How TradPub Works
Plus: A yearlong novel-writing incubator!
Hello friends,
Happy New Year! We are squeaking in with the last newsletter of the year (the one about my book cover didn’t count).
I had an unhinged start to December but then a very restful Christmas, praise the Lord. I anticipate doing absolutely nothing on New Year’s Eve besides eating fancy cheeses from my local Italian grocer. I can’t wait. And in January, I’m going to FRANCE.
And…
Immediately upon returning, I’ll be kicking off a yearlong, soup-to-nuts novel-writing program! If you’ve been making up your New Year’s Resolutions and thinking, “Wow, I’d love to finish my novel in 2026,” then do I have good news for you. The program starts January 24. Details are at the bottom of this email, after, y’know, the actual thing I came here to say.
On John B. Thompson’s Merchants of Culture
In November, I read a book called Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century.
I was tuned into this book by literary agent Alia Hanna Habib’s excellent interview with S&S editor Yahdon Israel. (By the way, Habib’s own book, Take It from Me: An Agent's Guide to Building a Nonfiction Writing Career from Scratch, is coming out on January 26! I don’t know her! This is not a sponsored post! I’m just saying.)
In the interview, Israel told Habib:
The difference between who I am as an editor now and who I would have been as an editor is thanks to John B Thompson’s MERCHANTS OF CULTURE. I got that book because I could imagine there were people who had been working at S&S who I thought that I’d filled somebody else’s position when I got hired. I know there are going to be some people reading this who are going to think, “He didn’t even have a traditional publishing background, and he got a job in publishing,” and there is absolutely some truth to that. I had to earn for myself the ability to display that I was not coming in completely from scratch. MERCHANTS OF CULTURE was the most comprehensive macro understanding of how publishing functions as a business logic. It showed me where I, as an editor, fit into that logic. That book has enabled me to bring my own plate to the table.
And Habib responded:
I think it actually says a lot about you that you had the resourcefulness to find that book and understand your own role through it.
And I thought: What’s my role in the logic of publishing?
So I got the book through InterLibrary Loan.1
Merchants of Culture is a history of English-language trade publishing2 throughout the twentieth century in the U.K. and the U.S. It explains how and why the industry came to work the way it does, and why certain decisions that might seem incomprehensible (Thompson starts with an example wherein a short book by an unknown academic received a multi-million-dollar advance, which from the outside might make a person go ?????) make sense within what Thompson — and Israel, above — calls the logic of the system. Merchants of Culture is both in-depth and quite understandable, each point stacking naturally on the last. By the time you get to the explanation of the multi-million-dollar advance, you’re like… I mean, I don’t know if you’re exactly like This makes sense, but you’re at least like, I see how we got here.
Or at least you see how we got to book publishing in the year 2012.
The book was published originally in 2008, with a second edition released in 2012. And when I finished it, I was like, please, my kingdom for a 2025 edition of this book. Thompson argues that there are three main developments from which springs the logic of the modern field of trade publishing:
the development of the bookselling retail environment, with much attention given to B&N and Borders in the U.S., and supermarkets in the U.K. I must say that as someone who doesn’t know a damn thing about the U.K. market, the supermarkets bit was fascinating.
the rise of the literary agent as a key figure in the industry
and, most notably and frightening to me, “the emergence of transnational publishing corporations stemming from successive waves of mergers and acquisitions, beginning in the 1960s and continuing through to the present day” :(
Thompson builds his explanation of the “logic” of publishing on these three factors, and then he concludes by considering the “implications” of the “digital revolution.” Which. I mean. In 2012, the e-reader had barely gone mainstream. Kindle Unlimited didn’t exist yet. There as much mention of Apple in this book as there is of Amazon, with much speculation about how Amazon’s actions might lower the market value of books the way Apple and iTunes did to songs. Reading it in 2012 is a trip is all I’m saying.
But super, super informative. For example, I did not know that the relatively low ebook prices of our day — when you can expect to buy an ebook for, like, $11.99 — come from a stunt that Amazon pulled in 2007, wherein they priced all NYT bestsellers and new releases for $9.99 on Kindle in order to sell Kindles. They sold those books at a tremendous loss, and it drove down the price of ebooks across the industry, because people came away with the impression that the bulk of the cost of a hardcopy book is paper and printing and shipping and warehousing.
But it’s not. Per Thompson, before this move by Amazon, publishers were commonly pricing ebooks at only 20% or less lower than the hardcopy price, because the most expensive part of a book is not the physical material, but the content (including the advance that was paid for that content!) and the production (and as someone who’s watching her first book be produced right now, long before it’s gone to the printers, I can attest that a lot is involved in the production that has nothing to do with the droplets of ink on the actual sheets of paper).
And, obviously, there’s a whole separate selfpub culture of pricing books at $4.99 or less, because that’s what the market will bear. Thompson’s book doesn’t get into this, because (a) his book is about trade publishing, not self-publishing, and (b) again, Kindle Unlimited had not been invented yet. But Merchants of Culture does make the points necessary to come to this conclusion: that the market is not shaped by the consumer, as some claim, but by corporations like Amazon.
