In my post about choosing between tradpub and self-pub, I tried to give tradpub a fair shake, recognizing that this more institutionalized publishing system appeals to a different mindset than I hold.
However, I don’t think tradpub is really giving itself a fair shake. In fact, traditional publishing’s rampant trend-chasing is doing us all a major disservice.
My brutal and very mean thesis is this: tradpub loves shit books because the general public loves shit books. And that’s fine if you want to make money, but not so good if you care about making great art.
⤝❖⤞
There are still good tradpub books, but they are drowned in debut garbage.
I have read plenty of quality tradpub books in the past year, both new releases and slightly older ones.
The thing, though, is that if you take a look at the good books being released, they are from established authors who began writing long before the past five-ish years.
These authors already have the star power and proven revenue from a “before time” that reassures publishers. However, even these authors are getting hammered in reviews.
Take China Mieville, one of my favorite writers. He has been writing for over 20 years now; he could put out the dumbest, weirdest book alive and still keep his contract. But his reviews have dropped sharply in recent years. People complain incessantly about how odd his books are, how they’re hard to follow, how the prose is dense and complicated.
China Mieville did not deteriorate since 2020. The readership has. And tradpub knows this, which is why debut authors put out slop.
⤝❖⤞
Tradpub measures marketability, not quality.
Here is the uncomfortable truth that tradpub authors don’t like to hear: the quality of your book absolutely does not matter to publishers. The keywords, tropes, marketing hype, and packaging does.
Yes, yes, we can argue about the subjectivity of quality. We can say, “Well, if people like it, then it’s good!” But let me vary the analogy I used in my post about bad books: fast food is utter garbage, but it makes billions in revenue per year.
Very few of us, save Donald Trump and RFK Jr., would argue that McDonald’s is the height of culinary purity. We know it’s terrible and that we only like it because it pushes primal buttons in our heads. We like fat, salt, sugar, and carbs because our ancestors didn’t have those things in abudance.
Tradpub is, unfortunately, pushing primal buttons by pandering to a specific, and growing, audience: not-very-literate people who want to appear very smart.
⤝❖⤞
Low literacy shifts the goalposts for “good writing.”
It’s not a secret that people are becoming more illiterate; I covered the problem in depth last July. Given that tradpub cares about marketability, this inevitably influences which books are pitched and sold.
There’s a reason that adult literature has morphed into YA style. Recent debut novels I’ve read, even those which include gratuitous violence or sex, read more like a teenager trying to be a grownup rather than an actual Adult Book.
Newer books use very simple sentences; the plots are straightfoward. Dialogue is stilted, designed more for quotability than realism. Random twists appear out of nowhere, shocking readers into paying attention after sleepwalking through a billion hours of introspection.
Rather than lingering on impactful scenes, the authors brush past them to avoid grossing anyone out. My repulsive climax in What Is Cannot Be Unwritten would be obliterated by an editor. These books even use euphemisms like “sicked up” instead of “vomited,” as if they’re being censored by YouTube Kids.
I’ve also noticed a proliferation of first-person POV in books that would be much better served by third-person POV. While first person is a respected literary tradition, it is also most prevalent in YA fiction; children are self-centered and want to imagine themselves as the protagonist. I highly doubt that most modern authors who use first-person POV are trying to emulate Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or the Japanese “I” novel.
When you’re pushing books to a stupider population (sorry), you’ve got to get down to their level. There isn’t room for unique turns of phrase lest the reader get upset, assuming that you’re actually saying someone is a teapot rather than feeling like one.
I am, unfortunately, quite serious about that. College students who tried to read Charles Dickens thought that characters had cat whiskers rather than facial hair.
This means that even the most beautiful work will be macerated by the tradpub machine, turning it into an easily-digestible slurry gulped up by the lowest common denominator.
⤝❖⤞
Bait-and-switch is rampant in publishing.
