A shrunken and fragmented media industry
Oct. 1st, 2025 09:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingThe Publishing Industry Has a Gambling Problem
https://thewalrus.ca/the-publishing-industry-has-a-gambling-problem/
If buying the debut is a rollicking night at the craps table, then the sophomore project is the sober morning after. Gone is the clean slate. What publishers really want to see, McGrath says, is growth. “More than any particular number, they’re looking to see a track that is always on the rise.” This is impossible to prove after only one book, especially a book that loses the publisher money. Which is to say: almost all of them.
Also:
Toronto-based writer Jean Marc Ah-Sen, who has published several books with small and independent presses, feels that he and his peers are being crowded out of their own game. “I used to think that the frontier of literary culture was the indie presses,” he says. “But when a person who has done three books with Penguin gets pushed down, it makes less room for the people who were doing the independent stuff to begin with.”
The author also points out that the closure of literary magazines both large and small has resulted in "a different kind of missing middle: an arid landscape of coverage that’s no longer bustling enough to put a wide range of books on readers’ radars." In other words, since there are no longer places to publish them, far fewer book reviews are being published.
Idk man. Fun times. I'm doing my best to write and publish reviews; and, despite everything, I think my own stories are worth the struggle and anxiety of the publication game. Still, I wish everything didn't have to be so difficult.
https://thewalrus.ca/the-publishing-industry-has-a-gambling-problem/
If buying the debut is a rollicking night at the craps table, then the sophomore project is the sober morning after. Gone is the clean slate. What publishers really want to see, McGrath says, is growth. “More than any particular number, they’re looking to see a track that is always on the rise.” This is impossible to prove after only one book, especially a book that loses the publisher money. Which is to say: almost all of them.
Also:
Toronto-based writer Jean Marc Ah-Sen, who has published several books with small and independent presses, feels that he and his peers are being crowded out of their own game. “I used to think that the frontier of literary culture was the indie presses,” he says. “But when a person who has done three books with Penguin gets pushed down, it makes less room for the people who were doing the independent stuff to begin with.”
The author also points out that the closure of literary magazines both large and small has resulted in "a different kind of missing middle: an arid landscape of coverage that’s no longer bustling enough to put a wide range of books on readers’ radars." In other words, since there are no longer places to publish them, far fewer book reviews are being published.
Idk man. Fun times. I'm doing my best to write and publish reviews; and, despite everything, I think my own stories are worth the struggle and anxiety of the publication game. Still, I wish everything didn't have to be so difficult.
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Date: 2025-10-05 08:27 pm (UTC)how tiring. I mean it's more than that, but that's all I really have.
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Date: 2025-10-05 10:39 pm (UTC)Earlier this year I read an interesting academic monograph called Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, and the author is essentially explaining that (a) every writer who anyone has ever loved used to be a midlister, (b) but now there are almost no midlisters, (c) and the industry has collapsed into "popular on TikTok" romantasy slop, diet fad cookbooks, and politician autobios.
I feel like a handful of American genre publishers like Tor are still putting out good work, but damn if that corner of the industry isn't a very closed circle of people who all met each other at SFF fan conventions back when we were still in high school.
And, in all fairness, a lot of comics publishers are publishing truly amazing work right now... but that's meaningless to me, because I can't draw lmaoooooo
Anyway, I've said this before, but AO3 truly is a gift and a treasure. It wouldn't surprise me at all if future scholars looked back at the early 21st century and came to the conclusion that some of the best writing of several generations was published in the form of fanfic.
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Date: 2025-10-06 06:54 pm (UTC)It's not really just fiction, though. I've seen this trend in movies and in games, TV, etc. Media companies have become so paralyzed with the fear of error or failure, but "continually strip mining the same plot of nostalgia" actually carries the same risks long term.