Ties That Bind
Regarding the Bindery Proposition
Good morning and welcome to a Shelf Life I did not write in advance and, thus, am writing from vacation. My vacation is half awaycation and half staycation and I’m on the staycation half so this is not a tragedy. Truthfully I like writing and it’s what I want to be doing on my time off anyway. I also hope to organize my shoes, but that is a very big and complicated job so I might not be able to accomplish it in just one week.
In any case, I’m grateful to the Catherine of two weeks ago who did not write several Shelf Lifes ahead in advance because now something interesting has gone and occurred and I have an available Shelf slot to process my thoughts about it.
Today’s Shelf Life is about the new publishing startup launching later this month called Bindery Books. I will refer to that company, in short, as “Bindery” for the purposes of this essay. That said, Bindery Books should not be confused with The Bindery, a literary agency established in 2017. These companies are not affiliated with one another. Is the naming situation confusing? Yes. Yes it is.
Much of the information I’ve accumulated about Bindery is from the Publishers Weekly article by Sophia Stewart, “A New Startup Proposes Influencer-Driven Publishing,” published July 28. I’ll summarize necessary information herein but I do recommend reading the PW article for a more complete understanding of the facts of the situation. The rest of the information I’ve gathered on Bindery is from reactions on social media sites like Twitter (X?) and Bluesky. I understand there’s a lot of reaction happening on TikTok but I don’t have an account on that app, so, shrug emoji.
Here’s Bindery’s value proposition: They are a new kind of publishing company. Each of their imprints will be headed by a social media influencer who serves as a literary tastemaker—the royalty of BookTok, BookTube, Book Twitter (BookX?). Bindery will approach literary agents and agencies to submit books to their heads of imprint (the tastemakers), who will select the books they’re most excited about. Bindery will then (attempt to) sign the books and publish them in print and electronic formats.
Bindery will also sell tiered subscription memberships to each imprint ($5, $12, and $25 per month). Within the paywalled community, members will have access to author livestreams, early copies of books, merchandise, and may even consult with the tastemaker on which manuscripts may be selected for publication.
Membership revenue will be split fifty-fifty between Bindery and the influencer. Book sales revenue—net—will be split 50 percent to the author, 25 percent to the publisher (Bindery), and 25 percent to the influencer whose imprint signed it.
Bindery will launch with nine imprints, each of which has a target of one book per year to start. Bindery is outsourcing production services to Girl Friday Productions and distribution will be handled by Two Rivers, a part of the Ingram Content Group.
Right off the bat I have a large concern. I’m not the only one with a large concern; Twitter (X?) users also have, collectively, a large concern. If you got the heebeegeebees when I specified that a percent of net book sales will go to the author, then perhaps you have the same large concern or at least an inkling about it.
Author royalties are traditionally paid as a percent of retail price. Scribe Media has an excellent guide to book royalties if you want comprehensive information about them. What’s important to understand is that net indicates the author will receive a percent of the profit, not a percent of the retail price. Fifty percent sounds amazing compared with traditional royalty rates like 5 percent (mass market), 7.5 percent (trade paperback), 15 percent (hardcover), or 25 percent (electronic/audio). However, that 50 percent is calculated after the publisher has recouped their cost of:
Development
Production Services
Paper, plate, and binding (PPB)
Warehousing and Shipping
It’s also 50 percent of what comes in after the retailer’s discount.
Let’s say I’m Jane Snow, traditionally published author. My book, Let It Snow, is available only in hardcover and retails for $19.99 and I get a 15 percent royalty. This means, after my advance earns out, I earn $2.99 for every single copy sold. However, the publisher is not profiting $19.99 per book.
First, there is a wholesaler discount agreed upon with my book’s distributor—55 percent is standard. This means, while my book retails for $19.99, wholesalers like Barnes & Noble and Costco only pay $8.99 per unit to the distributor. Next, the distributor takes their fee of net sales (that is, the money they receive from the wholesalers) of 10 percent. My publisher, therefore, receives $8.09 per unit sold. That’s still not the profit, though.
My publisher also paid for production services like editing, typesetting, proofreading, and PPB, which costs they will amortize over the total run of the book. Perhaps they paid $3000 for editing, $1000 for composition, $750 for proofreading, $1000 for cover design, and $3.00 per unit for PPB. If the publisher printed 10,000 units, their costs were $3.57 per unit, which comes out of the $8.09 they get per unit sold, leaving them with a net profit of $4.52.
