Blog

This is my bi-weekly “newsletter” delivered straight to your inbox with at least one guaranteed typo I’ll catch after hitting send! If email collectors’ items aren’t your thing, don’t hesitate to switch to the RSS feed or just bookmark loudpoet.com and check in now and then. You do you!

NOTE: Every now and then a theme reveals itself as I’m putting a newsletter together, and there’s a potentially interesting thread running through this one that some media veterans will probably pick up on. I actually wanted to pull at it a little more, but then I remembered the world is falling apart and decided to catch the end of the Mets’ game instead. I hope this missive finds you in a better place!

_ONE

How To Raise a Reader in an Age of Digital Distraction | Jessica Ewing

It’s easy to blame screens wholesale for declining literacy rates, but I find that both reductive and unhelpful. The real challenge isn’t technology itself, but how technology has evolved to actively compete with the very cognitive processes that reading requires.

Every now and then I read something I wish I’d written myself that is way better than I’d have done it, and Ewing’s essay is a perfect example, offering one of the most nuanced takes on reading and digital distractions I’ve read in a long while.

I particularly loved her noting that previous generations also had plenty of “distractions” to deal with. Like her, my Gen X childhood included juggling video games (in pizzerias and at home), appointment TV shows, Saturday morning cartoons, and as much baseball and football as I could get. I devoured the daily newspaper and was an avid reader of books that definitely weren’t considered “age-appropriate” — then or now. I even self-published my first newsletter in high school thanks to my Commodore 64, dot-matrix printer, and The Print Shop.

The primary difference isn’t that modern technology is more distracting than what came before, it’s that it became predatory — including so many of the EdTech “solutions” that claim to address declining literacy rates.

Content Warning: Some of y’all are going to get your feelings hurt by her reminder that reading isn’t natural!

__TWO

Middle Grade Is Down but Never Out | Shannon Maughan

“The graphic novel market for middle grade readers is still very, very strong. And if you count that, the middle grade market is really steady.”

From the popular genre also known as, “These kids don’t read what we want them to read!” is another article about the challenges for middle grade sales that touches on but doesn’t quite connect the dots between the underlying data.

• Kids LOVE comics and manga, which continue to sell very well, but they take longer and are more expensive to publish in print than the traditional prose that hasn’t been selling as well.
• Corporate publishers have no idea how to market to kids, and their primary intermediaries — libraries and schools — have been facing significant obstacles since 2020, including from big publishers themselves.
• The ongoing lack of diversity across the industry sustains systemic blind spots.

Besides generally ignoring comics, manga, and dramatically shifting demographics, the other thing publishers (and most trade media) can’t seem to fathom is that middle grade readers have so many other options today. That includes playing immersive games, watching videos that speak their language, and telling and sharing their own stories across a variety of platforms — many of which are inaccessible to marketers and adults.

It also includes reading in other formats like webtoons, fan fiction, and role-playing games. And yes, they can do most of that on their phones — which could be seen as an opportunity for savvier publishers whose business models aren’t voluntarily anchored to a single format. Or you can just call it a distraction, I guess…

Corporate publishing has been a myopic trend-following segment of the industry for decades, opportunistically Columbus-ing into existing communities because their short-term objectives don’t allow them to nurture their own. As traditional and social media ecosystems continue to fragment, and “influence” has been “democratized” (for better and worse), they’ve become increasingly out of touch with readers who don’t match their very narrow definitions of reading and readers.

And yet, somehow, audiobooks are reading but also not cannibalizing book sales…? -_-

___THREE

Independent Children’s Publishers Share Secrets to Their Success | Joanne O’Sullivan

Education and library spending cuts and increased consolidation are among the challenges facing independent houses. But for a range of indie publishers, nimble is the watchword and the common denominator that helps them navigate the ups and downs of the kids’ publishing cycle.

I frequently give Publishers Weekly a hard time because I expect more from them as one of the industry’s main sources of news and reviews, and I believe they’re at their best when they remind the industry that the publishing world is so much bigger and more interesting than the Big 5 corporate conglomerates ever will be.

O’Sullivan does a great job of rounding up an interesting range of indie publishers and letting them speak for themselves about the various advantages, challenges, and opportunities they have. It’s a great contrast to the gloom and doom stories about declining sales that are often really just about some of the Big 5 having a bad quarter or two because they bet on the wrong bestsellers.

NOTE: If you want a simple litmus test for how good your favorite local bookstore and/or public library is about offering a broad selection of books for young readers, see how many of the publishers mentioned in this article you can find represented on their shelves next time you visit them. I’d honestly be impressed by anything more than 50%; doubly impressed if they have more than one series from any of them.

____FOUR

Why subscription fatigue is not our problem | Lex Roman

Selling subscriptions takes work—separate work from publishing—and if you aren’t selling your subscription then you don’t have “subscription fatigue,” you have “selling subscriptions fatigue.”

The fundamental difference between indie and corporate (or VC-backed) metrics is the latter’s insatiable need for scale and never-ending growth. That’s partly why some self-published authors can make more money than their traditionally published counterparts — as long as they understand the business side of publishing and the audiences they’re serving.

And, of course, they have to understand marketing, without which you’re not even really a publisher.

Similar to self-published authors, most individual newsletterers (aka, bloggers getting paid) don’t need scale to succeed, they need to give a clearly defined audience something unique that they can’t get elsewhere. That can be as simple as offering a distinct and consistent perspective on a topic or industry, or being a trustworthy alternative to existing trade publications.

The audience can be as small as a few hundred people, too, which also means churn won’t be as big of a concern as long as you’re actually engaged with the broader community you’re serving, and transparent with them about your goals.

Roman makes a particularly great point about Substack’s limitations for anyone looking to run an actually independent subscription business, rather than plugging into the subsidized vanity hosting service it really is. Substack is basically a bootleg KDP, where writers have to bring their own readers, which Substack monetizes for itself first and foremost, while encouraging those same writers to spread the “magic dust” on its behalf — aka, saying “Check out my Substack!” at every possible opportunity.

The greatest trick Substack pulled was reducing the definition of “independence” to simply being able to export your mailing list, while it steadily built walls to diminish the value of that list if/when it was exported. The second greatest trick was their “Check out my Substack!” con game.

_____FIVE

Magical systems thinking | Ed Bradon

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

I stumbled upon “systems thinking” a couple of years ago and it was a clarifying moment, giving a definition to how I often intuitively approach challenging situations, looking at the big picture and figuring out how various parts intersect and work together — or against each other — rather than zooming in on one part in isolation. I noted at the time that “I think the opposite of systems thinking results in new shiny solutions searching for problems, incredulously championed by people who either have no interest in the big picture, or worse, want to obscure other people’s view of that picture.”

Fast-forward 2.5 years and I found Bradon’s take similarly clarifying, not because he debunks the approach, but because he identifies what is probably a very common flaw in how people apply it. “Systems fight back.”

I believe knowing how to deconstruct a complex system is a critical first step to figuring out what to fix and how to fix it, which is why so many wannabe industry disruptors fail miserably and disappear without any lasting impact. It’s also important to remember that so many of the complex systems we take for granted didn’t start that way. Some remain fit for purpose and may simply require minor tweaks, while others need to be scrapped and reimagined from a modern perspective. Knowing the difference requires a clear understanding how the overall system works; the purpose each individual system serves; and which systems will fight back, whether against you or other systems.

One of my favorite examples in publishing was Harper Studio, famously undone by, among other factors, the well-intentioned decision to challenge one of the industry’s most pugnacious systems of all: returns. RIP.

______BONUS

PS: If you’re reading this somewhere other than your inbox and would like to get it via email, sign up here.