The Vicious Cycle of Book Publishing

We are halfway through June, which means publishers are assessing what the final few months of the year will look like financially and asking questions like, How do sales this year compare to 2024? What does our budget look like from July to December? How many units (books) have we shipped overall? Are there holes in the fall schedule, and if so, what can we do to fill them?

Don’t worry, we won't be doing complicated math today. Here’s what happens with most publishers at this point every year, and why:

Note: This mainly applies to Big Five publishers.

• Every imprint at a publishing house has a budget. The budget is not only what they can spend on titles, but also how many units they need to ship and bill to retailers. When I say “units they need to ship,” I am referring to all the titles that Imprint publishes and how many copies, in total, they can ship and bill to retailers. Example: Imprint A must ship (I am making this up) 1.5M copies in 2025. That’s not 1.5M copies of one title. The imprint must acquire enough books and secure sufficient sales to retail accounts to meet the goal of shipping and billing 1.5 million copies of their titles overall. That doesn’t mean they will all sell. We’ll get to that later.

• A publisher’s backlist funds its frontlist, so they’re always looking for books that will sell continuously after the publication window—let’s say 3-6 months after the on-sale date. It’s worth looking at a publisher’s backlist to see what kind of books keep selling. This doesn’t mean a book needs to appear on bestseller lists for 269 weeks, as Braiding Sweetgrass has (it has been on The New York Times trade paperback bestseller list and was a surprise hit for the publisher). One of the most challenging aspects of starting a publishing company is building a backlist. It’s one of the things that acts as a safety net when frontlist sales are trending down.

• If a publisher’s revenue is meeting fiscal expectations, there may not be as much pressure to fill in gaps. However, that doesn’t mean they won’t continue to acquire books for the year. The more you can pad your revenue with extra sales, the better. Margins in book publishing are razor-thin!

• The reason publishers acquire more books than they can support with marketing and publicity is because of how many units they are required to bill each fiscal year (see my first bullet point). At the Big Five, there are always books published where the mantra is, “Let’s just see what happens with it.” I wouldn’t categorize those books as midlist; I’d place them a notch lower. The thing is, authors won’t know their place in the pecking order until they get a sense of the promotional plans. The problem with this method is that too many books are published. One of the driving factors behind this model is the possibility of a breakout book that might become a backlist title. Still, I don’t think a book should be published unless it has marketing and publicity muscle behind it. Discoverability is a significant problem in book publishing, and it has worsened with the increasing number of books published each year, particularly since Barnes & Noble changed its process for ordering books (the store managers choose titles, which means several titles are skipped).

• By mid-June, publishers know if they’re hitting their numbers. If they are meeting or exceeding their fiscal responsibility, whatever sells over the next six months is gravy. If they’re falling short, they need to make decisions about moving books up or acquiring crash titles (crash books are on an expedited schedule). Over the past decade, crash books have become increasingly prevalent, suggesting that capitalism remains resilient. A crash book can make a publisher’s year. I’ve experienced it time and again wherever I’ve worked. Compare it to having an F in a class and completing every extra-credit assignment and studying like crazy for a few weeks to earn an A (good thing my kids don’t read this—it happened with one of them). It’s stressful, but I don’t see things changing anytime soon.

• Another budget factor is if a book is done early. In other words, the publisher had scheduled it for March 2026, but the manuscript is ready early and requires minimal work. If it’s a book they know will sell (as well as one can understand that), they’ll move up the publication date. They could switch it out with a book that is supposed to be published in July. It happens more than you’d think.

• On the flip side, publishers might have signed an author to a deal with a fall publication date, and it is a big book they want to announce, but they’d rather wait until they know it will work. If it’s a celebrity or other high-profile figure, it might be a case where one ghostwriter didn’t work out, so they hired a new one. If all goes well, the book will be completed by June and announced soon thereafter.

• Conversely, some publishers hold off on announcing a big book because they need to ensure all the metadata (information about the book, like keywords, ISBN, price, etc.) is uploaded and the book is available for pre-order on Amazon and other retail sites.