More than 7,000 new books are released every day — but most of those writers won’t make a living off their work. Author Michael Castleman joins host Krys Boyd to discuss three distinct eras of book publishing, from the first printing press to Amazon, and why today it’s fairly easy to find yourself in print — but much harder to find an audience to read it. His book is “The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Publishing.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd There are plenty of jobs people do for the love of the work rather than the size of the paycheck. Ask all the park rangers and social workers and fitness instructors you know. But if they didn’t earn enough to at least scrape by, they’d probably have to quit. For many riders, though, the drive to keep doing their thing is so great they’ll work knowing they might be paid almost nothing for their laborers if they can even find somebody to publish them. And yet, in the U.S. alone, an astonishing 7400 new titles are released every single day from KERA in Dallas. This is Think I’m Kris Boyd. Here’s what’s so strange. Even in the era of TV and movies and social media and podcasts, an eager audience of readers is still really excited about books. So why does the book business seem to be perpetually in flux and in peril? And what should writers understand about how it all works, and how rare it is to make a living, let alone a fortune in the 21st century? Michael Castleman has had significantly more success than most authors, but he is not fabulously wealthy, and he doesn’t expect you to have heard of him, despite the fact that he’s published four mysteries and 15 works of nonfiction, including the one we’re talking about today titled The Untold Story of Books A Writer’s History of Publishing. Michael, welcome to think.
Michael Castleman Thanks for having me on, Krys. I really appreciate it.
Krys Boyd I want to start by setting you up for a joke. What does it take to make a small fortune in publishing?
Michael Castleman Start with a large one.
Krys Boyd All right. So, so, generally speaking, producing books is rarely an effective get rich quick scheme. But you do think it’s useful for writers and for devoted readers to understand the book business. When you write that you found a lot of mystery and mythology surrounding the industry, what would you say are some of the biggest misconceptions?
Michael Castleman Well, as far as authors are concerned, the number one myth is that with, a modicum of talent and a lot of hard work and a little luck, you can make a living writing books. Now. Some people do. Best-Selling Stephen King is makes a great living writing books Jim Patterson, Nora Roberts, people like Colleen Hoover. But they are the exceptions. The, the typical author, myself included, doesn’t make a living, writing books. In fact, you need another job to support your writing. Right now, probably. Well, this year, 2 million books will be published in the United States, and maybe 5000 writers make a living. I mean, it is a tiny fraction of 1%. And so for the vast majority of authors, writing books is not a career. It is an expensive hobby. Similar to playing golf or world travel or owning a boat. You have to have other income to support your writing, which I have always had. I mean, I’ve always used, book writing to supplement my other income. And that was in the 20th century when you could make money. Today, in the 21st, it’s even harder to make money. And in the 21st century, authors have to assume that their books are going to cost them more than they make.
Krys Boyd Before we get into the history, just from your perspective, why write instead of owning a boat or traveling the world?
Michael Castleman Well, sometimes I feel like writing is sort of like a chronic disease. You can’t get rid of it. But, you know, it occasionally brings great happiness. I mean, I love to write. I, I’m, I’m the son of a librarian. I grew up in libraries. I grew up with books. I loved reading, and, I was the weird kid who thought, term papers were the best part of school. I always loved to write, and so if you love it, then you can be willing to put up with all the nonsense that you have to go through to see a book come out. And almost all the writers I know, feel that way. I know a few people who are I know a bestselling author, but she feels the same way. It’s, you love it. You have to love it first, and then, you know, the cookie crumbles. However it crumbles in. In your career? My career, I’ve done reasonably well. But I’m not rich and famous. And I doubt that any of our listeners have ever heard of me.
Krys Boyd You divide the history of publishing into three major eras, starting with Gutenberg. Up through the current era of digital publishing. The Gutenberg era lasted through the end of the 19th century, roughly, and was the age of what you call the writer entrepreneur like. Rather than being hired by publishers, authors, paid printers to generate copies of their books.
