SARAH HOYT: The Publishing Business Is In Crisis.

The publishers had total control on how a book would do. If they targeted you for bestseller, you’d become one, even if they had to fudge the numbers to do it. . . .

Then Amazon opened the market to self-publishing, and people could find things that they wanted to read that insulted neither their intelligence nor their political beliefs. . . .

However for real push, for real penetration of market, traditional publishing still held control. They could still make something a bestseller if they wanted to and pushed enough. Or at least so I thought. . . .

And then . . . I saw the walls tumble down. I saw the statue of Lenin dragged through the streets.

I saw Hillary’s book tank. . . .

The book will debut on the bestseller list, because that’s determined not by books bought but by “laydown”, i.e. how many books the publisher shipped. (Bet you didn’t know a book can be a “bestseller” without selling a single book.)

What you might not appreciate from the outside is how amazing, how impossible this is. They still have control over what ships (and therefore gets on the bestseller list for at least one week), they have control over the figures they show, they have control over publicity, they can strong-arm bookstores to stock a book and to push it. And you bet your bottom dollar they deployed all this in favor of Hillary.

And it tanked. It tanked so publicly, so visibly, it can’t be denied.