Tradpub does not want to sell good books. They want to sell books, period. The best way to do this is by hooking readers with a few flashy first pages so that they’ll buy. Once the money hits, tradpub doesn’t care anymore. Their part of the transaction is done.
This is why literary agents obsess over the first five pages of a book, and why those seeking to query may agonize over the first chapter for a whole year. Agents and publishers push impulse buys through bait-and-switch tactics: great first few pages, trash after that.
The Atlas Six, in my opinion, is a keystone example of this approach, a book that was published as a “BookTok favorite.” The prologue is superb; it’s sharp, catchy, and suggests real danger.
I was intrigued and hoping the author would follow through on the stakes. But they didn’t. The whole thing falls to shit within the first chapter. Everything after the prologue feels like pulling teeth, and I gave up after a few chapters. I did try, I really did. But I am only human.
See, I’m the kind of person that doesn’t necessarily need a dopamine hit on the first page to keep reading. If you start a book by slamming me into a brick wall with nonstop action (a la The Hurricane Wars), I will stop reading. I want to bond with an interesting character and enjoy superb prose, which doesn’t always equate with thrilling initial stakes.
But for a certain sector of the population, this doesn’t matter, because they already stopped paying attention.
⤝❖⤞
TikTok has incentivized performative reading.
Performative reading has always been a thing, but it was typically an interpersonal thing. What I mean by this is that people would carry books with them on the subway in hopes of getting a cute girl’s attention, or reference a “smart” book they glossed over.
Now, though, performative reading is a mass trend. Readers brag about how many books they read in a year and give each other tips for how to skim as fast as possible.
Goodreads is no longer a repository of the books you liked, but a high score for your reading output. Authors complain about getting fewer reviews since BookTok exploded because readers aren’t following the text close enough to form an opinion. They want to check it off, maybe leave a star rating, and move on.
As such, books designed for fast reading are going to perform better than slower, more difficult books that require close attention. The more people can skim, the more readthroughs, the more ratings, the more visibility. Challenging plotlines go away; unusual words disappear. And tradpub ruthlessly slashes books to ensure readers can rip through them as quickly as possible.
⤝❖⤞
Presentation now matters more than substance.
We see this new performative trend not just in book text, but also in book packaging.
Recent releases are gorgeous: gold foil, sparkly paper, embossing, soft textures and cutouts. These special touches used to be reserved for commemorative editions of beloved tomes, such as the collected works of Shakespeare or pocket editions of Emily Dickinson. Now they are produced for debut novels from unknown authors, of dubious quality and untested fame.
Such luxury materials did not become more readily available in recent years; you can find similar productions from decades ago. Rather, the market started to care far more about presentation than about substance.
Consider TikTok reviews of ARCs or recent releases. I won’t link any, to avoid shaming anyone, but I’ve watched quite a few. Every time a BookTok girlie does an “unboxing,” their immediate conversation is about the book’s visual appearance; they squeal about the sprayed edges and gush authoritatively about paper weight. Books that include little extras, like bookmarks or stickers, send reviewers into the stratosphere.
Then the TikTok star inevitably rushes through the review, their eyes dimming as they’re forced to discuss what actually matters about a book. Often they’ll cheap out by coyly entreating the viewer to read it and see for themselves. In other words, they don’t feel like summarizing anything. Any true analysis is flattened into fun tropes or which “spicy” scene was the best.
BookTok ARC readers also spurn ebook editions; other authors tell me how they get more requests if they offer a paperback versus an ebook. That’s because the BookTok reviewers want something to hold up and ooh and ahh over, not necessarily something to read. The book must look very cool on their shelf so everyone knows they are a Very Cool Reader.
One can argue that publishers could provide quality on both fronts: prose and packaging. That’s true, they could. But that doesn’t satisfy performative readers, who don’t really give a damn about the inside.
Book revision requires months of labor-intensive editing, while cover development requires a few weeks. Given that tradpub wants to make a quick buck, it’s obvious what they will choose to prioritize.
