And so it begins...
the end of "woke" books?
Daily Mail reported that Woke books bought for huge advances by 'inexperienced' editors hired post-George Floyd have FLOPPED - including $500,000 'queer feminist' novel that's sold 3,500 copies and Elliot Page's $3 million transgender memoir that's sold 68,000 copies.
Just to start with some critique: maybe a shorter headline next time? I guess this is Daily Mail’s thing, SUPER long headlines wedged between nonsense on the right-hand sidebar that let me know who was out in a bikini yesterday and ads for Subarus.
The Facts:
The article cites several books, acquired by publishers in a post-2020 rush, meant to put out a more diverse set of authors talking specifically about diversity or, in the case of fiction, presenting more diverse characters.
Quick breakdown of the titles mentioned:
Pageboy by Elliot Page: $3 million author advance, has sold 68,000 copies.
Dear Miss Metropolitan by Carolyn Ferrell: $250,000 author advance, 3,163 copies sold.
Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens: $500,000 advance, 3,500 copies sold.
My Government Means to Kill Me by Rasheed Newson: $250,000 author advance, 4,500 copies sold (this does not include any digital sales, so this is a questionable number, however, with print still outselling digital, the most generous number I could confidently give the book is a doubling, 9,000 copies sold).
Uphill by Jemele Hill: 5,034 copies sold (I didn’t find an exact number on the advance).
The Less-Facts:
The article then goes on to attribute these financial bombs to acquisition of “woke” book by editors who were…I’ll use the term “diversity hires” to summarize what I see the article as saying, or perhaps it’d be more accurate to say that these new editors were hired for their ability to find diverse authors, so the authors are the “diversity hires?” Who knows.
And who cares?
Because I’m not so certain the blame sits with these new, inexperienced editors who think with their identities instead of thinking more about the bottom line.
I’m suspicious this is happening for other reasons.
Is This Downturn Unexpected?
No.
…really?
As talked about in THIS VERY NEWSLETTER, this sort of thing happens all the time. Literary trends come and go.
Now, don’t mistake me for saying that the political ideologies being discussed, or even the identities of these authors, are “trends.”
Looks like I’m going to use lots of quotation marks around various words in this newsletter. It’s one of THOSE newsletters…
Books and popular media will always financially benefit from trends, and subsequently be victims of trends when they jump on too late and tastes have moved on.
Let’s examine a less charged topic: Vampires.
Vampires were fucking EVERYWHERE in fiction in the Anne Rice days.
Then they went away, after a glut of vampire fiction.
Then they resurged in the Twilight era, especially in the burgeoning Young Adult/Teen market.
And they went away again.
You would NOT want to be putting your vampire novel in front of an editor in 2012, which perhaps the Mayans mis-predicted as the end of the world, and instead it was merely the end of super popular vampire fiction for a time.
I’m assuming this ebb and flow of interest in vampires isn’t particularly offensive to anyone, so let’s move closer to what we’re seeing with these “woke” books today.
In the early 2000’s, books that took place in or discussed the Middle East were HUGE. The Kite Runner is probably at the forefront, but there were tons of books that were sold to publishers on the basis of having some connection to the Middle East or Islam.
This is a direct effect of people crashing airplanes into buildings and the subsequent war. People wanted to learn more about a culture that they hadn’t really spent a lot of time learning about. You’d hear stuff all the time: “Muslims do this” or “Muslims believe that,” and a lot of us living in parts of the world that weren’t predominately Muslim were like, “Is that true? I don’t think that’s true, but on the other hand, I never really thought someone would crash an airplane into a building like that…”
As we got into the 2010’s, widespread, general interest faded among those who were inclined to care but were not going to radically change their lives and make these topics a central focus of study or leisure reading for decades to come.
Sales of these books didn’t decline because people didn’t care about Muslims or 9/11 anymore, but because they’d read, they’d experienced a variety of books that talked about or were written by Muslims or people in the Middle East, and their curiosity was satisfied. I’ll make a gross generalization and say, “We got it.” We understood some of the basics, we learned a little bit about what it meant to be a Muslim and what it meant to live in Afghanistan.
