Change of the decade

A conversation with Jane Friedman

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Before striking out on her own, Jane Friedman had an impressive publishing career that included executive roles at Writer’s Digest and The Virginia Quarterly Review. Her first newsletter, Electric Speed, offering support for writers and other creatives, launched in 2009. The Bottom Line, devoted to the business of publishing, followed in 2015. It’s been a big part of my publishing education.

There are many publishing experts out there. Some are plugged into the big houses. Others have specialities—publicity, say, or metadata. Few match Jane for her comprehensive knowledge of the whole publishing landscape. And she’s unmatched for her insights on what’s happening at street level, which is where most of the action is these days.

I’ve always wanted to speak with Jane. I finally reached out this past week after reading her thoughts on how publishing had changed over the ten-year life of The Bottom Line. You can learn more about her here. You can find her latest book, The Business of Being A Writer, Second Edition, University of Chicago Press (2025), here along with a small library of publishing related titles.

Our conversation ran long so I’m going to deliver it in two parts. More next week.

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Ken: In the last decade, if you had to pick one seismic change, what would it be?

Jane: Let me pull up my piece to remember what I said. I know audiobooks were in there. The media landscape, generally. There’s hybrid and self-publishing, and direct sales.

The biggest change? Probably the shift toward self-publishing, especially in genre fiction—it’s been enormous. It started in the early 2010s, but the implications have really accelerated. If you look at Penguin Random House’s share in genre fiction, you can see it declining precipitously, and I think self-publishing is a significant part of that—particularly in romance, where authors have increasingly taken over.

I’m working on a piece coming out later this month about something related: the number of traditional deals being made for existing work by self-published authors. Those deals doubled in the US in the last year.

Ken: Say that again—what doubled?

Jane: Using Publisher’s Marketplace—not a complete accounting, but the best indicator we have—I found roughly fifty deals in 2024 involving self-published authors selling existing work—usually a series, often multiple books. In the most recent year, that number was about a hundred. Sometimes it’s print rights only; sometimes it’s all rights. It’s mostly romance and genre fiction, but it’s a meaningful shift that’s underreported.

Ken: That fits with the biggest shift I’ve noticed—the explosion in the number of titles published each year. You don’t go from several hundred thousand books a year to a couple of million without self-publishing and hybrid driving a lot of it. Discoverability becomes a major issue for everyone—backlist gets buried. It affects everyone, including self-publishers.

Jane: Exactly. There are lots of knock-on effects. Amazon ends up with even more power than it ought to have, because everyone is trying to game the system—rank, charts, visibility.

This connects to something people have been arguing about lately. There was a New York Times piece about AI-generated romance. People got angry at a quote implying that if it takes you six months to write a book, you’ll “lose the race.” And people say, “Who said it was a race?” But the reality is: there is a race—especially a race to be on top of the Amazon charts.

Ken: Absolutely. Amazon’s domination started earlier than ten years ago, but it feels even more dominant now. Has it become a bigger factor across publishing?

Jane: Yes—Kindle Unlimited alone has had a major effect. Audible has, too. The whole notion of a creditworthy audiobook. It’s also strange that Amazon has managed to preserve high audiobook prices in the US, when in Europe subscription models have been more common. Spotify may be changing that. But Amazon’s influence is pretty remarkable, especially in digital formats.

Ken: I don’t do anything on Kindle Direct, so I’m less familiar. What kind of volume are we talking about?

Jane: People try to extrapolate from the Kindle Unlimited payout pool—because it’s a pool system. Those payouts to authors keep getting larger every year, so everyone assumes there must be the same or better business. It’s like tens of millions of dollars in payouts.

Ken: So it’s very significant—and mostly genre fiction?

Jane: Mostly, yes. I look at fiction on Amazon very differently than nonfiction. I think it’s because my lens is very much on the author community and people who are trying to make a career as a writer—even if there’s a little bit of a widget mentality there. By that I mean people writing four to six books a year to keep the engine going. The novels become a bit of a commodity. That’s a community that gathers at conferences, you know, there’s some camaraderie there, and people collaborating, not so different from any author community prior to Amazon. But on the nonfiction side, I feel it’s just full of get-rich-quick schemes. For the most part. You know, people trying to make a quick buck. These authors are not authors, they’re LLCs, or they’re people working from Romania, or whatever. And the book’s quality, there’s just so much scammy crap, you know, some of it infringing copyright. AI has accelerated that…

Ken: Yeah, that’s another surprise. I thought by this point, Amazon would have cracked down on some of that, just for the integrity of its own business.

Jane: I stilI think, any day now, they’ll do something, right? Any day now. But the day hasn’t come.

Ken: We skipped over hybrid publishing. So, alternative business models and pay-to-play business models have been around for a long time but they’ve come into their own in the last decade. There’s a legitimacy attached to it now that maybe wasn’t there before.

Jane: It’s such a tortured area, from my perspective. Again, the lens I put on this is author-first, and I hear far more complaints from the authors about hybrid and what they thought it was going to accomplish for them. They feel this … sometimes, shame, embarrassment, regret that they have put so much money into paying to publish and didn’t see either more sales, or more status or prestige. They thought that the distribution that they would get if they were working with a decent hybrid would mean more than maybe it did.