This, to me, is the buried lede of Thompson’s book. And it’s not only a publishing problem, obviously. He writes:
One of the greatest threats facing the creative industries today is, as one perceptive retailer put it, “the increasing commoditization of content by non-content players, which is driving down the value of intellectual property.” … It carries the risk — by no means hypothetical, as the music industry shows — that content becomes cannon fodder for large and powerful technology companies and retailers that use content to drive the sales of their devices and services and increase their market share, thereby devaluing intellectual property and sucking value out of the content creation process. … However this plays out in terms of the reconfiguration of the creative industries, a major devaluing of intellectual property, and a constant driving down of the price of content, is unlikely to lead to an overall increase in the quality of content over time.
Most of this book is not about writers. But I do think writers should read it. I think even writers who have no interest in tradpub should read this book, personally. It presents a clear and straightforward, if slightly outdated, outline of the paradigm in which we’re operating, and I think that understanding that paradigm is a good idea for all of us.
I think there’s some sense that this system is pessimistic for writers, my whinging about Big Tech above aside. A blurb from John Conwell calls Merchants of Culture “a salutary, scary read.” Thompson himself admits:
For the vast majority of writers or aspiring writers, this system seems like an alien beast that behaves in unpredictable and erratic ways, sometimes reaching out to them with a warm smile and a handful of cash, inviting them to join the party and holding out the prospect of a future of riches and fame, and then suddenly, without much warning or explanation, pulling back, refusing to respond or perhaps cutting off communication completely. This is a system geared towards maximizing returns within reasonably short time frames; it is not designed to cultivate literary careers over a lifetime.
And yet.
I did not feel Conwell’s sense of pessimism while reading this book. Certainly, a lot of the developments that Thompson details have been crunchy for authors (and for everyone else in the industry, besides, like, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts). And he expresses a great number of causes for concern (again, Amazon).
But… this industry exists!
Maybe I’m just too much of a glass-is-half-full kind of person. Yes, intellectual property IS being devalued, and I find that frightening and depressing. But, I don’t know, I feel like we’re down but not out! This behemoth framework — the trade publishing industry, and other publishing industries that Thompson doesn’t touch on — still exists for us to sell and market our words and our ideas. Yes, it is very difficult. Yes, according to some metrics, it’s getting harder all the time. But it’s there, it’s hundreds of years old, and it works! I mean, how cool is that. How lucky are we.
Book in a Year
On that note…
I can’t get you a book deal, sorry.
But I can get you to finish your novel.
I’m teaching a one-year online Book in a Year program with the MetroWest Writers Guild. We start in January and we end in December. It costs $250. We’ll have monthly check-ins and customizable word count targets; we’ll go from outlining, to drafting, to developing a plan for what you want to do with the novel when you’re done. It’s the full Monty. If you have been trying to write a novel for years, then I’m telling you: You can get it done, this year, with me.
Have you always wanted to write a novel? Do you have a dozen ideas for a book kicking around, but no idea where to start? Or perhaps you have a dozen drafts kicking around, but no idea how to finish?
Well, no more! This 2026, join Mary Berman, author of UNTIL DEATH (Mulholland Books, 2026), for a one-year soup-to-nuts novel-writing program. This class will start with brief lectures, assignments, and exercises to help you outline a new novel or define a roadmap for an existing draft. You’ll draft your novel over the course of eight months, with monthly accountability check-ins and fixed-yet-flexible word count targets. Then, at the end of the year, you’ll develop a plan to revise, self-publish, or query — and you’ll celebrate your accomplishment!
This class will meet monthly throughout 2026 on Zoom with rigorous assignments and check-ins between classes. The first class is Saturday, January 24th and the class will schedule future classes together at that time.
That’s it! See you on the other side of my trip to France… unless I just decide to stay over there, hahahahaha. (But even then, I’ll be Zooming in for Book in a Year on January 24!)
(a) I LOVE InterLibrary Loan. (b) I also want/ed to read another book Israel mentioned, which is The Program Era by Mark McGurl. I got that one from ILL, too, but sadly it was due back before I got a chance to read it and they wouldn’t renew it for me, even though literally who is out there beating down doors to read The Program Era. Anyway.
In the headline to this piece, I called this “tradpub,” which I believe — someone correct me if I’m wrong — is an abbreviation of the phrase “traditional publishing,” NOT “trade publishing.” “Trade publishing” is the area that Thompson’s book covers. “Traditional publishing,” I believe, encompasses a whole host of publishing arenas that are not “trade” — such as scholarly publishing, illustrated art book publishing, Bibles, and so on. BUT, imo, when people on the Internet say “tradpub,” what they actually seem to mean is what Thompson means by “trade publishing”: “the sector of the publishing industry that is concerned with publishing books, both fiction and non-fiction, that are intended for general readers and sold primarily through bookstores and other retail outlets.”