Michael Castleman Yes. The idea that publishers pay authors for manuscripts, that is, that only happened for about 80 years, from about 1920 to 2000. Before World War one. There were no publishers as we know them today. What we had was authors writing books. They would hire printers to print those books, and then they would market them pretty much on their own. I mean, and printers competed for business. Ben Ben Franklin published a lot of books by competing with other printers for the business. So until World War one, printers used fairly slow presses that couldn’t print a lot of books to make money writing, printing books, they depended on authors hiring them. But after World War One, high speed industrial presses could churn out so many books so quickly that, printers stopped taking orders from authors. And a new profession developed in what we call publishing today. And publishers paid authors for manuscripts, turned around, paid printers to print them, and then the publishers distributed those books. But that was a fairly and that’s now called traditional publishing. But it only lasted for 80 years out of the 600 years of the book business. Since 2000, what we have digital publishing, which allows pretty much anybody to publish anything. And as a result, there’s a tremendous increase in the number of books, in fact, an avalanche and the sales per title have been plummeting to the point where publishers can’t really afford to give many people advances anymore. I mean, Stephen King still gets advances, but, most of the rest of us don’t. In fact, my calculations suggest that about 99.5% of authors now write books without getting advances.
Krys Boyd I look this up before I sat down to talk with you, Michael. Current estimates are that an original Gutenberg Bible is worth about $35 million today. I gather nobody would be more surprised by this than Gutenberg himself.
Michael Castleman Absolutely. Gutenberg went bankrupt. Gutenberg had enough money to set up a few presses, but he didn’t have enough money for ink and and paper and all the supplies he needed to publish books. And he borrowed that money. And when he printed his Bibles, they were so expensive he couldn’t sell them. And he went bankrupt from day one. The book publishing industry has been a has been quicksand. And the graveyards are filled with, defunct, bankrupt, publishers. But that didn’t stop other people from getting into the field and, and and making a go of it in in some cases.
Krys Boyd I mean, the printing press as used by Gutenberg really was a revolution. You remind us in the book that before Gutenberg, when books had to be hand copied by these professional scribes, there were probably fewer than 10,000 books in all of Europe. How much and how fast did that change? Once books could be printed mechanically?
Michael Castleman Well, yes. The, when, before printing, not only were there very few books in Europe, but the books that there were in university libraries were considered so valuable that they were chained to the shelves. You couldn’t take them out of the room because they were chained to the shelves. They were so valuable. Within 100 years of Gutenberg. Those 10,000 books was suddenly about 150 million books. I mean, when the printing press appeared, it was so revolutionary and it spread so quickly throughout Europe and the whole world, really, that, you know, we now Revere Gutenberg as someone who changed the world. But like I said, Gutenberg had a tough time in the book business and went broke.
Krys Boyd Why did the crowned heads of Europe at the time worry about this astonishing new technology?
Michael Castleman Well, they were convinced the kings and, popes were convinced that, the printing press would foment, sedition and heresy. And they were right. I mean, the printing press is generally given credit for, social revolution that that, brought down the monarch use of Europe and turned Europe into constitutional democracies. And, the printing press is generally credited, credited with playing a key role in the Protestant Reformation that, successfully challenged the Catholic Church for religious, hegemony in Europe. So, when information becomes more available to people, that changes things. And the problem with information becoming more available is that a lot of false information gets out there. And that’s why we are struggling with, in an unprecedented amount of lies and distortions and disinformation on the internet today, the struggles that we are having today with, the difference between real news and fake news is very similar to what, what happened, throughout history, ever since the printing press was invented. Once you, give people access to a great deal of information, they can get good information and they can get false information. And that’s that’s the canon. That’s the two edged sword of, of, having, information be so available, to everyone.
Krys Boyd So interesting. You explain that early on, the ability to produce physical books was seen as much more valuable than the ability to write them. The idea of writing for money was viewed as like intellectual prostitution.
Michael Castleman Correct. Early on in in the publishing era. The intelligentsia or the people who wrote the books and the intelligentsia, were, generally wealthy, and they didn’t need to make money, from writing their books. What they wanted to do was contribute to knowledge, which most writers still want to do today. So that’s that’s remained the case. But they felt that writing for money was dishonorable and a form of intellectual prostitution. And they, they didn’t want to do that. And that’s why that’s part of the reason why, printers wound up holding copyrights to printed work, because the, the authors, the intelligentsia, didn’t, didn’t really want to, dirty their dainty little hands with the business side of the business.