I find it’s different with the more sophisticated business people who use hybrid, the people who are entrepreneurs and see this book as more of an investment. They have some larger goals, rather than being a career writer—that’s not really their lane. They’re thinking about this book as maybe a tool or something that will further their business goals. Those people tend to be very happy with hybrid, and that certainly makes sense to me. Hybrid has grown to serve that market, but there’s also kind of this other market of companies that call themselves hybrid, but, you know, they’re really just taking people’s money and putting the book out. I don’t want to name names, but I think they’re pretty obvious. It’s just the sausage factory. They charge a lot. They dress it up as, look, you get power and control, and you keep your rights. I just think they’re targeting people who don’t know any better, who don’t understand that what they’re being offered isn’t necessarily better than self-publishing, and that they have a better chance of earning money self-publishing.

There was a really good study, you probably saw it, called “Author ROI.” It was a collaboration with hybrid publishers and Gotham Ghostwriters to look at their earnings and determine the paths to a return on investment. They looked at traditional publishing, self-publishing, and hybrid, where the money comes from, what the sales look like across those paths. I thought they did a really good job of trying to compare and contrast what that’s like. Now, again, I think they were focused on a very particular audience of business book people, because they were looking at business book authors. The thing that makes me feel queasy is where you get, you know, the novelists and the memoirists who, for whatever reason, they can’t get into or continue in the traditional publishing life. And they just can’t fathom self-publishing, so they go off and get into a hybrid publisher situation, which may or may not go well. I’ve seen some people spend upwards of $100,000. And they do sell a lot of copies, but their profit is, like, $5,000. So I’m not really sure what you’re accomplishing, but okay, as long as you’re happy, I’m not here to judge.

Ken: Has anyone counted how many hybrid houses there are in the US?

Jane: The best number would probably come from the Independent Book Publishers Association, because their member levels attach to what sort of publisher you are, and I think last time I asked them, it was around 400-500? Maybe not that much, but well into the hundreds. There’s probably more, because not everyone’s going to join that organization.

Ken: That’s crazy. There wouldn’t have been maybe dozens of them ten years ago?

Jane: Yeah, I would agree with that. The IBPA, I think it’s directly said that this is one of the biggest growing areas. It’s changed, really, the shape of the organization and its mission and what it does. I’m not going to say whether it’s for good or ill. I don’t really know. That’s where things are going, right?

Ken: Yes.

Jane: I also think that it’s interesting that a greater number of their members are what they call author-publishers. These are people who have a really high interest, after they publish themselves and they learn something, and they’re like, oh, well, now I can make money helping other people publish, and so they kind of edge into hybrid publishing as a way to keep everything afloat for themselves, or whatever their goals might be. It’s hard to sell books, but it’s easy to get authors to pay to publish.

Ken: It’s an easier business, there’s no question about that. Let’s talk about the media landscape. We’ve seen the marginalization or deterioration of conventional media, on the one hand. And we’ve got the rise of Instagram and BookTok. Would you say those are the two biggest changes in the last decade?

Jane: Yes, the fact that mainstream media … I don’t know that it moves enough books for publishers anymore. They’ve had to change their entire marketing and promotion engines. I mean, if they haven’t, they’re suffering. If you look at something like [super fast-growing] Sourcebooks, having spoken to their team, I know that they look at marketing and promotion very differently now than how they did even five years ago. I imagine that all publishers are going through similar changes.

Ken: So how would you describe the shift?

Jane: When I got into publishing in the nineties, and I think this held true at least through 2010, maybe even longer, what you’re really focused on was selling to the bookstores or libraries, or the middlemen, I guess. And there wasn’t really a direct-to-consumer effort. But now you get into the early 2010s, you have publishers thinking, well, maybe we should start an email newsletter list. They’re seeing the power of doing BookBub promotions—my gosh, look at how many books this sells! Whereas before, where would you advertise? The New York Times, or Publishers Weekly, or some of these trade outlets, Library Journal. So now we have much more consumer-oriented advertising that can be measured.

Obviously social media coincides with everything we’re talking about. The really interesting thing for me is that, initially, publishers said, and it was partly true, that social media doesn’t sell books. It might not have sold books for them. But the people, the authors, in particular, who had meaningful engagement, I think they would tell you, yes, this sells books. I saw it sell books for myself, I saw it help me build a career when I left my corporate publishing job, so I knew that it was meaningful, and it was a little simplistic to say this doesn’t sell books.

But then you get into TikTok and everything changes, right? That is really an inflection point. I still have trouble figuring out why, other than just the magnitude, it was such a greater impact than what anyone had seen before on social. For whatever reason, it seemed to be more traceable. Like, you could go back to the source. And then BookScan started its list of the top 200 BookTok authors, and then you had to pay attention. So that’s been really incredible to observe. Now you’ve got the publishers, the ones who are more forward-thinking, setting up TikTok shops. And you’ve got the self-publishing authors looking at how they can sell direct? What does that look like? How can I manage it?

Part of this is pushback against Amazon, the loss of profits, and seeing that readers are willing to pay more if they’re getting something that they feel is more of an experience—or exclusive—something. The whole deluxe edition phenomenon.

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