Five Slices #28: The business of writing
Tales from the publishing industry
Welcome to Five Slices! I share five stories every week from science, art, psychology, culture, history, and business. To get it in your inbox:
I’m an outsider to the world of publishing. I don’t know how this world works. At first, I just wanted to figure out how authors get book deals so that I could get one. When I started to dig into it however, I found more than I was looking for. Some of these are to-dos and helpful information on how money is made online – and how online and indie publishing are changing the game. But there are a couple of bizarre stories here which just happened to take place in the publishing industry. In this issue:
How to buy your way onto a bestseller list
Can you make a living as a writer?
Writing a novel on Substack
The bookstore that made a comeback
The last letter
Meme for the day: Dumbledore calling up one of his buddies
How to buy your way onto a bestseller list
In 2017, a Young Adult novel called “Handbook for Mortals” by debut author Lani Sarem took the #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list – a big achievement for a newcomer. There was a catch though. Nobody in the YA community had even heard of this book; yet it had displaced a much more popular book. Journalists started digging into it and tweeting about it, and a shady story turned up… It turned out that Lani Sarem might have gamed the system by buying her way onto the list. To understand how she did this, let’s go step-by-step.
Why do bestseller lists exist?
Most people don’t have time to explore and track new authors, and they trust social proof – if “everybody is buying a book,” then it’s tempting to check it out, at least for the sake of having an opinion on it. The Matthew effect works in favor of bestsellers: The books that sell become bestsellers, and the bestsellers sell even more. So every author hopes to get on these lists to boost their sales because their next book deal depends on it.
The New York Times Bestseller list is the most popular one. It can boost the sales of debut authors by 57% and any author by 14% on average. As an added benefit, you get to call yourself a “New York Times Bestselling author” for life. But there’s a problem with how the list is put together: The NYT team members explicitly state that they don’t read the books that make the list, and only rely on sales data. While other listmakers use industry standards like Bookscan, NYT gets sales data from retailers across the country while making their list. Usually a book has to sell 5,000 to 10,000 copies a week to qualify. The issue is that people can bulk order copies of their own book to boost the numbers. This isn’t illegal, but the NYT is aware of this possibility, and marks such cases with a †.
Lani Sarem was accused of buying her own books. She didn’t get a † because she bought just enough books from each store to not be marked as a bulk sale – so it looked like her book was an organic success that readers loved… and she made the list. But after journalists complained, the NYT took another look at the data and removed her book from the list. Lani claims that she did nothing wrong, and that she was just punished for thinking outside the box. I guess we’ll never know, unless there are any die-hard Lani Sarem fans among my readers.
Read more: How the NYT and others compile bestseller lists, Vulture Magazine’s story on the whole fiasco, and other attempts to hack the list
Can you make a living as a writer?
No. Most writers are dead, didn’t you know?
They’re writing to you from their graves after starving to death.
Brushing aside that terrible joke, this is something I’ve been desperately trying to find an answer to – is it possible and practical to sustain a career as a writer in this era? And how? I don’t have answers, but I have some clues. There’s this article in Esquire: “Has it ever been harder to make a living as an author?” The premise of the article is simple – writing is a capricious career, and it doesn’t pay as a job. If you want to do it full-time, you’re risking a lot. Some people wrote successful books and still chose not to quit their day job. Others quit successful jobs to write a book with a fixed deadline in mind. The gist is this:
The publishing industry needs to sell books. To sell books, the author has to bring something to the table apart from their book like a social media following, marketing skills, etc. If you don’t sell enough books the first time around, you won’t get a second chance. So most writers support themselves with a second job.
But this is a bleak perspective that only speaks for traditional publishing. Self-publishing and indie publishing offer alternatives that seem to work for a lot of authors, with the median income being about $12,000 a year. That’s unsustainable in the US but great money for someone in a developing country. The tradeoff is that while traditional publishing does the hard work of distribution and marketing, indie publishing pushes you to build your own audience via social media or a newsletter or by selling books on Church street.1
If you want to learn more about the numbers, you can check these links: Indie author income survey, comparison of different publishing routes, the state of indie authorship. Readers from India, check out this Reddit answer from a senior editor.
Writing a novel on Substack
Most of you get this newsletter as an email. But if you click here, you can read it on Substack, the platform where I host it. Substack is a place where any writer can build a direct connection with their readers and even get paid for their work.
I write Five Slices for free, but there are hundreds of paid newsletters here which are supported by readers. There are more than 50 newsletters earning $500,000 a year on Substack and the highest paid one nets $4 million a year. (Source) The topics on which people write about are diverse: Investing, politics, science and tech, art, maps, music, psychology, culture, relationships… anything you can think of.2 But even if you don’t want the money (you don’t?), and you just want the pleasure of having four people read your work, Substack is great.