Now, as author, which would you rather have:
Fifteen percent of $19.99? ($2.99 per unit) or
Fifty percent of $4.52? ($2.26 per unit)
First, as I said above, I’m concerned that Bindery is hoping to lure authors to their platform with a generous-sounding 50 percent profit share but, as I demonstrated, 50 percent of net sales is not as good as a 15 percent royalty.
Second, I’m concerned because the PW article indicates that Bindery’s 50 percent share of subscription revenue is to be used to underwrite book production. However, net royalty terms (also specified in the article) usually indicate that production expenses are deducted from sales revenue before the author is paid their royalty. If book production is being underwritten by the subscription revenue, why is it also being recouped from book sales before the author is paid?
Next big concern: How often do influencers get disgraced and canceled? Like every 5 minutes. Like Colleen Ballinger literally last month. James Charles? Logan Paul? Caroline Calloway? Andrew Tate? So what happens to you, the author, if the influencer who selected your manuscript for the Bindery treatment gets bad behavior exposed on the internet? Bindery’s terms of service reserve their right to cut an influencer at any time. Does that mean the imprint go up in smoke—along with your deal?
Why would we let Bookstagrammers and Booktweeters choose what to publish, anyway? Okay, so, listen. This is the part that honestly makes sense to me. Let me tell you a very short story.
The sci-fi epistolary novella This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, was published in 2019 to richly deserved praise, fanfare, and solid sales; it won a bunch of the 2019 and 2020 genre awards (BFSA, Nebula, Locus, Hugo). That was that.
Then, on May 7, 2023, a Twitter (X?) account named Bigolas Dickolas, who tweets day in and day out about the Japanese manga and animated series Trigun, asked all their users to read This Is How You Lose the Time War with a message that said:
read this. DO NOT look up anything about it. just read it. it's only like 200 pages u can download it on audible it's only like four hours. do it right now i'm very extremely serious.
The social message received more than 18.5 million views, 140,000 likes, 20,000 retweets, and sent This Is How You Lose the Time War zooming back onto all the bestseller lists. Importantly, Bigolas Dickolas isn’t even a bookfluencer. They’re an anime and manga fan account. But they’ve got 55,000 followers (they may have had fewer at the time) who trust their opinion, and those followers spread the message around the internet like wildfire.
Normally when a book goes viral, that book has already been published and an influencer who enjoys it promotes it to their fans, who then spread the word to other book-minded friends. Bindery proposes to put influencers into the mix before publication by allowing them to select manuscripts for publication from the curated selection pitched to them by agents—just as an editor at a publishing company does.
The big difference between the influencer and the career editor is this:
The influencer chooses a manuscript to publish based on what they like, and, theoretically, what their fans will like and wish to buy.
The editor chooses a manuscript to publish based on market research and their knowledge of what the book-buying market, at large, will buy.
It’s certainly possible that Bindery intends to support their influencer imprint heads with market research, but that also kind of defeats the purpose. I see the books Bindery signs selling very well to a limited demographic and not well outside the membership communities of each influencer.
However, Bindery and the influencer will split the membership subscription revenue, so they are getting paid whether the book sells or not. It’s only the author who will be out of luck if the book doesn’t sell—they don’t get any part of the subscription revenue and only receive a percent of net unit sales. Put another way, Bindery is actually attempting to monetize two things: The influencer’s audience of followers and the books the influencer selects to sign. Bindery and the influencer receive income from both sources. The author receives income from only one of those sources (hint: it’s the one that’s not a sure thing).
Each influencer is intended to launch one book per year. Let’s imagine an influencer with 10,000 subscribers.
Again using the fictitious figure of $19.99 list price, let’s figure out how much the author might make in this deal. Under the net percent author payment terms, the author will receive a set amount for each unit sold. Perhaps that $2.26 per unit I calculated above (maybe more, maybe less, there’s no way to know because the “net” terms aren’t spelled out. Let’s say every single subscriber buys a book. The author would earn $22,600 for the book. (By the way, 10,000 copies is an astoundingly high number of units for a book to sell; fewer than 10 percent of titles from the top 10 publishers in the US sell more than 10,000 copies in their first year.)
On the other hand, consider the subscription revenue: Let’s take those 10,000 subscribers I theorized above and put 60 percent of them on the cheap plan ($5 per month), 30 percent on the mid-tier plan ($12 per month), and 10 percent on the top-tier plan ($25 per month).
That’s $1,092,000 for the influencer and Bindery to share, fifty-fifty. And remember, Bindery and the influencer are also each receiving 25 percent net book sales, so each party gets another $11,300 on top of their half million subscription revenue.
Publisher: $557,300
Influencer: $557,300
Author: $22,600
Somehow this is just not sounding like a great deal for the author, to me.
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