Dare we hope that Gen-Z decides books are “Newtro” enough to be cool?:

The ‘boring phone’: stressed-out gen Z ditch smartphones for dumbphones
Guardian   27 Apr 2024

“…The Boring Phone is part of a new dumbphone boom, built on the suspicion of gen Z towards the data- and attention-harvesting technologies they have grown up with. That suspicion has fuelled reinventions of retro cultural artefacts – a trend known as Newtro – and seen in the revival of vinyl records, cassettes, fanzines, 8-bit video games and old-fashioned mobile phones….”

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/27/the-boring-phone-stressed-out-gen-z-ditch-smartphones-for-dumbphones

PW spotlighted Entangled recently and I was shocked that it has moved from mostly ebook to mostly hardcover with print runs as large as 850,000 copies for Rebecca Yarros's next romantasy. Entangled is feeling quite optimistic and perhaps rightly so; apparently she is a blockbuster author, an outlier who will make everyone involved a fortune.

A prior report on Entangled in March said they're planning on printing 30,000-60,000 copies of their typical hardcovers from other authors, with a $17.99 cover price. Good print numbers, but not earthshaking, and here's why:

Returns are a key measurement of how trad publishing is going. So my question is, what is the current rate of returns for hardcovers? For trade paper? Are they trending up or down? If they're trending up, then we know the trad pub business is on rocky ground--although unlikely to fall apart anytime soon. Historically, when returns trend up, profits go down, and the publisher has to seek other revenue streams to sustain it. Sub rights, usually. Ebooks. Audiobooks. Reasons why trad pub contracts now typically are big rights grabs and an author needs a tough agent to negotiate retaining their rights or getting a fair split with the publisher. Money is still being made, and publishing is still a big gamble. But what is the trend? 

Interesting breakdown of Trad publishing, and it's worse than I thought.

I think I agree with the conclusion, the Trads are going to die, but not as fast as stated. It's going to be a long slow self strangulation. One that is already well underway.

[Moved this, as it's not really about marketing, but discussing the Trad model.]

Interesting write-up, hadn't heard of The Trial.

This confirms a few things I suspected, mainly, even the big names hardly earn out their advances, and trad pub wants to spend as little on marketing as possible. The second point is why it never interested me. If I have to do all of the work of building up the audience to begin with, what do I need trad pub for?

The rest of the doom and gloom ... I think we could have expected.

So many interesting tidbits copied into that article. Thanks for sharing, it's worth the read.

I haven't published traditionally, but from what I recall, publishers expected authors to do most of their own marketing.  And authors had to pay out of their own pocket (or advance) for most, if not all, of that.  That would be stuff like traveling to book signings, radio/TV promos/interviews where possible and whatever other means of marketing the author may do.

Even just a few years ago, self-publishing had a stigma despite the number of authors who had historically self-published.  There is no as much of a stigma against self-publishing anymore.  And, more and more people are opting for eBooks and self-published eBooks are pretty much identical to eBooks from big publishing companies.

So, I wonder if the big publishers have effectively experienced a "brain drain" where those authors that were successful at marketing their books just sort of cut out the middleman and newer authors just skipped the middleman entirely, both due to the ease of self-publishing these days and the growing loss of stigma around it.

Which would mean not that people aren't buying books but that people aren't buying very many books from the big publishers.