The Current State of Hybrid Publishing: Q&A with David Wilk

Earlier this month, I talked to several leaders in the hybrid publishing space and wrote an article assessing how the field has developed over the last decade. (The article is available to paid subscribers to my newsletter The Bottom Line; here’s the link.)

One of the people I spoke to was David Wilk, someone who has decades of experience across the industry. Once upon a time he was literature program director at the National Endowment for the Arts, he was co-founder of Inland Book Company (1981–1996), president of LPC Distribution (1997–2002), senior vice president at Perseus Distribution (2002–2005), and vice president at Resolution (2005–2007) before founding Easton Studio Press in 2004, a hybrid publisher. Its books are distributed by Two Rivers Distribution, an Ingram Company.

I find Wilk an honest broker; while he runs a hybrid publishing company, he’s not proactively trying to persuade anyone on the merits of that particular path. He serves on the board of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and offers consulting to all sorts of people who need expert publishing guidance. What I appreciated most about our conversation was his perspective as someone who’s been in the business for decades, plus he offers context and nuance around what can be a divisive issue: paying to publish.

In my article for The Bottom Line, I was only able to include a fraction of what Wilk and I discussed, but it felt a shame not to make use of our entire conversation, as informative as it is. Since it was not initially my intent to run this as a Q&A, I asked him for permission to run it as such, and gave him a chance to make adjustments to the transcript for clarity. The spirit of what you read here remains in line with our Zoom conversation, which has been edited for length.

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Jane Friedman: I’ve spoken with leaders in the hybrid publishing space who say this sector is growing, and I believe there is some stratification in the market that supports that assertion. I wonder if you agree. Certainly I see more players than before who call themselves hybrids, as well as hybrid-like operations that don’t call themselves hybrids. It seems you have a hybrid now for every budget.

David Wilk: You know, when you’re on any kind of a curve—for example the J-curve—you never know where you are, because you’re in it, and there’s no way to predict accurately where it’s going or when. People predict all the time, but, you know, it’s bullshit, because you don’t know where you’re starting. You have no idea where you are in the curve.

That said, my own opinion is that the growth phase of hybrid publishing has already occurred. I think this is because of cultural and social matters, but also demographics and economics. The growth came from Baby Boomers, which is my generation, who reached a certain point in their life that prompted them to want to write and publish books. And that is now happening to some extent with the generation after them [Gen X].

As they age, many people who were not professional writers start thinking of who they wanted to be when they were younger. A lot of them are in business or professions. Some are lawyers, doctors, and while they are successful, writing was always important to them. I think that’s one thread of this, people getting to a certain age who can afford the time to write and explore their creativity and thinking. Their kids are grown up and/or in college, and they have more time, and maybe they have more money, so they don’t need to quit their jobs in order to write. They can actually write in their free time, and I think a lot of them do.

Stratification in the hybrid publishing business reflects the stratification in the client base. Just because a publisher charges $100,000 for a book project doesn’t mean they’re predatory—because the people who will pay that kind of fee can afford it. On the other hand, it would be unethical if a publisher allowed someone to pay $100,000 knowing that the client was taking out a mortgage on their home to cover it, thinking that somehow their book would be a bestseller, which we all know is wishful thinking. To me, that is an ethical breach. In a sense that is a financial crime. And I’m sure it’s happened; there are unethical companies out there. But those that are aboveboard are selling a service and pricing it to the market they serve.

The higher budget books mostly come from business owners or the companies they own that will pay the bills, their business expenses or their ego expenses, because they’ve already gotten rich. There are several hybrid publishers whose clients are billionaires and multimillionaires, or companies that generate hundreds of millions of dollars. When they want or need a to publish a book, they can afford to pay for it.

I was hired once by a $6 billion a year company to help them write and publish a book that was very important to their business, and I realized partway through the project that they would have paid what seemed to me an outlandish price for the work. I could barely comprehend the differential between what I was used to charging and what they were used to paying. The book was successful, they were happy, and they hired me to publish another book. For that book, I raised my rate. They didn’t care.

