The stagnancy of publishing and the disappearance of the midlist

Interesting history but what's going on now is so crazy as a reader. Amazon kindle publishes 7500 new books daily. There's no longer gatekeepers like in the article.

About two years ago I was searching for a new sci-fi book to read - I routinely rotate genres. I did my research in goodreads and started reading a trilogy that was highly rated. Holy crap it was so bad a quit about halfway through the second book. I went back to goodreads and the rating since my last visit had dropped drastically. A bot campaign or something fooled me, I guess.

I've since just started reading older stuff, before the 2000s. I'd try to find a gatekeeper to filter newer stuff for me but everything seems corrupt - even the Hugo awards gets scammed by influence campaigns.

This is not specific to publishing. The diagram tells the story: it's consolidation. Consolidation is bad. Giant companies are bad. In publishing as in other domains.

I don't understand what the problem is. TFA makes many references to "literary culture" degrading.. does he mean that readers were better off when the big 5 or 6 controlled the mast majority of new books?

The number of new books available exploded after 2000 (yes, way way before AI).

Readers are arguably better off than they ever have been in terms of variety.

The clickbait title refers to a day in fall 1995 when a Random House editor was told by his boss that the business could no longer afford to publish modestly-selling books (~10,000-40,000 copies), marking the moment when corporate scale killed the old risk-taking culture of publishing.

I'll offer a hopeful rejoinder. Perhaps, when AISlop generates enough of the same old story "guaranteed" hits for the mass market (and book covers to go with same), the editors will switch back to something that is novel and unlikely to be generated.

Think about what happens when you feed the first few books of a series into long context llm, along with their audience interests, pitch lines, plot summaries and character guides. When each element is multi-shot rather than zero-shot.

The 90s aren't coming back to publishing. The audience who reads multiple books a month is going the way of the classical symphony attendee.

I deeply empathize with his complaint about book covers, but that's just what "design" is these days. This is Peter and Wendy, 1st edition: https://mflibra.com/products/1911-rare-peter-pan-first-editi...

This is a modern edition: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Peter-Wendy-AmazonClassics-J-Barrie...

They could have just left it alone - "fired the design team". But no - they spent time and money to vandalize it. Look at the Museum of Modern Art (conveniently also in New York): https://museumsexplorer.com/museum-of-modern-art-moma-in-new...

https://loving-newyork.com/museum-of-modern-art-new-york/

The paintings in the most lauded modern art museum in the world are indistinguishable from those garish book covers. That's what gets recognition in the "art" world.

Extremely weird cover selection. Books like Stag Dance, Project: Hail Mary, The Emperor of Gladness, etc. None of them have that. Some of the books listed there are several years old (The Death of Vivek Oji was published in 2020). A Map Is Only One Story isn't even fiction?? I think its very cherrypicked of a complaint. Not to mention the author doesn't talk at all about the rise of romantasy and finding bets like Alchemised and Fourth Wing (neither of which have these covers complained about).

One medium where this isn’t really true is video games. Why hasn’t Steam or Itch fallen in this trap? Because they are honest stewards? Or because the software plane isn’t as large? Only news publishing and written word and movies. In fact movies even have a set number of prestige “risk” directors so they never have to reach too far out of the norm, see Yorgos Lanthimos.