The Untold Story of Books

Introduction

Two old jokes crystalize the book business:

• How do you make a small fortune in publishing? Start with a large one.

• What’s the difference between an author and an extra-large pizza? An extra-large pizza can feed a family.

Of course, I’m not the first to address the bittersweetness of publishing and book writing, or the fact that very few authors—or publishers, agents, or booksellers—become Shakespeare or get rich. Everyone who dips a toe into the roiling waters of publishing quickly learns that the book business is no beach party.

Which raises a question: Why do authors and book people get up every morning obsessed with writing and books? As one would expect, reasons vary, but based on forty-five years as an author, ten years as an editor, and innumerable interactions with people involved in every aspect of publishing, one reason stands head and shoulders above all others. Book people love books.

We love to hold them, turn their pages, read and collect them, learn from them, thrill to their artistry, and marvel at their ability to transport us to distant times and places and insert us into the lives of people very different from ourselves. Then, when we’ve reached The End, we love to ponder books’ meanings and discuss them with anyone up for the conversation.

To me, books are the bricks that form the foundation of culture. All the book people I’ve ever known have felt proud to count themselves among the culture’s bricklayers. They’ve all felt passionate about contributing to humanity’s ever-unfolding saga.

Forty-Four Years of Research

Since 1980, I’ve published nineteen books, one almost every other year: fourteen nonfiction titles dealing with health and sexuality, four mystery novels, and this history. From the moment I signed my first contract, I’ve researched the industry, figuring that studying its business side might aid my career. When I attended writing conferences, instead of attending the how-to-get-published panels or standing in signing lines for A-list authors, I was among the few quizzing the publishers: How do you determine print runs? Why don’t you advertise more? Publishers always expressed surprise: You’re interested in the business side? Few authors they dealt with were, unless it had to do with their royalties.

Turns out, you can understand your royalties a lot better if you understand the industry. For four decades, I’ve followed the book business avidly (see Sources and Bibliography). I devoured every publishing book I could find, among them many memoirs, notably At Random (1977), the reminiscences of Bennett Cerf (1898–1971), founder of Random House. He depicted the industry as a delightfully gossipy enterprise fueled by cocktail parties and weekends in the Hamptons. At Random was entertaining, but not particularly informative.

Then I read Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future (2001), by Jason Epstein, Random House’s longtime editorial director. In contrast to his boss, he focused not on personalities and martinis, but on the economic history of publishing from World War II to the millennium. I loved it—and figured that if Epstein’s six-decade perspective could produce such fascinating insights, perhaps an investigation of publishing’s entire six-hundred-year sweep might provide even more.

That is the mission of The Untold Story of Books, to provide authors and book lovers with informed perspective on an industry often shrouded in mystery and mythology. This book is my attempt to lift the veil, to demonstrate how the book business actually developed and continues to evolve today. Ultimately, I hope it provides writers with a better understanding of their industry, especially the new possibilities and perils of the third book business.

Three Book Businesses

Book publishing has experienced three distinct epochs with three different economic strategies (business models). I call them the first, second, and third book businesses. Each involved technological revolutions in printing that allowed fewer individuals (and later publishing houses) to produce more copies of more books faster and cheaper per copy (unit cost). Each book business developed its own unique economics and center of gravity, and its own paths to success despite daunting challenges. And in each, what most influenced the bottom line was neither the writers nor publishers, but the way ever-increasing numbers of readers responded to the evolving industry.

The first book business began with Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type and lasted 450 years through the end of the nineteenth century. It was an author-centric cottage industry, author-centric because entrepreneurial writers formed its core. Publishers, as we know them, did not exist. In a world without publishers, most authors were entrepreneurs who hired printers, paid to publish, and marketed their books on their own.

The printers those authors hired walked a greased tightrope. Printing books was risky. Presses, paper, and ink were expensive, and books cost more than most readers could afford. Many book printers went bankrupt, including Gutenberg. Of course, every business involves considerable risk. But few people outside publishing appreciate how challenging it is to find what readers want and deliver it to them.

