The Publishing Industry is Allergic to Money

Here’s the real reason most books don’t sell—and why no one wants to admit it

Writers like to blame capitalism for their problems.

Listen—I get it. We work just as hard as anyone else, and unless we luck out and fall into the top 0.01%, we’re usually about as financially stable as the local barista. I make about $10,000 a year on my writing—including my Pens and Poison social media work—and run a separate college consulting business to keep my writing career afloat. When I’m not college counseling, I’m usually writing weekly Substack essays, shooting Instagram videos, and querying my novels; these tasks require much more time, effort, and brainpower than anything I do in my college counseling work (hopping on sales calls, editing essays, writing emails), yet running my business is exponentially more lucrative than my more “intellectual” work as a writer.

The outcome is frustrating to say the least—and I don’t blame anyone for taking this information and concluding that there’s something wrong with the publishing world at large. In a fair system, after all, hard work should reap commensurate rewards—but that’s unfortunately not the case when it comes to writing.

Such a reality is precisely the reason that many writers fall into the “capitalism is bad” rabbit hole.

Viewing the world through a Marxist lens, these writers become convinced that “the system” is rigged against them; growing bitter at the nebulous “corporate machine,” they conclude that capitalism is responsible for their failures and blame the commercialization of the publishing industry for their literary struggles.

In many ways, these writers aren’t wrong. It’s no secret that the publishing industry has largely swapped out deep, introspective literature for gimmicky genre fiction. I am guilty of making this argument myself, and I do genuinely believe the industry’s hyper-fixation on “books that will sell” is partially responsible for the downfall of great literature. After all, the top comment I’ve gotten from literary agents on my own novels is “I just don’t know how to sell this.”

The fact is that publishing isn’t fair—but not in the way you’re thinking.

It’s not that there’s no longer a market for “non-commercial” or more traditional fiction but that these books never get the chance to compete with their more “commercial” counterparts in the first place.

In other words, it’s not the publishing industry’s capitalism that’s to blame but the absence of it.

Now, if any of these more “commercial” books actually did sell—and if we had data that they performed better than their more “introspective” counterparts—we could certainly blame capitalism for our problems and conclude that current market demands have brought good contemporary literature to a state of near obsolescence. The problem, however, is that none of these “commercial” books actually do sell, suggesting that the publishing industry is working directly against market demands and—by extension—against the fundamental principles of capitalism itself.

According to data from Nielsen BookScan, 95 percent of trade titles published in the U.S. sell fewer than 1,000 total copies. Earnings reports from Penguin Random House suggest that every other book published in the United States sells fewer than twelve copies. What this means is that while publishers supposedly optimize for sales, the vast majority of books—even the “commercial” ones—barely sell at all.

Are publishing professionals just that terrible at assessing sales trends, or is something else going on here?

I suspect it is a mix of both: ignorance of market demands and knowing opposition to them.

Trained in “grievance studies” at elite liberal arts universities, publishing professionals bring their lopsided worldviews to the workforce and believe that the purpose of literature is to create societal change or to elevate LGBTQ+ and BIPOC voices. One such professional recently lamented the fact that books authored by the alphabet soup tribe don’t sell—all while insisting that the “conversation about diversity in publishing” needs to make “real progress.” It is no wonder that many literary agents can no longer support themselves on book sales, as this particular agent confesses—they are so far removed from reality that they have no pulse on what people actually want to read. As a result, many agents and editors base their decisions on past trends, concluding that if Fifty Shades of Grey became an overnight bestseller, the strategy should be to push out more BDSM books—or that if Sally Rooney’s fourth-grade sentences sold copies, then readers want minimalist prose and elementary vocabulary.

The issue with this line of thinking is that it defies the fundamental principles of capitalism: risk-taking and innovation. Running on formulas and “comp titles,” the publishing industry promotes sameness rather than difference, insisting on disseminating books that all sound like one another. The problem with this strategy is that while Rooney herself might drive sales, few other authors writing in her style will see the same success. If I make a knock-off of a famous shoe, after all, most people will still purchase the original—but if I make a completely different shoe, my product is guaranteed to gain attention on the market.

Why, then, do publishing professionals keep making the same shoe over and over again—and expecting it to sell just as well as the original?

The answer lies in ideology: because many literary agents are self-proclaimed disciples of Karl Marx, few understand how capitalism actually works. The result is a series of erroneous judgments on “what will sell”—and the scapegoating of unrelated external factors (the social media age, the death of reading, the
“evil” capitalists) to account for low sales numbers. In time, this self-perpetuating loop only causes agents and editors to double down on their Marxist convictions—which brings us to our second point.

Publishers knowingly defy “what sells” to promote certain ideological messages over others.

