{"id":229,"date":"2026-05-14T21:49:37","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T21:49:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/?p=229"},"modified":"2026-05-16T16:39:21","modified_gmt":"2026-05-16T16:39:21","slug":"podcast-26-27-money-in-publishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/podcast-26-27-money-in-publishing\/","title":{"rendered":"ST Podcast on Where is the Money in Publishing ?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-text-align-center\">Listen Podcast on Where is the Money in Publishing ?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/file\/aud-st-podcast-26-27-money-in-publishing.mp4\" autoplay><\/audio><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Transcript<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>(0:00 &#8211; 0:28)<br>So, picture this. You&#8217;re at the bookstore, right? You just paid like $30 for a brand new hardcover book. You swipe your card, the cashier hands you the bag, and you probably assume, you know, you just supported the author.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Right. Yeah. That&#8217;s a dream, isn&#8217;t it? It is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I mean, the truth is that physical book in your hand is practically a loss leader. The real money in the publishing industry today has almost nothing to do with what happens at bookstore register. Oh, absolutely not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(0:28 &#8211; 0:59)<br>It&#8217;s actually hidden in like university tuition fees, artificial intelligence training data, and Hollywood licensing deals. Which really just shatters the whole romantic illusion of the publishing world, doesn&#8217;t it? I mean, we tend to look at a book or an article as this discrete standalone product, but that physical object, that block of paper is really just one tiny struggling node in a vast and honestly pretty ruthless financial network. And untangling that network is basically the mission of our deep dive today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(0:59 &#8211; 1:58)<br>We are following the money. We&#8217;ve got this extensive industry breakdown from support tips, which digs deep into the Association of American Publishers 2024 annual report. Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And we were looking at a $32.5 billion US industry. So today, we&#8217;re going to tear apart those revenue streams to figure out who is actually getting rich off the media you consume. Because the publishing industry is not a monolith at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I mean, it is a highly intricate ecosystem made of entirely different business models that honestly barely resemble each other. Right. Whether you are trying to understand why your favorite news site is suddenly begging for a subscription, or you&#8217;re just insanely curious about the hidden forces funding your media diet, you have to look at the underlying structures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The financial incentives dictate the media. Okay. So let&#8217;s unpack this by starting with the most visible part of the industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When someone says publishing, we all picture the exact same thing, right? Trade publishing. Yeah. The celebrity memoirs, the thrillers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(1:58 &#8211; 2:02)<br>Exactly. The cookbooks, all of that. And then that $32 billion pie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(2:02 &#8211; 2:15)<br>How much of it actually comes from this traditional side of the business? So trade publishing is still the lion&#8217;s share of the revenue. According to the 2024 data, it accounts for about $21.2 billion. Okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(2:15 &#8211; 2:40)<br>But to understand why the industry feels so precarious right now, you have to look past that massive top line number and look at the actual margins on an individual book. It&#8217;s a sobering reality check. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I want to break this down mechanically for a second. Let&#8217;s trace the actual dollars on a standard $26 hardcover. Imagine that $26 is a physical block of cash passing through a gauntlet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(2:40 &#8211; 3:01)<br>Right. I love this analogy. Everyone takes their cut before the publisher even sees a dime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>First, the bookstore, the retailer eats half right off the bat. $13, just gone. Poof.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And out of the remaining $13, the author takes their royalty. On a standard hardcover, that&#8217;s usually around 15% of the retail price. So another $3.90 is gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(3:01 &#8211; 3:14)<br>Okay. So we&#8217;re down to $9.10. Now we have to actually physically create the thing. Printing, warehousing, shipping heavy blocks of paper across the country, that consumes another $3.25. Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(3:14 &#8211; 3:37)<br>Cover design, typesetting, copy editing, that takes about 80 cents. Marketing averages around a dollar per book. We run the gauntlet and the publisher&#8217;s left with just $4.05. And keep in mind that $4 has to cover their expensive New York office space, the salaries of their editorial staff, legal teams, HR, literally everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(3:37 &#8211; 3:54)<br>Wow. The margin for error is razor thin. Hang on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That margin is terrifying. How do they even survive? I mean, for 20 years, everyone has been saying digital is going to take over. I would assume publishers are just desperate to kill off the physical book to eliminate that $3.25 in printing and shipping costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(3:54 &#8211; 5:16)<br>You would think so. E-books are essentially pure profit by comparison, right? Yeah. And that was the industry&#8217;s great hope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But the sources provide a fascinating reality check here. The e-book revolution basically plateaued. