On Waiting Out the Boom Times

Business is booming in the book biz. At least for some. Romantasy is the word of the day. Hugely profitable, hugely successful, it has been remarkable to watch this unfold over the last year or so. The readership's appetite seems insatiable. What a time to be a genre publisher.

Writers are getting paid, building careers that will last them for years and years to come. Readers are showing up in droves and conversation around these books is everywhere I turn whether that's on my for you page or at the coffee shop down the street. There's no question in my mind that that's a net good. It may not be what I gravitate to in my own personal taste, but I'm just one reader in a vast audience. I'm just one agent in a sea of agents.

But even though I don’t really go here, I’m still an industry “expert” or something so I get asked a lot what this means. People want to know if this portends a future doom or represents a present decline. People want to know what to think about new publishers, new imprints. Social media strategies, merchandising, special editions, and sprayed edges. Oh god, all the sprayed edges.

Here's what I think: all mono-cultures are bad. I think a lack of diversity in the kinds of fiction that we are publishing and reading leads to a vulnerability in the market. If the bottom falls out of this readership, and publishers don't have other things in the pipeline, that could be a problem. So I understand the fear I hear in the voices of writers when they ask me about this boom time. I understand the concern that some voice in private conversations, in dms, in private servers. "What if this is all there is?"

But this isn't a mono-culture. It's a trend. It's a new category that's not really all that new when you get right down to it. It's, as these things always are, a blend of things that folks have been doing for a long time, remixed and repackaged to capitalize on the enormous success of a handful of authors. And, more to the point, most of the industry, even if we're just talking about the genre houses, are continuing to chug along publishing what they've always published.

Because here's the thing. All books are hard to sell. All books are hard to find an audience for. This is always true and never changes. There are seasons where some are just a little less hard than others.

In the last couple of years we have seen a contraction across the culture as major media companies have had to look at their bottom lines and ask themselves some hard questions. Are we actually making money doing this? Are enough people watching our shows and movies? Are enough people playing the games we're making? The answer, unfortunately, has been kind of not really. A bunch of folks in C-suites realized the emperor was doing the thing he does: standing butt naked on a pedestal hoping none of us would ever notice that subscriber numbers are different from profits. That attention is different from revenue.

Money got more expensive. Inflation was high, interest rates went up. Investors became more reluctant to give more with no clear returns. We are in a complicated moment. A moment that inspires a kind of conservatism among the decision makers at major media companies.

It's easy to feel frustrated by this. Fewer bets are being placed. The ones that are safe, reliable. Smart bets, they call them.

Blame publishers. Blame capital. Sure. Blame gatekeepers. Sure. Easy to do. But the reality is things move in trends. What works one day won't work tomorrow. What worked last year won't work next year. And it's important to remember this when looking at a boom market. Whether you are trying to hop on that train, or you are patiently waiting for another one to arrive.

As a professional who's seen this cycle many times before, I have some guesses as to what's next and when that might happen. I'll probably be a lot wrong and I'll probably be a little bit right. But I'll probably only remember the parts I was right about. And then I'll tell everyone, "Hey, I was right. I called this." But in reality that will just be confirmation bias. I won't remember the 18 things that I said that were wrong. And that's the important thing to remember when talking to an expert, an industry professional: we're just people. We don't know the future any more than you do.

Sure, we've seen more than most. We have seen the cycles of publishing in a different way than almost any individual writer could. But the reality is, past performance is not an indicator of future success. I can't predict the way the market's going to go. And yet my job, looked at from a certain angle, is to predict the way the market's going to go. Sometimes I'm right. But, at the end of the day, I can't predict a trend. I can't make a book work. I'm always selling something, but I'm never selling false hope.

The certainty I do have is that this business is cyclical. The bountiful times will be followed by leaner times. Hopefully the winters are shorter than the summers. But I think it is easy to get caught up in the moment and think that because it's like this now, it'll be like this forever. No one will ever want my fiction, because it's not like what's selling. Or it's trending in this direction, therefore it's going to continue to move in that direction forever.

Everything changes. That is the only thing that is truly predictable. When it will change and how it will change is unknown and almost impossible to divine.

For a while, we were moving into a market that was very favorable to me and the kind of fiction I read, enjoy, and publish. And now, we have moved away from that a little bit. And, yeah, I feel frustrated about that sometimes, but ultimately, the thing I feel is an excitement that publisher bottom lines are looking very healthy, that the readership is growing, and that enthusiasm and conversation around books is also growing. That kicks ass. Full stop. I'm optimistic about what this means for the industry and what it means for me and what it means for writers.

So, how do I navigate these next few years? I don't know. Probably not by jumping on the current boom trend. It wasn't my train to catch. I'll have to get the next one. I'll wait it out until my ticket comes up again. I'm focused on the projects I have in the pipeline. Those are working. And I am looking down the road to see if I can meet the readership where they will be instead of trying to catch up to where they are. In the meantime I'll enjoy the show and celebrate my friends who are hitting jackpots and be a friendly ear to my friends whose tickets aren't coming up.

So, that's where I'm at right now And I'm hoping, like I have done every day of my publishing career, that I'm more right than I am wrong.

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