Similarly, I recently was hired by a company that manages trillions of dollars. They wanted to do a book. I charged them what I thought was a high fee for my work, and they didn’t negotiate at all. And I thought, “I’ve obviously undercharged yet again.”

I’ve concluded that if you’re in the business of making books for corporations or extremely wealthy individuals, you can charge what they’re willing to pay.

But most of my work is for far less wealthy authors and institutions, and I think this applies to the majority of hybrid publishers as well; we charge what we think is a fair rate for our work and we are stratified by the kinds of clients with whom we work. Some clients can afford what you need to charge and some can’t. And if they can’t, we need to send them to somebody we think is more affordable.

There is a lot of judgment and sensitivity in this space. I find it really difficult to talk about hybrid publishing without making some group of people upset. If I talk about it as a legitimate option, I hear from self-publishing authors saying these companies are scams, or I hear from authors who feel they overpaid for what they received. Or if I talk critically, I hear from the hybrid publishers and hybrid published authors who say that I just don’t get it.

Self-publishers end up doing the same work that hybrid publishers do. They hire people to help them. But then they will have to be their own “general contractor.” I’ve talked to a lot of authors whom I have told to self-publish. It will be less expensive for them, but they will have to do more of the publishing and production work themselves. Some can, and some cannot. It’s almost exactly like building a garage in your backyard. I can’t do that work and I have to hire a contractor who has the experience to do it well. But my next-door neighbor has enough building experience to be her own contractor, and she can even do some of the work to build that garage herself.

Just like building a garage, when you hire someone who knows a lot about making and publishing books, you can save time, avoid making mistakes and if you hire a reputable hybrid publisher who is transparent about the costs and risks of book publishing, you can avoid being taken advantage of or just making a mess of it. And to some extent, the truism that “you get what you pay for” always applies.

That’s the challenge for self-publishing authors. Do you have time to learn how the business really works to make your books well and not screw it up? Everyone who does this work has made mistakes. That’s how we learn and become good at it. Even when you have produced hundreds of books, and you’ve seen everything that can go wrong, you are alert and careful, you still can make mistakes.

In my view, there are commercial publishers that are not that different from hybrid publishers. Certain commercial book publishers will require you to buy a large number of copies of your book as part of the deal, and that’s really no different from a hybrid publisher. It’s just a different form of capturing the cost. As a hybrid publisher, I am selling a service. “This is what it costs to publish your book, and you can decide whether you want to do it or not.” But if an author wants to have the benefit of a large publisher brand, publishers will qualify the book in pretty much the same way I would. They may like the book, but they will still need to get paid.

At this point, though, I think it’s going to become more difficult for hybrid publishers. I don’t think it’s a long-term growth piece of business.  

And why is that?

It’s what I started out talking about, the demographics and economics. Just as traditional commercial publishing appears to be (very) slowly (but surely) dying, I think hybrid publishing will be buffeted by coming demographic and cultural dynamics. I mean, we’re all facing this. I don’t know what the future will be. I don’t know how long it’ll take. I’ve at least sometimes been right predicting what will happen in the book business, just completely wrong about the timing.

You’re trying to read the tea leaves and figure out, “Is this business really healthy, or is it dying?” And it looks like unit sales are way down in most categories. It’s sort of like the economy overall. Some states are doing well. Other states are not doing well. Overall, the economy is kind of flat or even down. In the book business, a number of categories are doing really badly and the trendlines are clearly downward. Only a few categories are doing well, but well enough that overall, the business is flat or slightly down. But if you’re publishing in those categories that are not doing well, you’re looking around and wondering, “How am I going to sell enough books to make this work?”

The biggest challenge for hybrid publishers is that it’s actually a pretty straightforward process to publish a book. We know how to do this. But it’s really difficult to market and sell books. Nobody really knows how to do that unless you are literally paying people to buy books (which sometimes is what happens). And every single toolset that you think works, or did work in the past, doesn’t seem to work anymore. What might have worked last year doesn’t work today. And unfortunately, when there are activities that do work, they are not codifiable or repeatable. You’re not going to be able to just build a “TikTok strategy” to sell books. That’s bullshit.