Agents and editors represent books based on personal taste rather than the desires of the greater populace. How many times, after all, have you been told by a literary agent that they didn’t “relate” to the book or that they don’t “believe” in it enough to champion it? Such language suggests that the industry runs on subjective taste rather than objective market demands. Compare the job of the literary agent to that of any other type of salesperson, and the ludicrousness of such a model becomes immediately apparent: a good salesperson, after all, should be able to sell anything. When literary agents therefore claim that they “can’t sell” a given book, they are either a) admitting that they are bad at their job or b) purposely rejecting books they don’t “relate” to.

What this suggests is that agents actually don’t care about selling books—not, at least, if these books run counter to their personal convictions. Back in the 1940s, for instance, Victor Gollancz—one of the biggest publishers of the past century—famously refused to publish Animal Farm on the grounds that it was too “anti-Soviet.” While Gollancz was busy going out of his way to turn publishing into the ideological project we know it as today, Orwell found a different publisher, and Animal Farm became one of the bestselling books of the 20th century. Gollancz, meanwhile, lost not only an enormous sum of cash but also the opportunity to represent one of the most accomplished writers of the decade.

To Gollancz, the goal of publishing was to promote a particular ideological message rather than to drive book sales, and such is precisely the mentality of many literary agents today. These agents don’t care about selling books as much as they are interested in promoting their hyper-specific political agendas.

In this way, the publishing industry becomes fundamentally anti-capitalist. It actively thwarts market demands and creates a monopolistic system to prevent the people from accessing products they could otherwise consume in a free market. Couple that with unfair barriers to entry, and the result is the broken publishing system we are all familiar with today.

In an ideal capitalist society, after all, barriers to entry should not discourage any given individual from stepping into competition. Take my industry, college counseling, as an example. I started my company at the age of 24 with no prior business experience. I nevertheless created a profitable business in less than a year of operation because I provided a service that people responded to. While the market ultimately decided the value of my product, I had a fair shot of getting my service out there and letting people decide whether they wished to step into exchange with yours truly.

Such is not the case for the publishing industry: most writers aren’t given a chance to let the market decide the value of their product because the barriers to entry are based on arbitrary, subjective criteria. That is not to say that barriers to entry shouldn’t exist at all—I make the argument here that some gatekeeping is necessary in the literary world—but that the barriers must be ultimately beneficial for the consumer. In the case of the medical industry, for instance, high barriers to entry are set in place out of safety precautions—you wouldn’t want your doctor to botch a brain surgery, after all—and even then, a true capitalist would argue that medical licensure creates a monopoly-like system that promotes artificial scarcity. Under a truly capitalist system, we would let anyone practice medicine and allow the consumer to take on the associated risk. You might want your brain surgeon to have a medical license, sure, but if you have an eye infection and just need an antibiotic prescription, you might choose to go to an unlicensed doctor. Under this system, the consumer is given the ultimate free choice of what he wishes to consume.

And while one can make a strong argument in favor of barriers to entry in the medical world, such instances are completely illogical when it comes to publishing, where a greater number of books in circulation would do no one any harm—and would only ultimately benefit both the producer and the consumer. Yet because the publishing industry erects insurmountable barriers to entry, limiting the different sorts of books that see the light of day, it ultimately harms the interests of the people. In order to secure a literary agent in hopes of getting one’s manuscript in front of an editor, authors are required to go through a score of undefined hoops, the majority of which are determined by arbitrary people with arbitrary motives. Under a capitalist system, on the other hand, the author would simply be allowed to prove that his book would sell by placing it on the market—and take responsibility for all flops.

Now, one could argue that such a system is already in place with the existence of self-publishing, a system often held up as proof that the publishing world is a free market, but while self-publishing allows for distribution, it does not grant access to the infrastructure—bookstore placement, media coverage, institutional legitimacy, prize circuits, and cultural conversation—that actually creates readership. A self-published book, therefore, while technically “available,” does not pierce the market in any meaningful sense. Self-publishing, then, is simply a parallel economy in the same way that nurses are parallel to doctors—and most writers are shut out from meaningful participation before readers ever get the chance to decide what is worth reading.

No—publishing isn’t failing because it’s “too capitalist.” Publishing is failing because it isn’t capitalist enough.

Under a truly capitalist system, every book would get the chance to compete equally. The market would adjust to what it wants to see, and the soulless novels that industry pushes out today would stop selling.

Your book isn’t selling because it’s not “commercial” enough. It’s not selling because it never got the chance to make sales in the first place.

Capitalism would fix that.

Under a capitalist system, after all, the people—rather than arbitrary gatekeepers—would decide what they want to read.

And the people have had enough.

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