Krys Boyd So, authors, intellectual property rights ultimately weren’t spelled out anywhere until the early 18th century. The literary form we know, as the novel is broadly seen to have come into existence in the 18th century. Did the ability for writers to earn money have anything to do with this, or is that just a coincidence?
Michael Castleman Well, it’s hard to parse it out, but. Yes. As the novel took off, novels were big hits, especially with women. In fact, the first novel in English is called, Virtue Rewarded. It’s known as Pamela, for its, heroine. But novels were a huge, huge hit in England. And then later in the United States, and they appealed to women who were leaving the farm and moving to the city to work in the new factories of the Industrial Revolution. And these young women were avid readers, and they didn’t make much money. But, with it, a lot of them bought books now, not not leather bound, expensive type books, but they bought the precursors of today’s paperbacks and e-books, which were known as pulp fiction because they were printed on very coarse paper made out of wood pulp. But, pulp books were wildly popular, and so was reading. And, and even today, women are the main readers, women, read three quarters of books and buy two thirds of them. So, the audience for reading is largely female.
Krys Boyd Michael, did growing literacy drive demand for books, or did the availability of those less expensive books create an appetite for literacy?
Michael Castleman They co-evolved. They both were happening. It’s time. As has, literacy. Well, in the United States, states passed laws requiring public education. And so literacy was imposed really by legislatures who felt that an informed, literate citizenship was, citizenry was necessary for, the. Democracy, American government to work. And so, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the proportion of literate Americans soared. And once they could read, their friends started talking about the books they were reading and that that pushed people to read more books. Now, the Bible, of course, was the book that the vast majority of people read the most. But, I’m starting in colonial times. All kinds of other books were being published. Not just novels, but, you know, books on health and medicine. And a big one in, in the colonial era was sermon collections. Famous famous ministers would publish collections of their sermons, which were, among the best selling books of the, late 18th century in the United States. And so the more people could read, the more books were around. It all kind of swirled and stirred into the same soup pot. And, until we have, today a, a largely literate nation, not everyone in the United States is, is actually functionally literate, but the vast majority of people are.
Krys Boyd So initially, in the days of the colonies, Europe was still the epicenter of publishing. How did printing and printed books start to make their way to the Americas?
Michael Castleman The way they did it was that the Americans stole them from the English. Books were put on ships sailing out of England, and they were brought to American shores. And as soon as they landed here, printers seized them. And if they were popular in England, the assumption was they would be popular in America. And they just started printing them willy nilly. They did not license and they did not, observe copyright. They, their, their copyright was and frankly, still is largely an illusion. And any book that showed up on American shores, if printers thought they could make money selling it, they just ripped it off and printed it. And there was really no way for authors in England to to sue Americans. I mean, it was, you know, the other side of the world. So, the book business, hasn’t has a patina of gentility, in the public mind. But actually, the real book business is the result of wholesale book piracy all over the world.
Krys Boyd It had never occurred to me that early books were not only not edited, they weren’t even proof read. How did that start to be something that was common with published books?
Michael Castleman The era. The issue of proofreading infuriated early authors and authors would give their manuscripts to early printers in the colonial period, or in the early, actually, a now we’re in the early 1800s, authors would give books to printers. The printers would give those books to apprentices to set the type. And the apprentices were these young boys who really were not all that, hip to they didn’t know grammar and usage and spelling. And so, books would come out with all kinds of mistakes that drove authors insane. So one Philadelphia printer, a guy named Matthew Carey, he came up with the idea that he would print a test page called A proof, and he would then ask the author or, other people to correct that proof so that the actual final printed book was was correct and didn’t was not full of embarrassing errors. And that those proofs became known as proof reading, which is the term we use today. Proof reading. And initially when, when Carey proposed this, other printers scoffed at him and said, oh God, that’s going to be more expensive. It’s going to make you have to print the book twice. Authors aren’t going to pay for that. But, but authors did pay for it because they really wanted error free books. And, very quickly, proofreading became standard and all printers adopted it.