During the late nineteenth century, publishing industrialized, and literacy grew. Over several decades, Gutenberg-style hand-operated presses yielded to huge steam-driven machines that could print thousands of books in the blink of an eye. Industrialized printing produced substantial reductions in unit cost, which allowed more people to buy more books, read them, and dream of writing them.

By World War I, industrial publishing produced the second book business, now called traditional publishing, though it lasted only eighty of the book business’s six hundred years. The new model was publisher-centric. As it developed, authors stopped hiring printers. Instead, the new publishers contracted with authors and gave many of them money up front, advances—actually loans—to write manuscripts, which the publishers printed and marketed. This change relieved authors of entrepreneurial headaches. But as the second book business matured, publishers gained firm control over the new model, and many authors felt they had become cogs in a vast machine.

The second book business made some publishers and a tiny fraction of authors richer than anyone had previously thought possible. But the book business remained daunting. While unit costs fell, publishers’ overall cost of doing business increased substantially. Printing and distributing more copies of many more titles strained publishers’ resources. Many couldn’t hack it. They either went bankrupt or merged with other houses.

Mention merger, and the term conjures visions of equal partners combining forces for mutual benefit. Actually, absorbed was more like it. Shortly before bankruptcy, in fire sales, failing publishers relinquished to stronger houses their two assets: their names and backlists. They became imprints, wholly owned subsidiaries. They continued to release books but were no longer living, breathing enterprises. From 1970 through the millennium, publishing witnessed more than three hundred mergers. During that period, the number of major publishers, the New York houses with familiar names, decreased from several dozen to just five, the Big Five.

Around the millennium, the digital revolution launched the third book business. Computer technology—digital book design, desktop publishing, e-books, and print-on-demand—powered a streamlined model that once again dramatically reduced books’ unit cost. Readers’ habits changed too, as access to books diversified and personal entertainment choices increased. In the third book business, publishers are still very much with us, but publishing has become increasingly sales-anddistribution-centric, dominated by Amazon.

The first and second book businesses were manufacturing enterprises. Book manufacture was costly, but a sufficient proportion of most publishers’ titles sold well enough to keep the lights on. The third book business has upended that. In the digital age, producing books has become the easy part. Using Sqribble software, authors can turn manuscripts into e-books in an hour for less than $100. And if you want print copies, say two hundred, with print-on-demand, they can be yours in a week or two, with each copy costing no more than a latte. Consequently, releases have exploded. During the entire twentieth century, the second book business published approximately 2.5 million titles. Today, publishers and self-publishers produce that many new releases every year or two. The avalanche of new titles has changed the very definition of publishing and how readers find, enjoy, and react to books.

Today’s unprecedented book glut has pushed median sales off a cliff. Some titles—around one in thirteen thousand—still sell zillions. But nowadays, only 6 percent of new releases sell one thousand copies, and four out of five self-published titles sell fewer than one hundred. Books published by the Big Five are best positioned to succeed, but it’s by no means rare for their titles to sell only a few hundred copies.

As the first book business evolved into the second, publishing’s center of gravity shifted from authors to publishers. As the second has evolved into the third, the fulcrum has moved from publishers toward Amazon.

Since its founding in 1994, Amazon has bankrupted many publishers, three-quarters of independent booksellers, and several bookstore chains. Since 2015, independent booksellers and publishers have bounced back. Still, as I write, Amazon accounts for 40 percent of trade sales. (Trade means books sold in bookstores, not textbooks or business, religious, or technical titles.) Amazon’s huge market share means it can demand wholesale discounts that squeeze publishers.

The third book business has produced amazing new opportunities for success. Fifty Shades of Grey, which first appeared as an e-book in 2011, has sold 150 million copies. But like its two predecessors, the third book business presents existential challenges daily. Keep that in mind the next time a publisher offers you a no-advance contract, like the one I signed for this book.

What does the third book business portend for authors and those who aspire to see their names on book covers? The current model has granted authors one magnificent benefit: easy, affordable self-publishing. But that gift comes with a crushing impediment: in the United States alone, there are 7,400 new releases every day, more than five every minute. Meanwhile, most new releases sell in two figures—rarely beyond authors’ friends and families. Want to learn how few friends you have? Self-publish a book. Of course, some authors write expressly for their family and friends, without commercial aspirations. But the vast majority of authors I’ve known have craved a mass audience and have struggled to understand why it’s so elusive.