The New Yorker recently published an article called “Is the next Great American Novel being published on Substack?” The piece is about a novella by
who writes a Substack on The Great Books. She’s gone the traditional publishing route before, but she chose to publish a 15,000 word novella called Money Matters for free on Substack, and it got a very favorable review in The New Yorker article. I read the story. It’s a fun read and I loved it. (But it’s also very edgy, transgressive stuff, so tread with care if you are easily offended or disturbed. I mean, I’ve at least warned you).More importantly, the novella has started a discussion about alternatives to traditional publishing. Naomi has written a lot about this herself: Why she chose to publish her novella on Substack, why talent isn’t the only thing that matters in publishing, and her reaction to the New Yorker article (which also announces a contest for fiction writers).
If you’ve ever considered writing online – for art, connecting with people, money, whatever – this is all stuff worth digging into.
The bookstore that made a comeback
I usually like decisions that make my life better. What I don’t like is having those decisions forced on me without warning – whether it’s the way Gmail looks, the square images being converted to rectangles on Instagram… or waking up to this email from Amazon in the morning:
Now I had to pay extra to not have ads on Prime Video. Before I know it, I’ll be watching ads on my Kindle when I’m reading books. It’s moments like these that remind me how much power these Big Tech companies have. Not just over customers like us, but over competitors too.
Barnes and Noble, a bookstore chain that’s 139 years old, was struggling to keep up with eBooks and competition from Amazon. They tried competing by launching their own eReader called Nook, which saw sales drop by 90% from 2012 to 2019. With sales dropping and stores shutting down, it looked like the chain was going out of business.
Then James Daunt took over as CEO of Barnes and Noble in 2019. He started operating from a strange philosophy not often seen in corporates, that instead of looking at the numbers, he wanted to make the bookstores a fun environment where people would love to shop. He made these decisions:
No more deals with publishers to promote specific books and authors
The bookstore employees had to select the books on the shelves based on their taste and customer feedback.
There would be no top-down instruction from the head-office. Each store could make its own selection, and each store was different.
Hiring and promoting staff from within.
By prioritizing customers and employees over publishers and distributors, Barnes and Noble got down book returns from 30% in 2019 to 7% in 2024. From 2023 to 2025, the chain is now on track to open 147 new stores.
I find this story optimistic, because it shows there are always alternatives to the current way of doing things, and no matter how inevitable digital tech or AI or monopolies seem… There always seem to be a niche for a business run with soul.
Sources: The Honest Broker, Modern Retail
The last letter
Nobody expects they’re going to die. It’s too terrifying a thing to contemplate. Death is something that happens to other people, some other day, some other time. For us, tomorrow will be like today, and the day after will be more of the same. That is, until we’re confronted by the moment and forced to compress an entire life into a few words.
French soldiers, activists, and political hostages during the time of World War II were sometimes executed by Nazi firing squads for little reason. Before dying, they were given a chance to write a last letter to someone. A professor spent some time reading these letters, published as a book, to understand how people bargain with themselves during their last moments and wrote an article about it. Here are some excerpts:
‘Be courageous, ma chérie. It is no doubt the last time that I write you. Today, I will have lived.’ — A high school teacher, to his lover
‘I do not feel the need to sleep, not out of fear, but to remember my life, because to sleep, bah! won’t I have time [to do so] very soon?’ — Leader of a miners’ strike, to his brother
‘This evening, I think of your sweetness, your kindness, of our sweet moments, those from long ago and those of yesterday, know well, my darling, one could not love you more than I did. And I will fall asleep with your sweet image in my eyes and the taste of our last kisses that are not that distant, my sweet friend, my gentle little Lienne. Be sensible … Be reasonable. Love me, for a long time yet.’ — A lawyer who fought for the unjustly imprisoned, to his wife
‘I dreamt a great deal, this last while, about the wonderful meals we would have when I was freed. You will have them without me, with family, but not in sadness.’ — Distributor of an underground resistance magazine, to his parents
‘I still have the time to talk to you ma petite, as if you were still here close to me, on the other side of the wire mesh. For this last day you were beautiful like you had never been before and oh what grief is now yours. I would like to be in this moment still.’ — Leader of the counter-espionage wing, to his newly-wed bride
Sometimes, publishing goes beyond commerce or art or beauty – it manages to freeze true moments like these in crystal so that almost a century later, it makes me think… There was a war in my part of the world too. Did the people there get to write a last letter? And if I had to write a last letter, who would I write it to, what would I say, what am I holding back today thinking life will go on as it always has?
Source: The last letters of the condemned in Aeon magazine
I’m still trying to learn more about how the publishing industry works, especially in India. If you know anything about the industry or have written and self-published a book, I’d love to hear your experience. Write to me or drop a comment.
Share this with a friend who might enjoy it. Last week, I wrote about some clever scams and capers. You can find the complete list of posts here.
Church street is the hip part of Bangalore, and I always see a guy standing on the cobbled stone walkway waving his book in people’s faces trying to get them to buy it. I admire his hustle, but as for the books themselves… not so much.
But people might be getting tired of paying for so many newsletters. NYT wrote an article on this. People on Substack are asking for a different pay-per-article model. Such a model would give readers more options but also distort the incentives for writers, nudging them to try for virality with every article, instead of building a relationship with an audience. Another option is to have digests where multiple writers contribute – hooray, we’ve reinvented magazines!