Krys Boyd You mentioned that the invention of pulp paper, which was much cheaper than paper produced by older ways, really revolutionized books. It’s so interesting that there was this class division in readers. There were those who could patronize the bookshops and buy the expensive, leather bound volumes, and those who bought novels at newsstands. But before very long, the newsstands were winning.
Michael Castleman The new sense of always won. I mean, leather bound books have always been a kind of, luxury item. And, most people bought pulp fiction, bought pulp books and, or, eventually started patronizing public libraries, but, you know. The, upper middle class and the wealthy people bought books, but the vast majority of Americans owned one book, a Bible, and if they owned a second book, it was an almanac. And if they owned a third big printed item, it was the Sears and Roebuck catalog. The idea of people having book collections of books, bookshelves, bookcases in their homes was unheard of until, the 20th century.
Krys Boyd What role did the abolitionist movement play in publishing and distributing works by black writers?
Michael Castleman They were critical. The abolitionists, published the first, screeds against slavery. In fact, it was, a coalition of abolitionists who published Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, which was, after the Bible, the best selling book in America during the entire 19th century. And, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which, demonized slaveholders and humanized enslaved people. Was really is generally cited as a key contributor to causing the Civil War and to rallying Americans against slavery. But it wasn’t publishers who published Uncle Tom’s Cabin or other memoirs by escaped slaves. It was abolitionists who had a, a political mission, and they became the de facto publishers, of those books. And they were the ones who gave the first black writers, a pulpit, a podium to, release their work. The other printers were, you know, as racist as, as could be and just dismissed black writers as inconsequential. It was the abolitionist movement who, launched, Frederick Douglass and, all of the early black writers.
Krys Boyd Why were so many magazines and newspapers with these captive audiences of people who have been shown to like reading? Initially reluctant to write about books.
Michael Castleman Well. In the 19th century, newspaper and magazine publishers viewed books as competition and why? Why put a spotlight on the competition? In the 19th century book, magazine and newspaper, publishers, actively ignored books because they didn’t want to shine a light on, on other ways that people could spend their money instead of buying their product. It was only as, industrial printing, progressed and the price of books came down and the and pulp books became a bigger thing that, that the newspaper and magazine publishers of America finally decided, well, you know, I guess we should pay attention to books. And The New York Times, didn’t publish its first book review until 1896. Just as just as industrial publishing was making books cheaper, as books became cheaper. Newspapers saw them as, a wrinkle in the culture that they should cover. And after 1896, when The New York Times published its first book reviews, within about ten years, most of the major newspapers in the United States were publishing book reviews, and many of the magazines as well, including all of the magazines that were launched by book publishers Harper’s and Lippincott Magazine and Scribner Magazine. All these magazines were launched by book publishers who were printing excerpts of their books in these magazines to try and drum up business, to sell the books.
Krys Boyd How did libraries become really central to so many American communities?
Michael Castleman Well, for that we have Andrew Carnegie to thank. Carnegie was a steel millionaire in Pittsburgh who, later in his life, became a philanthropist. And just as just as the culture was developing, great institutions like, you know, opera companies and, universities. A lot of them date from the late 19th century. And, so Carnegie decided that what America needed was more libraries. And he paid for the construction of almost 1700 libraries in cities and towns across the United States. In fact, Carnegie paid to erect the library that is eight blocks from my house. And so, those 1700 libraries made an enormous contribution to the idea that, hey, you know, every town should have a library, and those libraries should be filled with books. And Carnegie, really, was responsible for the sale of tens of millions of books from publishers to public libraries. And we, you know, had him to thank for our libraries today.
Krys Boyd So as it got easier and cheaper to quickly produce large numbers of physical books, publishers were suddenly facing a glut, and they flipped the script. They would decide which authors to publish. Is there any evidence that the quality of what circulated improved as a result of that?
