Has 'Silicon Valley-style Startup Disruption' Arrived for Book Publishing?

The Baffler says a new publishing house launched earlier this month 'brings Silicon Valley-style startup disruption to the business of books.'

Authors Equity has 'a tiny core staff, offloading its labor to a network of freelancers,' and like a handful of other publishers 'is upending the way that authors get paid, eschewing advances and offering a higher percentage of profits instead.'

It is worth watching because its team includes several of the most important publishing people of the twenty-first century. And if it works, it will offer a model for tightening the connection between book culture and capitalism, a leap forward for the forces of efficiency and the fantasies of frictionless markets, ushering in a world where literature succeeds if and only if it sells....

Authors Equity's website presents its vision in strikingly neoliberal corporatespeak. The company has four Core Principles: Aligned Incentives; Bespoke Teams; Flexibility and Transparency; and Long-Term Collaboration. What do they mean by these MBA keywords? Aligned Incentives is explained in the language of human capital: 'Our profit-share model rewards authors who want to bet on themselves.' Authors, that is, take on more of the financial risk of publication. At a traditional publishing house, advances provide authors with guaranteed cash early in the process that they can use to live off while writing. With Authors Equity, nothing is guaranteed and nothing given ahead of time; an author's pay depends on their book's profits.

In an added twist, 'Profit participation is also an option for key members of the book team, so we're in a position to win together.' Typically, only an author's agent's income is directly tied to an author's financial success, but at Authors Equity, others could have a stake. This has huge consequences for the logic of literary production. If an editor, for example, receives a salary and not a cut of their books' profits, their incentives are less immediately about profit, offering more wiggle room for aesthetic value. The more the people working on books participate in their profits, the more, structurally, profit-seeking will shape what books look like.

'Bespoke Teams' is a euphemism for gigification. With a tiny initial staff of six, Authors Equity uses freelance workers to make books, unlike traditional publishers, which have many employees in many departments... Their fourth Core Principle — Long-Term Collaboration — addresses widespread frustration with a systemic problem in traditional publishing: the fetishization of debut authors who receive decent or better advances, fail to earn out, and then struggle to have a career. It's a real problem and one where authors' interests and capitalist rationalization are, as it were, aligned. Authors Equity sees that everyone might profit when an author can build a readership and develop their skill.
The article concludes with this prediction. 'It's not impossible that we'll look back in twenty years and see its founding as auguring the beginning of the startup age in publishing.'

Food for thought... Pulp-fiction mystery writer Mickey Spillane once said, 'I'm a writer, not an author. The difference is, a writer makes money.'

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