And of course, this sounds terrible when you tell it to an author: “You are not going sell very many books, and I can prove it to you. I can give you a list of books in your category published by the Big Five or other top publishers. I can tell you exactly how many copies they didn’t sell.” So as far as marketing goes, how could you be better off than they are when they have budgets, and people, and tools? And yes, there are always success stories that literally prove the rule. There are always grassroots ideas and activities that people come up with that really do sell books. But most of the time, the vast abundance of books published and the decline in overall book readership means that the chance for a sales success decreases daily.

I don’t think we can feel good about the future of book sales, and I think that will eventually hamper a lot of hybrid operations. While not every book’s success or failure is measured by book sales, how many authors are going to be willing to spend their hard-earned dollars to produce books that sell fewer than 200 copies? We’ve all met with authors who, when you tell them upfront how hard it is, don’t actually believe you because they believe in themselves and their book, and they’ve been successful in life. And in their view, “How hard is it? James Patterson sells books. Why can’t I if my book is as good as his?” And it might be, but so what?

In addition, most younger writers who are digitally astute will not pay for this kind of stuff. They are much more likely to be able to figure this out on their own. They may not have ever produced a book before, and maybe what they produce will not be as good as I think a book should look, but they can cobble it together well enough.

And none of this applies to the book categories where self-publishing authors are being successful publishing on KDP and other digital platforms where true communities of readers and authors have formed an ecosystem that operates completely outside of traditional publishing formats and processes. Nor does this rule out something new and innovative emerging that alters the dynamics and upends everything we currently take for granted. Maybe podcasts, maybe new forms of digital storytelling that redefines the book reading experience. Despite the book’s successful resistance to change so far, there is no certainty about anything ahead of us.

Recently Pew Research said that 40%+ of teenagers are making money in the creator economy. I look at authors like Keila Shaheen, who rode a wave of sales success just selling through TikTok Shop and then signed a seven-figure deal with Simon & Schuster with 50-50 profit sharing. There was a cookbook author I interviewed last year who was beating traditional publishers with his sales while working with this firm I’d never heard of—I can’t bring myself to call them a publisher, because they aren’t really anything more than a digital printer with a sales page. But that’s all he really needed, he wasn’t precious about it.

Exactly. Yeah.

Can we talk about the definition of “hybrid,” because one question I’m frequently asked is how to distinguish between a hybrid publisher and a vanity publisher. The question drives me a little crazy, because I consider “vanity publisher” nothing more than a pejorative term for any situation in which an author pays to publish. So, in the end, is there a difference between the two, except brand reputation?

I think the reason hybrid publishers are often so sensitive about the idea of being considered to be “pay for play” publishers is that for many years, vanity publishing was disparaged by the commercial publishing industry as a way to protect their hold on the definition of culture and determination of what is a good book. This goes back to the 1960s and 1970s, or maybe earlier. Vanity publishers were never a real threat to commercial publishers, but they were a kind of insult to the notion of “quality” in publishing, so they had to be disparaged. The common wisdom at that time was that any truly good book could find a publisher. If a book was not accepted for publication, it couldn’t be good, and if an author had to pay to be published, the book was automatically written off as a bad book.

At that time, most traditional publishers considered it unethical to be paid to publish a book. That concept has been eroded over time, but hybrid publishers still have to differentiate themselves by being able to say that they will not publish what they consider to be a “bad” book even if the author is willing to pay for it. Of course, defining what is a good book or a bad book is highly subjective in any case and applies to all publishers, hybrid and commercial alike, but that’s a different discussion.