Michael Castleman Well, there’s a debate that goes on endlessly about whether books are better today than they used to be. Quality of books has a lot less to do with who publishes them than how they are edited. And a lot of readers, and, don’t appreciate this. A lot of writers don’t appreciate it either. You know, the the myth is that a lone writer sits in a studio, writes the book, gives it to the publisher. Bingo. It’s a big hit. No, that’s not the way it works. Writing is much more collaborative than many people, believe. In The Untold Story of Books, I, I paid three professional editors to edit that book. And then I had about 50, friends and writer people I knew, read it and comment on it. You know, a lot the myth is among some people, some writers think, oh, I’m experienced. I’m experienced as a writer, I can edit myself. No, I’m sorry, you can’t, no one can bring someone else’s sensibilities to their work. And so that’s why editing is so important. And, and that’s the great downfall of today’s, self-published e-books. A lot of them aren’t edited. When self-published books are well edited, they often read beautifully. If they’re not, they they read like junk.
Krys Boyd These days, Michael, writers understandably dream about appearing on a best seller list, but often those lists feature works in different order. Like number one at the New York Times may be different from number one at Amazon, and I’m wondering how that’s possible. Like what data figures into which titles are recorded as selling the most copies.
Michael Castleman Nobody knows.
Krys Boyd Nobody knows.
Michael Castleman And that’s. Bestseller list is an incredible mystery. None of the major lists, are open and transparent about how they compile their lists, and they do that to prevent gaming the system. But, of course, you know, secrecy invites as much fraud as transparency. So, no one knows how The New York Times, assembles its bestseller list. Not even the editors of the New York Times Book review section know how the list is assembled. The list is assembled in secret by, a department of the New York Times that does things like surveys. So, what we do know is that, the New York Times, is in communication with about a thousand bookstores around the United States, and they poll them on what’s selling. Well, and, you know, on the face of it, that sounds like a decent way to, compile a bestseller list. But the problem with it is that booksellers are not disinterested bystanders. Booksellers have a vested interest in selling books. Supposing you’re a bookseller and you’re, a store that reports to the New York Times is known as a reporting store. If you’re a reporting store and you’re telling The New York Times what’s hot, say you bought a lot of copies of a book that you thought was going to be a big hit, and then it didn’t sell very well. Well, you know, you could say that it is selling well. And if it makes the list, that’s going to be a big boost to sales. And that means fewer returns that are shipped at the booksellers expense. So bestseller lists are a very strange, thing, and people put a lot of faith in them, but they’re really not as they’re just not as, you know, they don’t reflect reality, as much as, most people think they do.
Krys Boyd When a lot of people buy books, those books might sit on a shelf in their homes for years or decades or the rest of their lives. We think of books as these permanent objects, but they’re stunningly perishable as commodities, aren’t they?
Michael Castleman Oh, yes. Before 2000. If a book did not have good sales within around six months, it was pulled out of print and disappeared. And it was gone forever. Since 2000, when the industry has now turned to digital publishing books live as digital files that can be maintained virtually for free forever. And so books no longer go out of print. Which has, one advantage for authors, which is you’re under less pressure to promote them like crazy right out of the gate to keep them in print. And so authors have a longer runway, on which they can promote their books. But the the problem with that is that there are so many books that it’s very hard to get noticed at all. I mean, you know, how many, how many authors can come on your program in a year? I mean, a hundred, maybe. I mean, there are 2 million books published every year, and most of them get almost no notice at all.
Krys Boyd All right. I want to move on to the third book, Business The Transition to the Digital ERA. You explain started well before e-books with the adoption of those ISBN codes. Why are those so important?
