The trial seemed to display the elite condescension to and obliviousness of genre that has clouded mainstream publishing’s vision of their own business interests from the get-go. The trial is focused on the effects of a merger on a narrow band of writers of top-selling books, but these big sellers have historically included genre fiction. In the anti-trust suit against a proposed merger of publishing giants Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, which has riveted book professionals this summer, observers acquainted with genre fiction, like Steve Axelrod, the agent who negotiated the books by Julia Quinn on which the Netflix blockbuster Bridgerton was based, were shocked (or perhaps, rather, bemused) by the assertions of publishing executives that they saw no threat to traditional publishing from Amazon’s self-publishing business. That is an enormous number of books being sold outside industry metrics. ![]() John Thompson also presented an analysis by a software engineer (and self-published writer) indicating that 47 percent of positions on Amazon’s e-book bestseller lists on a day in 2106 were held by self-published books (plus 12 percent that were from publishers so small they were likely to be self-publishers). Nine of that year’s top ten bestsellers were romance. But John Thompson looked at figures for Amazon’s closest self-publishing competitor, Smashwords, where, in 2016 at least, 50 percent of overall sales were in romance 77 percent of sales of the top two hundred bestsellers and 78 percent of the top fifty bestsellers. Amazon keeps Kindle sales a closely guarded secret (why I had questions about the widely-cited $1.4 billion number for romance sales). According to John Thompson’s recent Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing, between 20 the number of self-published books with ISBN numbers (which does not include those on Kindle, which has its own cataloguing system) went from 152,978 to 16,777,781. Hence self-publishing today is dominated by romance. Observers have noted that this micro-segmentation of romance has also contributed to its amenability to Tiktok, which directs users minutely in the direction of their known enthusiasms. These sub-genres and tropes were indeed part of what made romance so successful as a mass-market genre-readers needn’t look for individual books or authors so much as easily identified types of stories, what the industry called “category” marketing (as opposed to the inefficient “single title” marketing of trade publishing). ![]() (Contemporary publishing impresario Andy Hunter, inventor of the website that allows independent publishers to compete online with Amazon, intuited the power of such reader-writer communities when he founded Catapult as a publisher for literary fiction as well as a hub for would-be writers, with workshops, consultancies, and community-building opportunities.) Romance also benefitted from a well-established tradition of sub-genres and what insiders call “ tropes” (and others might call formulas)-historical romances, Christian romances, nursing romances, enemies-becoming-lovers romances, amnesia romances, Amish romances, the secret millionaire romance, BDSM romance (which famously got a huge boost out of a certain book originally published independently)-that pinpointed readers’ interests, making it easier for lone self-publishing writers to find their fan. The embrace of self-publishing by romance novelists benefitted from a long history of writer-reader intermingling, like the Romance Writers Association that connected writers directly with their readers and tapped the enthusiasm of would-be writers as an audience. The signal challenge of self-publishing is the challenge of “discovery”-the easier it becomes, technically, to publish yourself, the larger the pool of other self-published writers you must struggle to stand apart from, to be discovered by your readers.
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