The Bluestocking 379: The economics of writing a book
Infinite scroll means infinite ad inventory
Happy Friday!
Housekeeping note: As the ill-advised honesty below will attest, I’m quite knackered and will be getting a proper break in August. Bluestocking service resumes in September. Thank you, as always, for reading—and for the funny, informative and only occasionally disturbing comments and emails.
Helen
Last year, my old NS colleague Caroline Crampton published a book on hypochrondria, A Body Made of Glass, and so she diligently followed her publisher’s advice about generating “buzz” on social media. However, after recording innumerable Instagram videos and posting every small update online, she realised that all her activity was just “busy work.”
She’s written a long essay about that realisation, and her general desire to get offline:
I’m Done With Social Media
In that tense, quiet period after the book has been finalised but before anyone can buy or read it, augmenting your personal brand via the regular use of social media feels like the only concrete action you can take. Or at least it did to me, so I threw myself into it.
I attended some training sessions on "social media for authors". I asked professional acquaintances with expertise for tips. I learned that Instagram and TikTok were the best platforms to target for bookish followers and that the algorithms of these platforms were, these days, only interested in vertical videos. I compiled lists of videos I could make and started filming mostly-daily updates about my experience as an author with a book coming out soon. I scoured the accounts of other authors who were more successful than me on social media for insights. I posted about every tiny bit of publicity my book got or small win I achieved. I asked people to pre-order in as many ways as I could think of. I delved into the analytics, searching for ways to optimise and improve.
I spent a lot of time scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling, hunting for the "one weird trick" that would help me make a success of this.
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Having also published a non-fiction book recently, I concur with Caroline about the fragmentation of the media landscape, and the way that it has completely nuked traditional book marketing.
Nothing I posted anywhere on social media moved the needle on sales. Nothing I posted on this newsletter caused a noticeable spike in pre-orders. The reviews? Bzzt. Not a flicker.
What about interviews? Last time, going on Woman’s Hour produced a notable bump in orders—the book immediately went to #16 on Amazon in the brief, golden half-hour after Jenni Murray was nice about it. This time, the only tremor on the sales Richter scale was the very enjoyable interview I did on CNN with Walter Isaacson, who shares many of my interests (and has spent enough time with Elon Musk to, I suspect, have views on his alleged genius). The book made it onto the Sunday Times bestseller list in the first week, but hasn’t troubled the charts since. I would describe its sales as respectable. I’ve had lots of nice comments from people who have actually read it, but getting it into people’s hands has been a slog.
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Despite all the recent articles about how no one reads any more—and it’s notable how sizeable a chunk of my sales are from audiobooks—this problem is not unique to books. In June, Nicholas Quah wrote a piece for New York magazine saying that no one knows how to market movies these days, either. As I wrote in June, that piece was a “look at the new rules of a press tour: spray and pray. No more hitting a couple of prestige late-night cable shows, and a magazine profile. Now you have to do a dozen random podcasts and hope something viral happens.” Something similar is true, at a much lower level, for nonfic authors like me.
Like Caroline, I have concluded that most of my promotional tour was, essentially, busywork. Since April I’ve recorded more than 32 hours of podcasts and radio interviews, written one exclusive essay based on the book (and overseen two extracts from it), and done 12 live events, with another half-dozen to go. All the podcasts were unpaid, and the live events tend to pay £150 and require several hours of travel.
Now, this isn’t a woe-is-me tale. Most of the events have sold out—and 400 people were willing to drop a chunky amount (£30-50) to see me and Armando talk live for 90 minutes1. So there is a market there for something involving my thoughts on the topic of genius. Just maybe not for my book in hardback2.
Nonetheless, this landscape does require a recalibration on my part—and it’s something other writers might want to think about, whatever stage they are at in their career. The current bargain is that you write the book, and then essentially do events and podcasts at a loss, in order to drive book purchases3. But that now looks as outdated as a pop star going on tour for free and expecting to make money from CD sales. What people are willing to pay for has changed4.
One author I know, whose book is doing well—they’ve sold multiple foreign translations—is considering simply using their next tranche of book-length material as a podcast series instead, dropping it into the regular feed of an established star in their field. David Runciman is doing something similar, running his authored audio lectures on big political ideas over several weeks on his PPF podcast feed, which I suppose is a modern day version of Dickens publishing his book via instalments in magazines. He can make more money from ads in the podcast feed, where consumers pay nothing for the content, than from asking people to stump up £25 for a book before they know if they’re interested in the contents.
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Talking of free content, the interview podcast circuit operates on the same principle as TV—you’re supposed to be flattered to be asked, because who doesn’t love airing their thoughts to a grateful nation? Looking back, I think it’s funny how ready I was in the 2010s to chuck in all my plans and go into central London at 10pm to be on Newsnight to do 3 minutes about some random topic. (I swore off doing that ever again after arriving at the BBC late one Friday night to find a load of beat poets in the green room. Newsnight was now doing a culture special instead, and the producer had forgotten to tell me.) But at least your mum saw you on TV. She probably isn’t watching a podcast about personal development on YouTube.