And prior to the advent of Amazon, booksellers would not carry vanity press books. And the hybrid publishers at that time were afraid of being categorized as vanity presses, so the fact that their books were subsidized by authors was often not revealed. And the concern remains even now, that in some instances and for some people, if books have been paid for by the author, they will be dismissed out of hand. Some book reviewers, for example, simply do not trust that hybrid published books are worthy of their time.

Publishers cannot maintain a reputation if their work is constantly being questioned. So hybrid publishers have developed the notionality that, “We will select the books that we think are good enough from the millions of titles that are offered to us, and only then will we talk about the contract.” Or stated more bluntly: “Your book is good enough to be published, but you have to pay.”

Of course, all commercial publishers have published books they thought were saleable or commercial but not great literature. In the end, publishers make business decisions that are not always based on the perceived quality of the book. I don’t believe that quality is so objectively measured that we can say that any publisher, self-publishing, hybrid or commercial, is truly, always 100% dedicated to the principle that they will publish only books they believe are worthy.

Speaking as someone who tries to protect authors from making poor business decisions, I see how they get tempted by a hybrid who says, “Oh, well, we only select books that pass this certain set of criteria, so now that you’ve been vetted and selected, don’t you feel special? And here’s a bill for $25,000.” So there’s some psychological manipulation, the author’s ego gets massaged.

It’s true, there’s that dynamic. We just have to acknowledge it exists. I guess the question comes down to whether you’re being honest with yourself. Ask the question, “Would I publish this book if it was my own money?” And I don’t know. Sometimes you don’t know the answer to that. Maybe my answer, considering what I think of the book business is that I would never publish any books if it was my own money. I just don’t know if the economics work anymore. Or maybe they never did. There’s a frequently repeated joke about the book business that goes like this: “How do you make a small fortune in publishing? You start with a large fortune and open a publishing house.” Personally, I can’t afford to be that person.

Being honest with myself, I do believe that a lot of the books I’ve published are good, some even are really good, but maybe not every single one will stand the test of time. That’s a fair assessment, probably for all publishers. One of the ways that I can tell when a book is good, not just in my own opinion, is when the proofreader tells me that they love the book, or a copy editor says, “Wow, this is really good,” which I secretly interpret to mean “I wasn’t sure you would be giving me a book that was this good because you’re a hybrid publisher.”

I agree with you that there is always that concern, and maybe the only way that authors can protect themselves is to look at the other books from the hybrid publisher, and actually read some of them. Are they good enough? Will you, as an author, feel good to be in their company?

So that’s where a publisher’s reputation and history comes into play. That would be true of going to a commercial publisher too. An author might say, “I would really love to be published by W.W. Norton. Maybe I wouldn’t really love to be published by XYZ because my books don’t really fit in that list. And if they wanted to publish my book, I’d wonder why.”

Authors should do the same kind of vetting with a hybrid publisher, maybe even a tougher vetting because of the risk that maybe they are not being a hundred percent honest with you or even themselves. Maybe they are not making a decision on the same basis that they would if there was no money involved. So as an author you just have to accept that when you’re working with a hybrid publisher it’s a concern to address and work through.

One of the ways that hybrids convince authors they have a reputation, and that they’re worth the investment, is that they’ve secured sales distribution, they can get books on store shelves. And they wouldn’t be able to keep that distribution unless they’re doing things properly. Do you think that is good criteria?

I do think that it has some value. Being distributed, whether it is by Simon & Schuster or Random House, or Two Rivers, the fact that you have distribution does mean that you are taken more seriously as a publisher. But even though that is a meaningful data point in evaluating a publisher, it still doesn’t guarantee that the books they publish are truly better than non-distributed publishers.

It is definitely a valid distinction in making a judgment about a publisher that an author is considering working with. It’s just not a hundred percent fail-safe. If you’re an author with a healthy sense of self-awareness, I would say a publisher with a distributor is likely to be safer bet. But it’s just not like some sort of a seal of approval, and you should still do your research as part of your due diligence in deciding on what is your ideal publishing path.

Thank you, David.

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Note from Jane: For more insights, see my archive of articles on hybrid publishing.