Why Am I So Negative About Traditional Book Publishing?
I Got That Question in an Email…
It wasn’t from anyone who had taken a class with us, and I laughed and almost just deleted it as I do most spam emails. Then I looked at it and googled the website that came with it and realized the person was a writer, or in the early stages, and someone had pointed this person to some of my really negative posts about traditional publishing. And this person was honestly having an issue with me blowing up the dreams of having a major publisher sprinkle fairy dust on a book and proclaim they are a REAL WRITER!
So being the real ass that I am, I wrote this person back and said, “Read my bog tonight.”
My credits… Sold my first two short stories 52 years ago. Sold my first novel to Warner Books in 1987 and ended up doing 106 books with traditional publishing. Many under pen names. I had the same agent for 17 years whose company ended up stealing from me. I had great editors and horrid editors over the years. I hit the bestseller lists a ton of times. (Not one bit of that now matters in the slightest.)
When the publishing industry started to change in the mid-1990s, I started getting disgusted at the bad contracts and lowering money and by 2005 I was pretty much done with it all, but thankfully indie publishing came along very shortly after that and I was back writing more than ever.
I have in the 20 years since indie publishing started made far, far more money than I made in the 20 plus years in traditional publishing. (In traditional publishing I averaged about $20,000 per book, so you can do the math.)
Now, here in 2026, traditional publishing will buy all rights from writers who don’t know any better and use the rights to increase the profitability of their bottom line spreadsheets. They flat don’t care if they publish most books or not, even after buying them. And most editors are fresh out of college and being chewed up by the system as fast as baby writers. And book agents are pretty much scams running one thing or another. Just do the math. Not possible to live in New York and have an expensive office off of 15% of what publishers are offering these days.
And it is impossible to make a living in traditional publishing in 2026 for writers unless you started last century and are now aging out.
On the stand in a lawsuit a few years back, a major publishing officer swore under oath that over 50% of all traditionally published books sell less than 12 copies. Under oath and not one major person in traditional publishing pushed back on that in the slightest because they all know it is right.
12 copies.
And besides buying all rights and the author losing their book, the authors get a royalty on full sales of 10% or so. Indie publishers make 70% per sale and up.
And don’t forget the time. Traditional publishing will take years and a ton of rewrites demanded by non-writers to get a book published. (Read my previous posts on the money a week or so ago.) And the traditional publishers will force you to write what they want, not what you want.
Indie publishing you can write what you want and publish when you want. And you get to keep all your rights and make money from them.
Traditional book publishing with thousands of publishers worked pretty well from 1960 to 1995 and then it just fell apart. Those good years are where the myths built up. Now in the last 30 years, traditional publishing and its four publishers has become a sad little echo of the thousands of publishers that came before. Now there are hundreds of thousands of indie publishers, many, many, many making great money and writing what they want to write when they want to write it.
The myth of traditional publishing is still strong among the young. And if the belief is too strong, folks, just let them go. It is their dream.
But the writer who asked me why I was so down on traditional publishing seemed to be hesitating before becoming lost chasing bad agents and giving all their rights away. I hope that whoever sent this writer my way helps the writer into indie publishing.
I have lived for over 20 years on each side of the fence. There is no green grass in traditional publishing. It is just a sad wasteland littered with the bodies and dreams of young and some not so young writers,
You can’t help those whose dreams are based in a 40 year-old myth, but you can help the writers who start to look around and ask questions. I hope this post helps a few, including the writer who wrote me.