Michael Castleman Well, the ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number. And in the 1960s, an English bookseller decided that with computers starting to come in, they would assign a digital number to every book to identify it, which would help with, warehousing and following the book as the title as it moved through the, supply chain and, those international. Well, originally they weren’t they were just in England, but now they’re international. And so every book has an ISBN which identifies it. And those numbers came were in wide use. By the end of the 1970s. So digital, the digital world, moved into publishing slowly. But around 2000 was when, ebooks, came in and and, and were launched, and when the Kindle e-reader initially e-books were not popular. People didn’t trust them. People didn’t know them. They just didn’t go anywhere. But then, Amazon introduced the Kindle, and people already trusted Amazon as the nation’s largest bookseller. And so they were willing to take a chance on the Kindle, especially because initially, if you bought a Kindle, Amazon was virtually giving books away. That’s no longer the case anymore. But, Kindles, really turned the corner on e-books and then, phones became e-readers as well. So now people can read books on paper, they can read them on Kindles, they can read them on their computers, their phones, pretty much any digital device. And that has revolutionized, the book business. But it has not changed the fact that the vast majority of people still want to read books on paper. E-books. When they took off, there were all of these predictions that, e-books would put print books out of business. In fact, there was even a book on the subject. In 2008, a book came out called Print Is Dead. That was a, that that predicted that e-books would just kill print books. But that hasn’t happened, right? Today, 85% of books that Americans read, they read on paper and e-books have become, the sort of pulp fiction of the 21st century. Romance fiction is very popular in e-book format. Mysteries and thrillers are popular as e-books, westerns, sci fi, fantasy, the genre, the genres that used to be on pulp paper, are now finding a new home in ebooks, but most people still read books on paper. And why there have been surveys. Why do you read books on paper? And one of the main reasons is people say, look, all day long at work, at school, I’m staring at a screen when I have my own free time in my house and I want to read a book. I don’t want to look at another screen. I want to hold that book in my hand. And so it seems that despite the convenience of e-books, print on paper, books on paper, will be, an enduring format, and print is not going away. In fact, print is thriving.
Krys Boyd So, as you told us, American authors largely self-published for 200 years or so when they had to hire a printer to generate copies, and then they would sell those copies at the back of a lecture hall or whatever. After speaking about 80 years. Publishers were paying authors significant amounts of money or reasonable amounts of money for their work. We’ve moved very much back into an era of self-publishing, haven’t we?
Michael Castleman Yes, authors have moved forward into the past. We are doing the same thing that 19th century authors did. We’re paying to publish, and, some authors, well, I should say that the big five publishers, the, you know, Penguin Random House and Simon and Schuster and Hachette, the big company, big five in New York, they still pay advances to some authors. In fact, the best estimate is that they pay advances to about 10,000 authors every year. But those 10,000 authors are 10,000 out of 2 million. So that 10,000 represents one half of 1% of all the authors, which means that 99.95% of books are written by authors who did not get advances. As I said earlier, books are much more likely to cost authors money than make any. And that is the great. Problem that authors are having in the 21st century. Our incomes are way down. Authors Guild surveys show that since 2009, the typical authors income has from books has dropped by half. And like I said earlier, this means that writing books is really not a career for the vast majority of authors. It’s an expensive hobby, and that’s pretty much what it is for me.
Krys Boyd I take your point. You know that you write because you love it. You can’t not do it. I do wonder, though, at some point, if something’s got to give, there will be people who love writing but absolutely have to work a job for money. Do you worry at all that the volume of work being produced will ultimately collapse, because people can’t make really any money for their writing?
Michael Castleman I’m not worried about that. In 1980, 45,000 books were published in the United States, 45,000. And most of them got advances. This year, 2 million books will be published in the United States, most of them without advances. And so the the daunting nature of publishing really has not stifled output at all. In fact, digital technology has made, publishing easier than ever. Today, it’s easier than ever to publish books. It’s just harder than ever to sell them. That’s the two edged sword here of of, digital publishing is that it’s easier to get books released, but it’s much, much harder to get any notice. And that’s the main frustration that, that authors have. If they can’t get their books noticed, they can’t make any money, they can’t get any attention, they can’t get it, public gratification. But that’s the world we’re living in.
Krys Boyd There has been so much consolidation in the publishing industry in recent decades. How did publishing go corporate in the first place?
