About the Clog in the Pipeline

It's time for a "Fair Trade"-style revolution in the writing industry to get around the bottlenecks of middlemen and monopolized distribution channels. Are you ready to help?

It’s always been kind of trendy for writers and literary critics to complain that “people don’t seem to be much interested in reading these days—not like the days of my youth.” The motivation for such a statement always seems to be that it voices a concern about a threat to the livelihood of the speaker. If nobody reads anymore, who will pay for writing? If nobody wants to read what’s being written, what use is there to even have literary critics?

I’m sure you get it. I’ll move on.

The threat to their careers is real, but the reasoning is off.

I can assure you that there are more writers alive now than have ever been on this mudball—possibly more writers than there were _people_ a few thousand years ago, when people started making this complaint—and more literate people, too, who could/might be interested in reading if the circumstances were right: enough free time, a quiet place to concentrate, no constant stream of distractions, affordable access to the material that they would find interesting, etc.

It’s not feasible to address many of those issues right now. Time is being created and distributed at the usual rate. Unless we’re going to give people free rides at near light speed, there’s no plausible way to create more of it. And short of outright economic revolution, there’s no feasible way to kill the need that most would-be readers have for spending all their waking hours in pursuit of money to periodically pay do-nothing owners for permission to remain alive.

Similarly, it’s hard to address things like urban noise and realistic worries over political and environmental catastrophe and the addiction to flicker-media designed to tickle and tease the same “one more, one more, one more” areas of the brain that slot machines and heroin poke, media that somehow manages to nestle comfortably into the crevices of the shattered free time we _do_ have.

But the writing that people would want to read—if they knew it existed and could find it—is being written. I know it is. A bird’s-eye view of the world of writers shows it dribbling out and pooling on the floor. It’s just not making it into the machinery that distributes it to potential readers.

Additionally, the readers who would enjoy some of this writing have never been exposed to anything like it to even know that it’s the kind of writing that they’d crave. Many simply think they just don’t like to read. Just like they’d think that they don’t like to listen to music if they’d never heard anything that would move them.

So there’s only one major disconnect here, but it works in both directions. Readers only get exposed to what goes through the machine and comes out the other end. Writers only get paid for what the machine accepts. So there’s no one reading what’s forming puddles on the factory floor, and there’s no encouragement to write more of it.

Just, you know, compulsion. From the writers who can’t make themselves stop. Until exposure and starvation take care of it for them.

Here is part of the problem:

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As of the date of this writing, the interactive graphic on the other end of that link details the five bottlenecks that dominate English-language publishing and the 280+ imprints that they own and control: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette.

There were six bottlenecks before the 2013 Penguin/Random House merger. And this past year Simon & Schuster, previously owned by Paramount, was recently sold to a private equity firm, KKR in this case, which is usually a prelude to being chopped up and sold for parts and financial dodges—like consolidating all of the debt in one little piece and letting that bit go down in flames while selling all the other bits at a profit that more than covers the bankruptcy-moderated loss. This is what happened to Red Lobster and Toys-R-Us. You can look up what happened to them as a roadmap to what’s in store for S&S in days to come. So maybe there will be only four bottlenecks soon.

One of the potential purchasers merely wanted to buy access to the content to feed it into a generative “AI” Large Language Model. I’m not sure what the status of that is at the moment, but believe me, we’ll be mentioning this topic again.

Let’s get back to the main point before I get any further off track.

Any basic economics course will tell you that reduced competition among the owners of commodity distribution networks will screw both the producers and the consumers. They’ll quietly collude with one another to pay the producers less and less and they’ll collude to charge the consumers more and more until they can make the most profit by moving the least amount of product possible. By doing the least amount of work possible. Starving both the producers and the consumers.

Any major player looking to make a play for increasing volume by paying more for raw product and selling more finished goods at lower rates will make themselves vulnerable to a hostile buyout before the profits roll in, so the only secure position (short of seldom-used antitrust legislation stepping in to protect the consumers and producers) is to sit quietly and do what everyone else does.

This is why there are only about as many writers in the market thriving solely by their writing as there are billionaires—and these numbers are decreasing in both categories. This is why bookstore outlets are filled with millions of copies of the same books that you’ve been tired of seeing for ages. This is why the rates being paid to writers for raw materials—the by-the-word rate for short stories, the advances on royalties for longer works, the royalties themselves, the compensation for per-book and sequel contracts—haven’t increased AT ALL since the 1970s.

This is why long-ago-established genre divisions _firmly_ control what’s considered publishable—despite artificial genre categorizations being a mere marketing tool and not at all descriptive of the end-user’s reading experience. This is why pieces that get bought for publication have to have certain lengths—preferably the length of one standard 250 to 400 page novel—instead of however many or few words it takes to tell the story with no uncomfortable chopping or padding. This is why every fiction publisher everywhere accepts only “character-driven” storylines with a Hollywood-blessed three-act frame of establishment/climax/resolution, despite how anything that breaks that model is considered a “work of innovative genius” and becomes wildly popular—assuming it ever sees the light of day. This is why poetry is on Public Assistance life support and short-bite, styleless, lowest-common-denominator prose is the only thing being purchased from new writers anywhere. At 1975 rates.

Despite the fact that many readers are actually interested in reading atmospheric description, world building, and simple “plotless” explorations of concepts and settings. In uncategorizable experimental works. If they’re desperate to find what they like, they have to find it—uncurated and unedited, and also uncompensated—online somewhere. If they have the time, patience, and technical knowledge.

Despite the fact that many of the writers who are selected by the bottlenecks to be published widely enough to support themselves with their writing are well known for being a bit florid, a bit experimental, and a wee mite inaccessible to the hoi polloi.