As such, the scales tip toward pretty books that provide absolutely nothing but a few “oh damn!” quotes. Millions of dollars are not spent on developmental editing, but on quality control for book covers. And everyone suffers as a result.
⤝❖⤞
AI pressures publishing firms to make more easily digestible content.
Last December, Amazon rolled out an atrocious feature called “Ask This Book.” Pretty much every author group, from The Authors Guild to Writer Beware, fucking hates this thing.
Kindlepreneur rightly pointed out that this could pose major legal concerns because it is essentially remixing a copyrighted material without the author’s consent. Kindepreneur’s founder, Dave Chesson, was even blunter: “This should be illegal.”
Now, I was heartened to see that readers also despise this feature. Some have canceled their Kindle Unlimited subscriptions over it. They can’t opt out of it any more than authors can opt out of having it incorporated into their books, unlike other things we have control over like X-Ray.
But, time and time again, corporations have proven that they simply do not care whether we like AI or not. They’re full steam ahead on their useless investments, and they will not take no for an answer.
Some have pointed out a very insidious reason for this product, which is that Amazon has essentially turned all of our ebooks into training material for Large Language Models without our consent. I don’t think it’s really for readers; it’s so that Amazon can snatch all our books and start generating soulless, bastardized versions of what we produced.
Another way for corporations to deprive authors of income and hoard it all for themselves – with the added bonus of destroying the planet so none of us can profit off anything ever again! Yay!
Now, I don’t know what goes on behind publishing houses’ doors, but I can tell you this: Amazon and all the rest of them do talk to one another. Of course they do. Why else would Amazon be able to roll out things like giving Prime members free books every month? They had to sign contracts with those traditional publishers; after all, you don’t see any selfpub books in the ranks.
If you think of your publishing corpus as training material, then you nudge authors toward prose that is easy for LLMs to understand. You penalize complex plots that require close reading. You ensure stupid features like “Ask This Book” won’t give wrong answers because it couldn’t comprehend the subtext.
You strip out intriguing or archaic words that an AI may misuse. You encourage simplistic, quotable phrases that could be reused in new AI-generated content.
In short, you tear the copper wiring out of every book. Pure, tidy, inhuman profit built off our bleeding hearts.
⤝❖⤞
We are reaching a fork in the road: quick returns versus lasting respect.
So maybe it’s not that tradpub is cooked, really. Corporations will get their bag one way or another.
It’s that tradpub debut authors – who do not have an established reputation or full creative freedom – are chopped, cooked, and burnt.
If you value your craft, if you prioritize quality prose, and if you delight in complex plots, then you’re fucked. Unless you let tradpub fuck your book up.
Listen to me: tradpub does not care about how good your book is. Literary agents don’t care. You can have the most beautiful book imaginable, and it doesn’t matter a whit.
They care about whether you can instantly produce a return on investment that justifies your insultingly low advance. If you can be their next golden goose. Which means pandering to insipid BookTok girlies who are more excited about spray-brushed edges than inspiring prose.
I do believe that tradpub authors are extremely competent and passionate artists. Their first drafts were probably much better than what appeared on the page, before developmental editors and publishers dug their nails into stuff. I’m not fully blaming writers for the final product, because I know there are dozens of intermediaries between query and release.
My quibble is never with my fellow authors. Rather, I despise the publishing companies that have decided putting out gilded trash is more important than offering true value.
Yes, if you want to (partially) pay the bills off your writing, then you can grin and bear it, maybe. If you really want the money, then go for it – I can’t tell you what to do.
But personally, I care more about my own feelings toward my work. I never expect self-publishing to be a moneymaker because I understand the realities of the industry. I keep my day job, and I don’t spend more than I can afford to completely lose. What matters to me is that I am proud of what I have created, regardless of what anyone else thinks about it.
If you’re like me, then maybe you should cancel your Query Tracker subscription and go your own way.