Islam, people of The Middle East, and war were not “trends.” But heavy, mainstream American interest in reading popular fiction and non-fiction about them was.
The People Whose Taste Matters
In Chuck Klosterman’s But What If We’re Wrong?, Klosterman talks about the tyranny of the unknowing masses.
Klosterman’s best example goes something like this:
If you ask someone in America who the greatest 20th century architect is, they’ll probably say Frank Lloyd Wright.
But the fact that almost everyone would cite Wright doesn’t mean that he IS the greatest living architect, it simply means that he’s the best-known architect, especially by those who don’t really know anything about architects.
And the real issue is that the number of people who don’t know a ton about architects VASTLY outnumber the people who know a ton about architects. Therefore, the popular, lasting opinion on the 20th century’s greatest architect is mostly about which architect is the most well-known among the largest number of people who know little to nothing about architecture, as opposed to being about the opinion of architecture students, architects, or, I don’t know, some award that goes to whoever does the most badass cornices.
How does this relate to “woke” books and waning interest?
Because while I think these books will always have an audience, and while the issue may not be the subjective quality of these books, there was a period from 2022-2023 or so when EVERYONE who was a semi-regular reader picked up something in this (hastily-defined) category. Just about everybody read a Coates book, or a Kendi book, or White Fragility, or an Angie Thomas book, or something that could be categorized as “woke.”
For a lot of us, these books were using new terminology or presenting new ideas.
Whether you were into NPR or Fox News, you were hearing about these books, they were being discussed to death in mainstream culture, and a lot of folks were reading them because they wanted to, felt like they should, or were just curious to see for themselves.
We also need to consider an additional factor: These were books that you might end up reading for a work DEI session, management group book discussion, school, or what have you.
In fact, these books kind of operated in a way opposite of most mega-hit fiction from the last couple decades. The big hits I’m talking about were things like Twilight, Harry Potter, The Da Vinci Code, and 50 Shades. All of those were incredibly popular, but none of them had the potential to make you a complete pariah in the workplace or your social circles if you expressed a disinterest in them the way these “woke” books did. In fact, superfan status for these books was not something most adults would crow about.
It meant something different to pass on a lunchtime book club at work that was reading How to Be an Anti-Racist than it did if that same group was reading The Martian.
It does feel like that fervor has faded for all except for those folks who are strict adherents to those philosophies and have decided to make those books a continuing focus of their reading life.
Again, this doesn’t mean those topics are resolved in the wider culture, just the way fading interest among American readers in books about The Middle East did not mean The Iraq War was over or that Muslims in America were non-people.
All I means is that there was a surge in interest, and that surge hasn’t sustained the same pace. And it shouldn’t be expected to.
Which is pretty much a way of saying it’s a “trend,” but, you know, if I add some paragraphs in here, I sound like less of an asshole, less like I’m comparing entire ideologies to the return of mom jeans.
Publishing Is SOOOOOOO SLOOOOOOOW
One factor in the slowdown of sales is that we have options now.
Shortly after summer 2020, there was HUGE interest in books about topics of race, especially books regarding George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. And those books did not exist yet. There are a couple fairly popular books on George Floyd on Amazon, and they both came out in 2022. There’s only one about Breonna Taylor, and it’s written by one of the police officers at the scene. *cough* It also came out in 2022.
In 2020, if you were reading a book about Black culture, you were probably reading How to be an Anti-Racist, White Fragility, or Between the World and Me. Those books did HUGE numbers, and they were fortunate enough to be readily available before the wave crested, so they were able to serve a need that a lot of people were having, and they were among very few books in that position.
Today, you have TONS of choices.
Which is a good thing, a GREAT thing.
But it does mean that authors coming out with “woke” books now, even excellent books, are splitting the attention and money among a larger pool.
Because publishing is so slow, these deals were most likely made at least a couple years ago, and in terms of 2021 numbers, those advances might not be that wild.
This is certainly some of the fault of management at the publishers ignoring the likelihood that “woke” books wouldn’t trend forever, but that doesn’t mean they were playing bad politics, it may just mean they bet on the future going one way and were proven wrong.
