Hi friends,
The main publishing story this week is about whether books actually make money…which I can’t believe we are having this debate in 2024. There are a ton of think pieces on both sides, so I’m just pulling them all up here to the top. I had a lovely piece here until yesterday, when everything spiraled out of control and I scrapped it for this frenetic chaos demon.
It was all kicked off by an article by Elle Griffin pulling data from the failed RH/SS merger to show that nobody buy books. It sure did use a lot of real data to draw exactly the wrong conclusions. She made some good points about how the industry gives too much money to celebrities and influencers, but her argument breaks down when trying to generalize it to the whole industry circling the drain.
There are plenty of reasons to think the publishing industry is circling the drain. Elle just somehow managed to swerve around all of them and run straight into nonsense.
That said, Elle did have her champions, namely Seth…
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