Perspective

My book-writing career has spanned the decades from the second book business into the third. The transition has not been kind to most authors. Authors Guild surveys show that since 2009, members’ median book-related income has fallen by half.

Still, I love to write. I reveled in it before I made a dime as a writer. I was the weird kid who thought term papers were the best part of school. In college, I won a writing prize and decided to write for a living. I struggled for a dozen years until I hit my stride. In the 1980s and ’90s, I made good money from magazine writing (during the heyday of that industry) and from books. Two of my titles produced enviable royalties. But like many writers of my generation, since the millennium, I have seen my writing income plummet. Throughout the 1990s, I earned in the low six figures writing about health and sexuality. In 2023, writing made me $12,000. Of that, book royalties came to $1,500. As my writing income fell, of necessity I developed other sources of income. For the past twenty years, I’ve made my living from real estate, renting apartments in buildings I’ve acquired. Still, I love to write and continue to pursue my passion daily. I hope to keep writing until I die.

After almost half a century as an author, I’m neither rich nor famous. Chances are you’ve never heard of me. The Sunday New York Times Book Review has never asked me which books sit on my night table. Oh, I’ve had a few mentions in the Times, and I appeared on Today and The Phil Donahue Show when it was the showcase for books. But occasional moments in the sun don’t alter the fact that I’ve spent my career in the shade.

The Untold Story of Books can’t tell anyone how to get happily published or pen bestsellers. Instead, I hope this book provides what many authors and book lovers lack: a clear, historically informed understanding of how today’s book business evolved and continues to change, and the implications for everyone who writes—and reads—books. I hope this book enriches reading for book lovers and helps authors surf the crashing waves of publishing and write productively, happily, and maybe even gainfully.

Part I

The First Book Business

Hand-Crafted Publishing

From Gutenberg to the End of the Nineteenth Century

1

Want a Book? That’ll Be $75,000

Around Paleolithic campfires, early humans told stories. Some spoke and others listened, commented, and recounted tales of their own. Bathed in firelight, nothing came between those ancient storytellers and their audiences. Everyone was both raconteur and listener. Stories belonged to everyone—until reading, writing, and the copying of words.

Today we view literacy as a foundational skill. But in the ancient world, reading and writing were not only novel, but controversial. Socrates (c. 469–399 bce) had decidedly mixed feelings about literacy. He recognized its utility in business, government, the military, and the arts, but he argued that writing increased forgetfulness and amplified falsehoods, spurring the dissemination of lies. Ironically, we know how Socrates felt only because his student Plato took notes on his mentor’s teachings and published them in the Phaedrus.

Echoes of Socrates’s sentiments are still with us. During the 1970s, when telephone speed dial was introduced, alarmists warned that users would forget important numbers. And today, everyone decries the avalanche of misinformation available online.

The earliest documents on paperlike materials were rolled into scrolls that filled libraries established by the rulers of ancient empires, particularly Egypt, where the library of Alexandria opened around 300 bce. It housed the ancient world’s largest collection of scrolls, some seven hundred thousand, until conquerors set it ablaze and destroyed everything. Scrolls looked very similar—so similar, in fact, that ancient librarians couldn’t tell them apart. To identify them, they affixed tags to scrolls’ margins that were called, in Latin, titulus—the source of our word title.

From the dawn of literacy through the first printing press, scribes embraced a variety of media: cuneiform on clay tablets; alphabets and pictographs chiseled in stone or, in China, on bronze plates; and later charcoal or ink on bark, papyrus, parchment (any animal skin), vellum (parchment from calfskin), and eventually paper. But all early reproduction methods shared a common characteristic. Scribes copied books one at a time by hand—in Latin, manuscript.

