Whose Business Model Is Broken Anyway?

It's been some time since your friend the Doctor has posted here--preoccupied as he has been with sorting out the syntax of authors far and wide--but a publishing story in, of all places, the New York Post, has prompted him to pick up his quill and stab it into the inkwell, with a snort of irritation. 

Once again poor old book publishing, the Post's Keith Kelly tells us, is to be "disrupted," this time by the online platform Substack, which has already taken a whack at disrupting magazine and newspaper publishing by peeling writers away from their media-company employers and offering their content directly to readers via subscription. Now, apparently, it's coming for the book industry. 

Media journalist Zack Greenburg, who has written four books for houses like Penguin Portfolio and Simon & Schuster, will release his new book, We Are All Musicians Now, in weekly installments on Substack. A paid subscription will cost $5 a month or $50 a year (typical of Substack); he will also post other content weekly that readers can get free. In the Post, Greenburg sounds pretty jazzed: "All in all, with the advance money being in the same ballpark, I’d rather go to a place where I can be my own boss with a higher upside than try to force it through an old business model that I think is broken." 

I'm all for exploring new business models, but when I hear someone bashing publishing as "broken," I cock a skeptical eyebrow. As I've said in my own book, What Editors Do, publishing has been declared broken repeatedly since Gutenberg. The industry has plenty of problems, but in fact it has weathered the digital era--and even a worldwide pandemic-- far more successfully than many other media businesses.  To compare Substack's "disruptive" model with conventional books,  let's look at the "value propositions" side by side by doing a little arithmentic. 

A typical book might run 75-100,000 words. Let's say Greenburg's is 80,000, just to make this math simple. And let's say Greenburg posts a 2000-word excerpt each week--that's long for a Substack but we'll assume he's a real fast typist....It'll take 40 weeks, roughly 8 months, to get his whole book posted, by which point a subscriber has paid $40 (or $50 if they went with the annual rate). 

In other words, the subscriber is paying $40-50 for content they could buy for roughly $25-30 in the form of a hardcover book, or $10-15 as an ebook. In either of those formats, they could read the whole thing at once (no waiting a week between chapters); bookmark or search passages--even give it to another person in the case of the print book. 

So Greenburg and Substack propose to charge their consumer a price four or five times what tired old conventional publishing would ask for a more convenient, more enduring version of the same product. But they will dribble it out over several months. Well, that's a new business model all right!  But it's not clear to me that it's any kind of improvement on what "broken" old book publishing has to offer, from a reader's perspective. 

Maybe what Greenburg believes is that it's a better deal for him, and given the markup just described, you'd think it would be. But that's not clear either, given the chunk of subscription revenues that Substack takes in return for what it advances an author. Other authors who got Substack advances have not necessarily found the economics favorable. One, Matthew Yglesias, concluded accepting an advance had cost him nearly $400,000 in subscription revenue.  

I'm no knee-jerk defender of traditional publishing, as readers of earlier posts here are aware. And writers are entitled to make a living however they want--there is no easy way, goodness knows. But bashing the industry as "broken" is a cheap shot, especially if your whizbang new model is a worse deal for readers.

[photograph via libertypressia.com] 

What "Fair and Balanced" Meant When FDR Was a Journalist

Guest post: John Q. Barrett is a professor of law at St. John's University and a scholar who is writing the biography of one of America's great Supreme Court justices, Robert Jackson. John discovered and edited (and I published) a wonderfully engaging memoir by Jackson of his friend Franklin D. Roosevelt, titled That Man. John maintains an e-mail listserv that features news and comment about Jackson and his times. It seemed particularly poignant, in this week of war-by-soundbite over health care, to read the following message, which John Barrett has allowed me to repost here. 


In summer 1928, a time of pitched policy debates and impending electoral contests, a New York State lawyer who was active in Democratic Party politics began to write occasional pieces for his local newspaper.

The column was called “Between Neighbors.”  In his first output, the columnist explained that his writing would be “more or less serious,” and that it would be aimed at his politically diverse upstate neighbors:

These neighbors of mine are a representative cross-section of the community, and are made up of Republicans, Democrats and people who are not affiliated with any party.  Therefore in talking about politics, I am keeping that fact in mind and have no intention of using the shop-worn methods of condemning everything on one side and praising everything on the other side of the political fence.

The day has gone by when you can fool people into believing that the nation, or a state or a country or a city is going to the dogs just because one political party happens to be in power in it.  People are sick of the kind of editorial writing which sees only good in every measure and every man sponsored by one party and only bad on the other side.  So, too, it is the little provincial papers that today in the news-columns magnify as first page news any disagreements in their opponents’ camps and run only a half inch on the back page about any trouble in their own camp.

That is one reason why the bitterly partisan press is losing its influence in this country.  The other reason is that there is more and better education everywhere and readers do not as much as formerly take the views and news of a one-sided paper as Gospel Truth.  I told [the local newspaper editor] I hoped he would get some Republican to write each week in this paper, but if he can’t find one, I shall try to be as fair as I can.

Although these ideas were as wise and fitting in 1928 as they are today, the lawyer did not, in the end, have much time to live up to them as a newspaper columnist.  He earlier had held political office.  That fall, after publishing ten columns in two months, he gave up the pastime to accept his party’s nomination to be a candidate.  (Robert H. Jackson, another upstate New York lawyer who was the candidate’s friend but also had a more booming law practice, became involved sporadically in the campaign.)

That November, the former Beacon Standard columnist, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was elected governor of New York.  In that office and in his next office, he got, at least sometimes, the fair and balanced media coverage that leaders and policies, and also we neighbors in the audience, deserve.

--John Q. Barrett
[For more of John Barrett's Jackson posts, or to subscribe to them, click here.]