What Underperforming Means
Back to the books at hand. Or, perhaps not at hand, based on the numbers.
The most important, or most-talked-about, factor in the performance of these books is the rather large advances received by their authors.
Let’s unravel The Mystery of Advances for a moment:
To make the math easy, let’s say you get a $10,000 dollar advance for your heist novel.
This is money the publisher gives you before the book goes on sale. Hence the term “advance.”
Let’s say for each copy sold of your novel about a heist involving a lot of toilet humor, you, the author, make $1.00 in royalties.
Here’s what your future looks like: You get that initial $10,000 advance, and that’s all you’ll be paid unless/until your book sells over 10,000 copies. This advance is basically an upfront payment for the expected sales of $10,000 copies.
When your book sells copy number 10,001, your publisher will pay you another dollar (your royalty), and they’ll pay you a dollar for each copy sold beyond 10,000.
If you don’t sell 10,000 copies, you keep the money, you don’t pay it back or anything, but profitable authors get further deals, duds don’t. Well, sometimes they do. It’s complicated.
Complicated, You Say?
Using the math above, the expected sales for Pageboy might be looked at as being in the millions in order to pay off that advance and start earning, which seems like a big gamble.
BUT, it’s more complicated than that, because it’s possible that a publisher will still profit from a book that doesn’t see an author’s advance “paid off.”
Ready?
Pageboy has a relatively high “list price,” or suggested retail price at $30.
Bookstores usually pay around half that, so that puts us at $15 left over. Let’s take out a cost for production ($5) and the author royalty (we’ll call it $2), that leaves $8 per copy. Let’s add in miscellaneous costs and put the profit to the publisher at $4 per copy.
To earn out and start making royalties above the $3,000,000 advance, Elliot Page would have to push 1.5 million copies.
BUT, to recoup that same $3,000,000 while also paying off all the costs associated with the book’s printing, shipping, and what have you, the publisher only has to sell 750,000 copies. This is pretty generous use of the word ONLY, but stay with me.
When they sell copy number 750,001, the publisher is in the black while Page is still only half-way to earning additional royalties.
The publisher’s break even point is usually quite a bit lower than the author’s in the case of large advances like this., so while the advances might appear way oversized when compared to sales, they’re less a problem then they appear at first blush.
A Word on This:
This might seem like an unfair proposition, kind of a Taylor Swift situation where it’s like, “But what if someone who is ACTUALLY CALLED SCOOTER is making a ton of money for doing nothing!?”
With a large advance, the publisher IS carrying a lot more risk than the author. The author gets paid $3 million no matter what happens, making the author’s part in this pretty risk-free. The publisher, meanwhile, can be well over $3 million in the hole if things go horribly wrong.
It’s also quite a bit different with books than it is with music. While a huge bestseller can drive interest in an author’s older works (see: Deception Point), it’s pretty unusual that a book, even a bestseller, continues selling tons of copies 10 years or more into the future, and the first few months is a pretty reliable predictor of what the book is going to do over its lifespan.
The only way this large advance setup works out really badly for the author is if the book sells at an absolutely bonkers, Harry Potter rate, which, statistically, it won’t. The chances of a book being such a huge hit that Elliot Page would be better off self-publishing are pretty slim.
But I think the bigger issue is that when we’re talking about 6-figure-and-higher advances, we’re talking about a more-than-reasonable fee for an author to make on a piece of work.
Are The Advances Too Large?
Let’s throw out one thing about Elliot Page’s right away: This is probably what it costs to do business with a celebrity.
With celebrity memoirs, the math is simple: How many hours did Elliot Page put into the book, and what is that time worth?
According to several sources, the cast of Umbrella Academy negotiated to make $200,000 per episode for season 3, and Page was previously making something like that from the beginning. Which means, for season 3, something around a $2 million dollar payday for Page.
I think $3 million is a lot, and it’s a difficult amount of money to recoup, but it’s what Elliot Page’s time is worth.