Michael Castleman Publishing and corporate because publishers needed capital to pay bestselling authors big advances. In the 1970s. Starting in the 1970s, top selling authors could sell millions of copies of books, and those would generate tens of millions of dollars for publishers. And the authors and their agents turned around and said, well, if you want my bestselling authors next book, you got to put up $1 million advance. And the publishers were actually sort of small and entrepreneurial. They weren’t General Motors. And they thought, well, we don’t have $1 million. And, but they they knew that if they could get $1 million to Stephen King or James Patterson or other top selling authors, they would make that money back and more. So they went to banks and they tried to borrow money. The banks would not lend the money. Because they had no assets. They didn’t have truck fleets. They, they really all they had was, was their employees and their back lists, and banks just wouldn’t lend money. So the, major publishers wound up genuflecting before the, international media conglomerates and say, look, if you finance us, if you acquire us and finance us, we’ll make a ton of money for you. But you have to put up millions of dollars to get our so that we can sign bestselling authors and the media conglomerates, groups like, Bertelsmann in Germany and Hachette and France said, okay, we’ll do that. And so, from the 1970s through the 1990s, virtually all of the previously entrepreneurial, family owned major publishers in New York got sold to, international media conglomerates so that they can raise the capital to sign top authors. Now, culture critics have charged have alleged that the, international conglomerates were these boogeymen, these bad people who wanted to seize publishing in a sort of, cultural coup data that is actually the opposite of what happened. It was publishers themselves throwing themselves at the international conglomerates saying, look, we need financing, or else we’re going to go out of business. So, and there were great predictions that the corporatization of publishing would destroy it, would would ruin it would, stifle, voices of of people who are marginalized and who had unpopular views. None of that has happened. I mean, you take Harpercollins, which is a major publisher in New York. They are owned by Rupert Murdoch, who is very conservative. And yet, if you look at their list, there are a lot of left wing books published by Harpercollins. So, the, the hand-wringing over corporatization of publishing, in my view, is, is just wrong. It’s misplaced. The corporatization of publishing really has not stifled anything. And the proof of it is we’ve got 2 million books published every year. So, anything you want to read, you can probably find something to read.
Krys Boyd When I’m trying to decide what to read. Michael. Just for pleasure. I will sometimes look to the blurbs. And if a writer I know I already like has praised someone’s book, that will incline me to pick up the other book. How did blurbs become a thing? And can we trust them?
Michael Castleman Blurbs? Yes. Blurbs. Everyone takes blurbs of the grain of salt. I mean, you know, every blurb say that every book is God’s gift to literature, that that can’t be true. Blurbs began in, the 1850s when, Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass, the sort of, the greatest poem of the 19th century in America, which is really fantastic. I just reread it and I love it. Anyway, Whitman published Leaves of Grass and, and he got a blurb from other famous writers. He got blurbs from other famous writers. They weren’t called blurbs, but he was, he got these endorsement quotes and they seemed to help sell the book. And so, endorsement quotes became a, a staple of publishing. And they also became very controversial because, the intelligentsia and librarians and guardians of culture would say things like, oh, these are flagrant exaggerations. These these endorsement quotes are ridiculous. They’re an insult to our intelligence. And as this battle was raging in 1907, a satirist, named Lewis Burgess in San Francisco, wrote a collection of satirical essays and as a joke on the back cover in Big Type, he had an over-the-top endorsement quote from a fictional admirer who he named Belinda. Blurb. And then, blurb became the term for, endorsement quotes. And every author is under pressure to have blurbs. Not that they really sell books because, you know, most people take blurbs with a grain of salt. However, if a book doesn’t have blurbs, the cover looks kind of naked and the author looks like an amateur. And so everyone is out there beating the bushes to get their friends and other authors they know to, to, create, to write blurbs for their book.
Krys Boyd In the long run, you don’t think reading is in any danger?
Michael Castleman Absolutely not. The. Every time a new communications medium has been, introduced, the, Guardians of culture, the people who say they Revere books have been saying, oh, it’s going to kill books. This happened in the 1880s when Edison invented the phonograph. People said, oh, it’s going to kill books. It happened in 1900 when radio and movies were introduced into the culture. A lot of, the intelligentsia said, oh, radio and movies, they’re going to kill books. The same thing happened in the 1950s with television. And and on and on. And now the internet reading has not only survived, it has thrived. Nothing has ever killed long form reading and books. And I’m convinced nothing ever will. I think, reading is a lot more resilient than a lot of Americans believe. Reading is fine. There always going to be good books to read.
Krys Boyd The latest work by author Michael Castleman, is called The Untold Story of Books A Writer’s History of Publishing. Michael, thank you for the conversation.
Michael Castleman Thank you for having me on, Chris. I really appreciate it.
Krys Boyd You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and subscribe to our podcast wherever you like to get podcasts or if you prefer, just listen to the podcast at our website. Thanks, Craig dawg. Again, I’m Chris Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