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Everyone assumed physical books would suffer the same fate as CDs or DVDs, you know, completely wiped out by digital formats. But in 2024, e-book revenue only inched up 1.5% to $2.1 billion. That makes no sense to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We practically live inside our phone screens. Why wouldn&#8217;t we want all our books there? It really comes down to screen fatigue and the physical user experience. I mean, consumers spend all day staring at monitors for work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They actively want a tactile, offline experience for their leisure reading. Oh, that makes sense. Print remains stubbornly dominant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hardcover and paperback formats together generated nearly $15.8 billion. That is literally half of all publishing revenue. But wait, if they&#8217;re stuck selling physical paper, and those production costs keep rising with inflation, how are they not bankrupt? Well, they&#8217;re flexing their pricing power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even though the actual number of hardcovers sold like, the unit sales stayed completely flat, the revenue for hardcovers grew 3.6% to $7.9 billion. Oh, I see. They are simply charging you more at the register to protect that tiny $4 margin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(5:16 &#8211; 5:28)<br>So if e-books aren&#8217;t the digital savior, are publishers just trapped in this low-margin paper business forever? Not entirely. They found their digital savior, but it wasn&#8217;t on a screen. It was in your earbuds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(5:29 &#8211; 5:56)<br>Audiobooks. The real format story of the decade is digital audio. It exploded by 22.5% in 2024 alone, hitting $2.4 billion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It has climbed nearly 80% since 2020. Audiobooks carry premium pricing, there are zero printing costs, and the audience is massive because you can consume them while commuting or doing disses. Okay, but even with audio booming, trade publishing sounds exhausting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(5:56 &#8211; 6:03)<br>It&#8217;s just a hit-driven grind. You are constantly hunting for that one blockbuster to pay for the 99 other books to flop. Oh, it&#8217;s totally a casino.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(6:04 &#8211; 6:21)<br>Right. So if trade publishing is this glamorous but margin-squeezed casino, where is the actual reliable, easy money in this industry? Well, to find the reliable money, you have to leave the local bookstore entirely and walk onto a college campus. We were talking about educational publishing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(6:21 &#8211; 6:31)<br>This is a $9.6 billion market. Wait, I need to push back here. Didn&#8217;t the used book market completely gut the textbook industry? Uh, yes and no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(6:31 &#8211; 7:07)<br>Because when I was in college, nobody bought a new biology textbook for $200. We bought a beat-up copy from a senior for $50 or found a PDF online. The original publisher didn&#8217;t see a single dime of those secondary sales.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It was a massive leak in their bucket. It was an absolute existential threat. But the industry executed one of the most ruthless and brilliant structural pivots in modern business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Companies like Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Cengage essentially stopped selling physical textbooks altogether. Oh, wow. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They moved to a system called inclusive access. Inclusive access. That sounds like a charity program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(7:07 &#8211; 7:17)<br>The branding is very intentional, I assure you. But the mechanism is purely about capturing guaranteed revenue. They transition from physical books to digital courseware.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(7:18 &#8211; 7:33)<br>Under inclusive access, the fee for the course materials is baked directly into a student&#8217;s tuition or their mandatory university fees. Let me make sure I understand this. You don&#8217;t walk into a campus bookstore, look at a syllabus, and decide whether or not to buy the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(7:34 &#8211; 7:42)<br>Yep. You just register for the class, and the digital access is already loaded into your student portal. And the university just bills you for it automatically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(7:43 &#8211; 7:52)<br>That is exactly how it works. And look at what this accomplishes for the publisher. First, it completely eliminates the massive costs of physical printing, warehousing, and shipping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(7:53 &#8211; 8:05)<br>Second, it instantly annihilates the used book market. Because the access is digital, it&#8217;s