It’s kind of like if you wanted to pay me for my time to help you with your newsletter because you have scraped the barrel and then the ground underneath the barrel: It’d be totally reasonable for me to request my current hourly salary to help you out. “Hey, here’s what I usually get paid per hour, so that’s what I want to get paid by you.”
Alright, so what about the other advances? Too large?
Maybe, maybe not.
Ibram X. Kendi commands a pretty huge speaking fee, and I’m guessing some of these authors could get a pretty good chunk of money for delivering a 50-minute speech. It puts us back in the same mathematical arena: If their time is worth $20k per hour, an advance of $200,000 is only paying them for about 10 hours of work, WAY less than the work that’ll go into writing and promoting a book.
To an extent, these editors and publishers are victims of the fact that books just don’t pay a whole lot most times, and a celebrity memoir is always going to give you problems when it’s time to recoup the cost.
Where It Gets Odd
Claudia Cravens has less than 500 Twitter followers, and does not seem to be a name in entertainment, books, or anything other than this debut. Which isn’t a slam, it just makes her case a little more interesting to me.
I can only suspect one of two things:
Either Cravens’ book was a pretty big gamble, and the editor kind of figured they could sneak a buddy in under the wire for a big payday
-or-
This book is objectively pretty good.
There’s a similar question with Carolyn Ferrell, who is a creative writing teacher and, while likely writing really good books, doesn’t seem to have the kind of huge clout that pushes books out of the warehouse.
I think they probably wrote really good books, and the publisher genuinely believes in these books. I think these books were big gambles, but they suspected that they would sell the way a literary book will come out and really shine every now and then.
And it DOES seem critics and trade publications adore their books.
Which means we may have a critics v audience situation on our hands.
Both writers seem like very “writerly” writers, very “literature” type writers, and I think it’s very possible that an editor with a major publisher may see their books as surefire hits, but it’s because they’re so embedded in the world of books and literature that they don’t really understand what 99% of people are reading.
Again, this is a situation that any editor could fall prey to, and I don’t necessarily see it as having anything to do with the “wokeness” of the authors or their books.
In fact, I’m curious whether that factor may have hurt more than it helped.
If we can agree that “woke” books are a fading trend, and if we can agree that books tagged onto a fading trend are likely to underperform, then I think it’s possible that while these two books represent a step into the future, their association as “woke” may have caused people, who may have otherwise been interested, to turn away.
However, this may signal a positive trend.
The Bright Side
I think the future looks like all people playing in the same sandbox. People of Color can write a great thriller and get published. We’ll see more LGBTQIA+ folks working in genre fiction, literary fiction, and non-fiction that’s not primarily concerned with gender and sexuality.
For example, a haunted house story with a trans person living in the house.
This does make it more difficult to stock libraries with diverse materials, but nowhere near impossible. And ultimately, I think it’s a good thing.
If this trend continues, your library will continue to buy diverse books, but it might look a bit different.
I think books will be continue to be published with a wider array of identities authoring and starring as main characters, but perhaps there will be fewer books that are specifically about topics of race and gender.
Other Predictions
I think this is going to signal a very difficult moment for publishing.
Because if this trend continues, publishing will have to pull back on large advances and numbers of authors they sign under the “diverse books” banner.
Not because those books or authors are bad, but because people aren’t buying them.
The most I can give the article is this: It’s possible that editors committed to publishing “woke” books allowed their bias towards those materials to override their good sense of trends and marketing.
But, to be fair to them, they were hired to find diverse authors and books, sign them on, and that’s what they did. I think it’s a little bit of a “shit rolls downhill” situation to say that these editors are to blame, when really it’s the publishers putting their money into a literary trend that was not going to last forever.
I think the falsehood here is that publishers will either have to continue their diversity initiatives and tank their businesses, or they can admit that they were publishing diverse books because that’s where the money was at, it’s no longer there, therefore it’ll stop.
I think that’s false because it can be both: There can be periods where the trends in books happen to dovetail with your personal values, and those are good, golden times. Cherish them. Enjoy them.
And there are times when tastes move away from yours, and all you can really do is shrug and put out another vampire novel.