Single-copy reproduction allowed legions of scribes to earn good livings. But it was so laborious that books cost a fortune, in today’s dollars around $75,000 per copy, which is the current price for a new scroll of the Hebrew Five Books of Moses (the Torah). A rare holdout of pre-Gutenberg reproduction, the foundational narrative of Judaism is still written by hand on parchment, which takes contemporary scribes one year to copy.

Scrolls left one side blank. During late Roman times, anonymous scribes discovered they could cut materials costs in half if they used both sides. In a technological leap around 100 ce, they began cutting scrolls into rectangular sheets with one side stitched together: codices (singular, codex), the precursors of books.

Before Gutenberg, European monk-scribes produced fabulously illustrated codices for kings, the Church, and for Europe’s first universities, Bologna (established in 1088) and Paris (1150). Early books were so valuable that to prevent theft, they were chained to library shelves.

THE WORLD’S FIRST AUTHOR KNOWN BY NAME WAS A WOMAN

She was the Sumerian princess-priestess Enheduanna (2285–2250 BCE), daughter of the Sumerian king Sargon. Most Sumerian priests were men, but apparently an exception was made for the king’s daughter. Enheduanna was the high priestess of the moon temple in Ur (the native city of the biblical patriarch Abraham). Cuneiform fragments preserve her name and some of the hymns she wrote. Her writing addressed the goddess of love on behalf of women who pined for mates.

Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1398–1468) was to mechanical printing what, five centuries later, Apple cofounders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were to the personal computer. Jobs and Wozniak did not invent personal computers from scratch. They built on others’ work in innovative ways, combining existing technologies—silicon chips, printed circuitry, and video monitors—into something new. Gutenberg did the same. A goldsmith by trade, he didn’t dream up movable type. As a young apprentice, he watched master goldsmiths fit short strings of movable metal letters into stamping devices to sign their creations. His insight involved applying the idea to printing.

Nor did Gutenberg invent his printing press. He borrowed its design from the devices used since Roman times to extract olive oil. But in 1450, when he adapted those ideas to printing, he changed the world. In one day, a scribe could produce a page or two of text, but a few printers operating a Gutenberg press could crank out hundreds. This marked the first step in the evolution of printing: fewer people making more copies of more books faster and cheaper.

The printing press democratized publishing. During the several thousand years of scribal manuscript creation and copying, scribes worked for rulers, temples, and the economic elite. Ancient scrolls were published but not widely disseminated. Most people had no access to them. The printing press changed that, enabling what publishing means today, reproduction of words made available to just about everyone.

Before Gutenberg, Europe housed fewer than ten thousand books. But by 1500, after just sixty years of printing, the number exceeded twenty million pamphlets and books, and by 1600, as printing spread around the world, 150 million.

In just one generation, the printing press threw almost every scribe out of work. Scribes made good money—until the rug got pulled out. Their anguish is lost to history, but imagine if artificial intelligence eliminated all need for teachers, lawyers, and doctors. All technological advances produce winners and losers. We can commiserate with those displaced scribes just as we pity anyone replaced by new technologies today. But who would want to return to hand-copied books priced like luxury automobiles? From day one, book publishers have moved heaven and earth to cut costs.

The printing press spurred literacy and fostered education. It enabled mass communication, ending the political and religious elites’ monopoly on information. It allowed translation of the Bible into vernacular languages, which fueled the Reformation. It triggered the Enlightenment, scientific research, and the industrial revolution, and created journalism, often called the press. And it galvanized dreams of self-determination, which eventually forced most monarchies to yield to parliamentary systems. All because it took fewer people far less time to produce exponentially more copies of reading material. And as $75,000 precious objects faded into the past, a mighty industry developed that required ever-greater amounts of capital to produce ever-cheaper books.

2

Gutenberg Went Bankrupt

Gutenberg had the money to construct a few presses, but he lacked the capital to set up a shop, create type, and buy paper and ink. Around 1450, he borrowed 800 guilders ($75,000 today) at 6 percent interest from fellow goldsmith Johann Furst (c. 1400–1466), who had prospered and become an investor-financier. Two years later, Gutenberg borrowed another 800 guilders from Furst, doubling his debt.

With Furst’s investment, Gutenberg printed 180 Bibles and displayed one at a trade