The Bookalike Phenomenon – What’s New in Publishing?
By Cindy Layton
In the movie, American Fiction, a Black author fails to sell his latest book and searches to identify what the market is buying. He finds a colleague who’s published, to great acclaim, what he finds to be a cynical story that trades on every trope associated with Black life in America. When he writes his own such book, under an assumed identity, his intent is to hold a mirror up to the industry’s limited understanding and acceptance of Black America. Instead, it becomes a bestseller.
The movie pokes fun at the publishing industry and its criteria for selecting manuscripts, pointing a finger at what author Therese Anne Fowler calls “bookalikes.” She describes this phenomenon in her blog post for Writer Unboxed titled “Is Traditional Fiction Publishing Broken?”
All of this translates to a larger number of editors seeking trendy bookalikes, which translates to more agents seeking those same bookalikes because that’s what they can readily place, which puts pressure on writers to create such bookalikes if they hope to break into the business or, if already in, to stay in. More than ever before, the fiction market is becoming homogenized.
Look no further than the Manuscript Wish List. There, writers are often asked to dazzle agents with a new mashup of their preferred titles, to reimagine stories that have already been told, using comps from the hottest selling books, as they try to ride the tail of the book dragon.
Fowler also points out the trend of book marketing via social media, primarily Book Tok (via Tik Tok), which skews toward younger audiences. It creates a tunnel effect of squeezing the market to feed a select group, who seek a certain type of book - more entertaining, more genre-driven, leaving other market segments under-addressed. For authors of a certain age, it’s a trend that doesn’t seem to translate well.
The alternative to all that is self-publishing and indie authorship, meant to reallocate control and revenue back to authors. As much as it has evolved, it’s also been constrained by its bent toward genre writing and serialized fiction. It makes sense - when marketing and sales efforts rest with the writer, having an identified market, i.e. genre, makes networking and community-building a simpler, more economical task.
There’s a lot to know about how these various publishing avenues have grown and changed. Jane Friedman’s latest update to her chart of publishing paths is a good place to start.
Despite the proliferation of platforms and software, the inherent structural formation of publishing has not been challenged on behalf of authors looking for compatible outlets. So much of self-publishing is unstructured and unsupportive. While hybrid publishing is an attempt to bridge some of that divide, much of the support is financed by the author.
In reality, there hasn’t been a lot of movement to address the bottlenecks in publishing, the gatekeeper effect, and efforts to reach some of the unmet markets.
One newly formed company, Galiot Press, may be postured to do it. What makes them different?
A willingness to take artistic risks. While traditional publishing pursues trends, Galiot intends to actively seek books that fall outside defined genres.
And, what many publication-seeking authors will find attractive, a query system that promises to respond to submissions within days, not weeks or months or never. No agonizing over every word in a query and hitting “send” to the black hole of the electronic slush pile. Instead, Galiot relies on a reservation system that limits submissions to available slots posted on the web site. Nobody’s drowning in submissions on one end and waiting endlessly on the other. That alone is an industry innovation.
Read more about Galiot Press here.
As with any of these publishing options, it’s always buyer beware. Do your homework.
For a deeper dive into all things publishing, here are a few links with a POV.
https://www.ingramcontent.com/publishers-blog/5-publishing-industry-trends-for-2024