tied directly to your student ID, and it simply expires at the end of the semester. You have absolutely nothing to sell to a freshman next year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(8:05 &#8211; 8:18)<br>That is incredibly slick. Why would a university agree to play the enforcer for a publishing company? Because it solves administrative headaches. Universities want students to have the materials on day one to improve graduation rates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(8:19 &#8211; 8:32)<br>And in some structures, the institution might get a cut or a heavily negotiated bulk discount. Of course. By securing these multi-year institutional contracts, academic publishers achieve gross margins of 60 to 80 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(8:33 &#8211; 8:44)<br>Trade publishers fighting for a $4 profit on a hardcover can only dream of those numbers. A 60 to 80 percent margin. And I imagine the K-12 market operates on a similar wavelength.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(8:45 &#8211; 9:18)<br>The stakes in pre-K-12 are actually even higher, because it is a centralized winner-take-all environment. When a major state like Texas, California, or Florida adopts a new curriculum, they aren&#8217;t buying single books. Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They&#8217;re buying from millions of kids. Exactly. They are buying massive, multi-year, district-wide packages of digital and print resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Winning one of those state contracts can literally make a publisher&#8217;s entire fiscal year. OK, so educational publishing is a fortress. But that brings us to what the source material calls the profit anomaly of the publishing world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(9:19 &#8211; 9:27)<br>This is the section of the data that genuinely made me pause. Let&#8217;s talk about scientific and academic journals. Oh, this is fascinating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(9:27 &#8211; 9:38)<br>Companies like Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley. If we look at their business model, it feels like it shouldn&#8217;t even be legal. It really is a model that completely defies the normal rules of capitalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(9:39 &#8211; 9:50)<br>It operates more like a monopoly over human knowledge. Let me use an analogy here. Imagine a restaurant where the local farmers grow all the ingredients and deliver them for free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(9:50 &#8211; 10:07)<br>Then world-class chefs come into the kitchen and cook the meals for free. And then the restaurant turns around and charges those exact same farmers and chefs a $10,000 cover charge just to sit at a table and eat the food. That is a highly accurate metaphor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(10:07 &#8211; 10:20)<br>It&#8217;s insane. Researchers who are usually funded by taxpayer grants or universities write these dense scientific papers and give the copyright to the publisher for free. Then other experts in the field act as peer reviewers to vet the science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(10:21 &#8211; 10:40)<br>They also work for free. The publisher takes this completely free pre-vetted content, slaps their logo on it, and sells it back to university libraries for millions of dollars a year in subscription fees. Why would any academic agree to this? Because the publishers own the prestige, and prestige is the currency of academia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(10:40 &#8211; 10:54)<br>If a researcher wants tenure, if they want to secure their next multi-million dollar grant, they have to publish in top-tier journals like Nature or The Lancet. It is literally publish or perish. The publishers hold the keys to their career survival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(10:54 &#8211; 11:14)<br>So the university libraries are basically held hostage. If they cancel their subscription to Elsevier, their scientists can&#8217;t read the latest research, and they can&#8217;t function. Precisely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And think about how the digital transition impacted them compared to the rest of the media. When newspapers went digital, they lost their lucrative classified ads and their print circulation revenue. It gutted them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(11:14 &#8211; 11:28)<br>Yeah, totally. But when academic journals went digital, they just stopped paying for paper and postage. They kept charging the universities the exact same exorbitant subscription fees, but their overhead dropped to near zero.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(11:28 &#8211; 11:48)<br>The sources show these academic publishers routinely boast gross margins exceeding 60 to 70 percent, with operating margins above 30 percent. But surely the open access movement is threatening this. There is a huge push right now demanding that publicly funded research be free for anyone to read on the internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(11:48 &#8211; 12:02)<br>You would assume that demanding free access would destroy their profit model, right? Instead, the publishers just flip the tollbooth. Yeah. If you want your article to be open access, meaning free for the public to read, the publisher charges an article processing charge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(12:02 &#8211; 12:14)<br>And who pays it? The author or the author&#8217;s university. And those fees typically range from $2,000 to $10,000 for a single article. $10,000 just to process a PDF so the public can read it? Yep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(12:14 &#8211; 12:22)<br>That is wild. They basically expanded their revenue streams without sacrificing a single point of margin. It is the ultimate captive market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(12:22 &#8211; 12:29)<br>But of course, most publishers do not have a captive market. Right. Let&#8217;s pivot to the companies that have to fight for every single eyeball.