16 Comments

All I can say is ughhhhhhhh to all this. I'm finding the academic series of articles you mention fascinating but absolutely agree that sales data being public to all would be...well. Yeah. Everything you said. It's so frustrating to see the way we've moved from the term artists to the term creators with the implication being that creators create *content* and *entertainment* but NOT art because art is for snobs. Or something.

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great commentary and thanks for the links to those articles up top. I agree making Book Scan data public is dangerous, BUT, why couldn't a registered author at least understand sales statistics in their subcategory?

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What I don’t understand is how alllll these literary agents are making a living. I’m convinced many so-called literary agents are charlatans.

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author

That might be an interesting topic for another newsletter. I'm not an expert in agenting, but I know enough agents I think I can say that first a certain number--especially agents starting out--don't make all their income agenting. They often supplement with freelance editing or other related things.

And secondly a lot of agents who represent literary work that doesn't sell well tend to represent some clients who do. It's hard to cobble together a living off 15% of 10k-25k advances. But if you sell one million dollar deal, then you can afford to take on a lot of smaller books.

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Yes, would love a post on this. Lol I’m prob more skeptical than most because I had an agent for a year who proved both ineffective and also hit me up later (after I’d parted ways with him) to pay him for editing. Was an eye-opening experience.

I get needing multiple income streams, but I think authors want agents so badly that they don’t scrutinize them enough. If you were going into a partnership with a lawyer for example or another business you’d want to see numerical metrics on past success, but authors rarely see this from agents.

I’ve even asked potential agents what their biggest deals were or how much their average client earns and they’ve declined to share the info.

I believe transparency would benefit authors in the case of agents and book advances and returns/costs etc.

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Also can’t get out of my head something from the book “Content” in which the author described modern writers as the liberal arts equivalent of day laborers standing outside Home Depot.

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100% agree with your sentiments. The poetry collection I’m serialising is title F*cK Everything, but most of all F*ck the algorithm. Focus on what serves us.

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Oct 22, 2022Liked by Lincoln Michel

The diversity of New Yorker fiction article was interesting but told me nothing I didn't already know by the "eye test." I actually don't have a problem with a magazine or editor having a specific vision for what they publish. The problem with The New Yorker is their outsized "importance"--and the fact that they actually pay $$ for fiction, while magazines with more diverse or experimental visions have no $$$ and much less influence.

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“Cultural products” perfectly describes the jarring algorithmic disconnect in how we collectively view art and how it is created and shared in the world.

Tell your friends, indeed. Over coffee perhaps--skip the retweet.

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The what-if scenario of Bookscan numbers going public and the ensuing Twitter fallout would make a great short story...

I think you’re right overall, and I will add: assuming that data will lead to better art is giving the audience a much, much larger degree of credit than they deserve. And it’s not that I think that mass appeal is always antithetical to art. However, if all of that sales data were to be made public, I think the business takeaway would be “how do we sell to as many people as possible?” Not “how do we communicate to this one audience very very well?” The former leads to an overabundance of corporate IP that writes toward their worst audience. The latter is the basis of the modern indie patron model, and still allows for a degree of creative freedom and experimentation.

Artists are always at the mercy of the audience, but real art communicates a singular vision; a narrowness of taste, experience and tradition. It’s not supposed to be all things to all people.

And I *do* think the Big 5/4/however many we’re counting now, plus the mainstream review outlets, are partially to blame for the state of this discourse. You cannot bankroll your entire business on a handful of bestsellers and then act surprised when the audience confuses popularity for quality. Would we even need to have this discussion if monopolies didn’t hold so much power?

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author

I agree although I do think, as cliche as it might be to say, that "the internet" causes a lot of these problems too. Social media algorithms reward sameness. When I edited a literary website, most of what we published was covering independent press books or literary fiction and yet we knew we could get more clicks by posting like a trailer for a movie adaptation of a book with no commentary than posting deep moving essay, just by the way the social media algorithms work. (In our case we were a non-profit so didn't have to worry about clicks, but it made me understand why even "alternative" websites spend so much time on MCU films and pop music and stuff. That really does drive traffic.)

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I wonder if the problem of “weaponizing sales data” is more of Twitter problem, than a data problem?

Also, in the event that suddenly everyone is aware of how poorly books sell, might we finally be able to move on from books and look at other markets? I personally think it’s to authors’ detriment that publishing has more prestige than it does an actual market, it means authors spend years working on something that won’t find readers.

For example, my first book sold 29 copies on Amazon, but garnered 6,000 newsletter subscribers on Substack. By all means, make that data public! Not so that people can look at me and say “oh she only sold 29 books, she’s a nobody.” But so they can say, “books are dead, but wow there might be a market for my writing on Substack!

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author

It's certainly more of a social media problem but it's still the reality imho. I think we always have to think about how something will actually be used in the real world, not just an ideal one.

That said, that whole question is admittedly academic (sorry for the pun) since BookScan is run by a private company and has no incentive to give away their proprietary data free.

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White people white peopling (& that includes the comments). Of course someone whose career is dependent on publishing companies thinks it's bad for access to information to be determined by someone other than our benevolent overlords of culture...

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author

Well I certainly never said or implied that corporate publishers are "benevolent" or that "access to information" should be determined by them or anyone else. There's a LOT of information that would be quite useful to know, such as how publishers allocate publicity and marketing dollars to white authors versus non-white authors.

My argument was that more focus on sales in determining what gets acquired isn't likely to lead to more experimental work being published.

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Thank you for such thoughtful content! I was wondering if you had any "best/recommended practices" for readers who want to seek out what isn't being read?

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