It’s like the selection process for being blessed for literary promotion is entirely different from the selection process for mass-market genre audiences. I can only assume that the Big 5 think that genre readers are dumber—and that they maintain the genre ghettos as a place to feed readers who don’t like a challenge a steady stream of less challenging material. And that’s putting it as nicely as I can manage. This assumption is misguided. Bigoted, even.

The end result is that your reading material can either contain a bit of a challenge (in language or theme or structure or whatever) as literary fiction _or_ it can contain speculative (SF/Fantasy/Horror) or romantic/thriller/suspense elements _or_ it can serve an established popular or academic nonfiction interest _and also_ it must be firmly written and packaged for one age/interest demographic (with illustrations, if it’s for younguns) _and also_ you must be capable of professional-grade self-editing and willing to market the holy #^@& out of your own work _and also_ it must have a cover added from an underpaid source of some artistic merit that may or may not be relevant to the actual content … _or_ it can #^@&ing languish on your hard drive, unseen, forever. Or be posted in the deepest, darkest corners of Reddit.

There is so much more than can be written that would fit into the established Literary/Genre/Nonfiction categories, and one of those possible things would more than likely be your instant world-changing lifelong favorite. Because it mixes together ALL of your favorite flavors. But you’ll never see it under these circumstances, because—not knowing how to sell the final product—the five entities that control the English language market will never allow those flavors to mix.

...unless/until some independent publisher takes a chance on the work, paying whatever trickle of money they can afford to get it out into the wild somehow. And then an agent of one of the Big 5 poaches the author/work away, if they’re willing to gamble on it, and shelves it in the Literature section, where maybe you’ll find it someday. Because I can guarantee you it’s unlikely to be popular enough for them to promote like the works of one of the as-common-as-billionaires authors. Maybe, maybe not. But not likely.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so think of the world of published works as images for a minute. If the only images that sell are “character-driven” portraits—not mood-evoking landscapes, not detailed diagrams, not collages of elements that build on one another, not abstracts that make the reader work to figure out what they see in there—then eventually the only stuff in bookstores will look like a deck of trading cards: a rectangular frame around the outside, an image of a character in the middle, some vital statistics details at the bottom. Zero flavor.

And then, for some reason, everyone seems to want to look down on the people who find reading these things an acceptable pastime. Maybe it’s what they want and there’s nothing wrong with that. But maybe they’re just that desperate to read _something_ and that’s all the market will provide them for options.

The truth is, however, that these kinds of works are what flood the market only because these just happen to be the only type of product the Big 5 know how to buy and sell in this #^@&ed up market that they’ve crippled by monopolizing distribution.

The writers are unhappy. The agents are unhappy. The editors and book designers and layout artists are unhappy. The printers are unhappy. The bookstores are unhappy. The book buyers are unhappy. The only people who are happy about this situation are roughly fifty hilariously overcompensated board members and the dividend-collecting stockholders.

Every industry where that is the case is broken and needs redesigning from the ground up. But we’re just talking about writing today.

What you can do in the meanwhile, to help find what you might actually like to read (as opposed to what is being offered for sale by the Big 5, only some of which might be vaguely palatable to any particular reader), is to keep your eyes on the independent publishers and support them however you can.

Working strictly from the odds, no particular indie is likely to have the book you want. But notice what they’re selling and recommend it to someone who might like it. Listen to the recommendations of others and pass them along. At some point we’ll be able to make some progress on compiling a massive database of _useful_ tags and categories that readers and publishers will be able to use to connect the right works to the right readers at _fair trade_ prices, with no cuts at all for distribution monopolists.

This will by no means cut the legs out from under the Big 5. In fact, it will improve their market as well by letting them know that there are other products in demand beyond what they’re currently trying to buy and sell and teach them how to find these previously ignored works. They’ll probably have to raise their payout rates for buying rights and offer more services to writers to attract them to their stables, but afterward they’ll sell more books and generate more profits to cover the expenses.

Now is the perfect time to get started on a project like this. The Big 5 (and much of the rest of the publishing world) is currently swamped with the garbage output of make-a-quick-buck hustlers milking ChatGPT for barely edited bulk wordcounts. Readers for all of the publishers are shutting down submission windows until they can shovel themselves out from under the avalanche of bullshit. Human writers (i.e., writers) have nowhere to turn but the indies at the moment, making contact with other actual humans at the publishing house in ways in which they can prove that they’re human and their output is actually worth considering.

The Big 5 have no idea how to rework their systems to make sure any new author is a genuine human being. They’re relying on established relationships with authors to carry them along for now, which means their machine will be starving for input soon if it isn’t already, being, as it is, already tweaked to run super-super-lean, with absolutely skeletal editorial and pre-publication staff.

Systems shouldn’t be hard to come by for cataloging manuscripts to connect them with editors and agents and formatters/typesetters and printers and illustrators and cover artists and voice talent for audiobooks and publishing imprints and readers. There are plenty of databases out there that come close already, fueling WorldCat and every large-scale library cataloging system. Hell, there are _dating_ apps that come close already. I’d be happy to sit down with anyone who wants to develop a system for codifying what each participant in the process wants to offer and what they’re looking for from the other adjacent links in the production chain. Once those are in place, paths should open up from manuscript to reader the same way lightning works, and with similar speed.

Armoring against spammers and scammers will be a problem no matter what the system’s details are, but the key will be to start with a core of actual trustworthy humans and slowly expand a circle of trust—and bounce anybody the instant there is any misbehavior.

I could probably brainstorm for days on the details of how to put something like this together. And I’m willing to, if anyone else out there wants to get to work on it as well.

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