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(12:29 &#8211; 12:45)<br>Digital media, news sites and trade publishers. They don&#8217;t have university students forced to pay tuition-baked fees. How do they survive in an era where nobody wants to pay for content? They are desperately trying to diversify, particularly in how they handle advertising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(12:46 &#8211; 13:02)<br>For a long time, digital media survived on open, programmatic advertising. For the listener who isn&#8217;t an ad tech, can you explain what programmatic advertising actually is? Sure. Imagine a chaotic, automated stock market that operates in the fraction of a second it takes a web page to load.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(13:02 &#8211; 13:10)<br>Advertisers use software to bid on the empty ad space on your screen based on your browsing history. Okay. It is a race to the bottom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(13:10 &#8211; 13:17)<br>The ads are cheap, they clutter the website and publishers get pennies on the dollar. So publishers are trying to escape that chaotic auction. Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(13:17 &#8211; 13:37)<br>They are shifting toward direct deals and private marketplaces. If a publisher has a strong, trusted brand identity, they don&#8217;t want cheap banner ads for weight loss pills cluttering their site. They want to go directly to a premium brand, say a luxury car maker, and create high-quality, sponsored video content or branded newsletters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(13:37 &#8211; 13:45)<br>That makes sense. It&#8217;s about charging a premium for authentic engagement, rather than settling for automated pennies. We also see this in consumer revenue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(13:45 &#8211; 13:54)<br>The New York Times is a prime example. They aren&#8217;t just selling news anymore. They are bundling recipes, product reviews, and games into a single household subscription.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(13:54 &#8211; 14:06)<br>Here&#8217;s where it gets really interesting now. If we look back at traditional book publishers, they are finding money in hidden places too. They are realizing that a successful book isn&#8217;t just a final product to be sold at a bookstore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(14:06 &#8211; 14:12)<br>It is a highly versatile raw material. Oh, absolutely. Intellectual property is the real goldmine of trade publishing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(14:13 &#8211; 14:18)<br>Think about it. You write a hit fantasy novel. The publisher doesn&#8217;t just sell the hardcover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(14:19 &#8211; 14:31)<br>They license the translation rights to Germany, Japan, and Brazil. They sell the film and television options to a streaming service. They sell the audiobook rights, the graphic novel rights, the merchandise rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(14:31 &#8211; 14:45)<br>And the beauty of this is that the physical book is already written. The cost to sell a licensing right is basically just a lawyer&#8217;s time to draft the contract. It&#8217;s nearly 100% margin, and it can triple the total revenue of a single title.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(14:45 &#8211; 14:50)<br>And this brings us to the newest, most disruptive buyer of intellectual property in the history of the industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Source<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-wp-embed is-provider-support-tips wp-block-embed-support-tips\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"wp-embedded-content\" data-secret=\"iB5pHmbTH7\"><a href=\"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/news\/where-is-the-money-in-publishing\/\">Where Is The Money In Publishing?: Beyond the Book Sale<\/a><\/blockquote><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-embedded-content\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts\" security=\"restricted\" style=\"position: absolute; visibility: hidden;\" title=\"&#8220;Where Is The Money In Publishing?: Beyond the Book Sale&#8221; &#8212; Support Tips\" src=\"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/news\/where-is-the-money-in-publishing\/embed\/#?secret=1Ed9pO5rRj#?secret=iB5pHmbTH7\" data-secret=\"iB5pHmbTH7\" width=\"600\" height=\"338\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Listen Podcast on Where is the Money in Publishing ? Transcript (0:00 &#8211; 0:28)So, picture this. You&#8217;re at the bookstore, right? You just paid like $30 for a brand new hardcover book. You swipe your card, the cashier hands you the bag, and you probably assume, you know, you just supported the author. Right. Yeah. [&#8230;]\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-podcast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":296,"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions\/296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supporttips.com\/media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}