike me as providing context: churn and gumminess. The Great Resignation came to book publishing like it came to every other industry around 2021–2022. It compounded issues in a field that’s always suffered from staffing turnover, especially at the junior end, thanks in part to comparatively low pay. Negotiations over return-to-office policies, the resumption of mandatory work travel, health safeguards in face-to-face environments—all of that, to my mind, has been implicated in the industry’s recent churn. (Despite my post’s use of the phrase “after Covid” in its title, after all, Covid is still here.) I think people who feel invested in books should think about who the field of publishing has lost in return-to-normal upheaval—about the toll in continuity and institutional memory, among other things.
I think too that when publishing loses people, its systems are often strained. A book’s schedule is affected when it’s hard to secure paper, or when printers and shippers are overwhelmed. Those were the prime culprits when the supply-chain crisis made headlines a year or two back. But schedules can also be thrown off by the clerical tasks that go undone because a publishing house can’t retain assistants, or when peer reviewers (for example) are too overwhelmed to complete tasks in a timely fashion. These are eminently understandable people-problems, and they’re a big driver of publishing’s post-Covid gumming-up. (That Ithaka S+R is commissioning a study of publishing and AI at precisely the moment when our field is starved for humans feels like an insult added to injury.)
Part of the rationale for my newsletter has always been the need for grounded perspective on books based on the lived experience of publishing work. And when I talk to other professionals in publishing, I sense (among other things) burnout. I texted a colleague recently to commiserate that a lot of the steps that go into publishing feel like they take fifty times longer these days, and he responded (quickly!) “absolute truth.” Because publishing is, like any industry, big, there can be a tendency to think in terms of systems. But those systems are made of people—many of whom have been sick, or have paid high costs trying to avoid sickness, or are doing more jobs than they did before, or are learning new jobs on the fly. In a field that’s relied (sometimes to an exploitive extent) on a sense of joy that comes from making things, my largely anecdotal sense is that post-pandemic reserves of joy may be running low.