Like Caroline, I’m also recalculating my use of social media. I don’t enjoy it—I flick from being screamed at by lefties on Bluesky to being wailed at by MAGA diehards on X, because a change is as good as a rest—and it’s not paying off in terms of my career. The most brutal part of Caroline’s essay is her assertion that the social media companies have, essentially, tricked us into making content for them, with the promise of exposure: “I don’t doubt that the select few who make this equation work for them do get well paid for their work once they become successful. Everyone else, though, is just uploading for free so that there is enough stuff on the app to keep users scrolling forever. Infinite scroll means infinite ad inventory.”
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Caroline’s essay prompted many other thoughts, which I hope to return to when I have a bit more perspective. These include:
Never mind the busywork: Writers seem cooler now when they don’t do social media or give many interviews. It’s far more premium to be Zadie Smith and drop an occasional New Yorker essay than it is to be out there hustling on Threads or sucking up to BookTok.
We are far too ready to describe male writers as public intellectuals, but it’s not a label that women get.
Also, god help you if you are female and try to write a book that’s funny. Many people will regard this as being the same as “unserious”.
If you do write a nonfiction book, make sure it’s “giftable”. Preferably to Dads, because no one knows what to buy for Dads.
Otherwise, write self-help. So, not a gardening book, but Garden Yourself Happy, or if you must, Gertrude Jekyll and Me. Not a book about France, but Finding L’Amour: What I Learned From Eating Baguettes (And You Can Too). Not a book about particle physics, but The Quark Method: Discover YOUR Inner Equilibrium.
One thing that does sell books? Being a Waterstones Book of the Month5. Before signing up to a publisher, ask how many of their books have secured this honour. Or find whoever is in charge of this choice and sleep with them.
Getting a mean and snobby review of your book is an unpleasant experience, but it pays off when you read the next piece the reviewer publishes and it’s SO DULL you almost claw your eyeballs out by the ninth paragraph. Ohhhh, no wonder you hated my book! You are the Fred West of prose!
Thankfully, the era of gratuitously rude book titles—SORT YOUR F***ING LIFE OUT YOU C***—appears to be over, although the related birthday card trade is still going strong. No, I don’t want to give anyone a card that says “Sorry To Hear You’re A Saggy Old Twat Now, You Ugly Piece of Shit”. Is there really a big market for birthday cards for people who hate their friends and relatives? Congratulations On Your Promotion But I Bet You Still Die Alone.
Authors and journalists: One of the most useful resources for how much promotional appearances might pay is George Monbiot’s annual financial disclosure.
How much of each copy sold goes to the author? A rough estimate would be £1 for hardbacks and 50p for paperbacks. Although, of course, you have to earn out your advance before seeing any royalties.
See you next time! After all that bearishness, I should say that The Genius Myth is out now.
Despite these high ticket prices, the company involved has offered to pay me £300 for this event. I didn’t check in advance, stupidly.
Publishing still pursues a nineteenth century schedule where most books initially come out in hardback, and then in paperback a year later. Going directly to PB is considered a bit “straight to video” and generally reserved for commercial fiction. You might get a large format “travel paperback” for sale in WH Smiths at airports initially, though.
At a “good” event for 300 people, you might sell 40 books, which is not going to be enough to retire on. Some of the larger events companies are now acknowledging this reality by staging events where the (now higher) ticket price includes a book.
To give you a rough benchmark of sales figures, in the period between January 2023 and September 2024, an industry source tells me, the 250th bestselling nonfic book in the UK sold 30,000 copies. The 1000th did 11,000 sales. This confirms my belief that most publishing is basically the same model as venture capitalism—make a few bets and the outlier success will hopefully pay for all the rest.
Jonn Elledge’s A History of the World in 47 Borders went from popular to supernova when this happened. Because Jonn is lovely and the book is good, I’m happy for him. NO REALLY I AM. I hear that the same was true of Ed Conway’s Material World, which didn’t fit neatly into any of the bookseller’s sections and so struggled to find shelf space and thus readers. Then it was made book of the month, promoted to the big tables, and people lapped it up.
I have never understood why publishers insist on hardbacks first. Not only are they expensive, but they are too large and heavy to take anywhere, take up far too much room on overcrowded shelves and hurt when I doze off reading and drop them on myself at night. I have almost always waited for the paperback - although these days I usually just wait for the ebook to drop in price (sorry).
I bought, and am enjoying yor book because I read everything you write in The Atlantic, love Strong Message Here, listen to Page 94 and subscribe. That said, I can't remember which one persuaded me to buy. But the scattergun theory seems to apply here. Your hard work was not in vain.