The Business of Books and the Merger That Wasn’t

For three weeks, we sat in a windowless room and listened to people talk about books. Most of the time we didn’t know the titles or authors. Instead we heard about money. We heard about advances, royalties, and option clauses. We heard about foreign rights, world rights, e-book rights, and audio rights. We heard about auctions for manuscripts in all their varieties: round-robins, best bids, better/bests. We heard about preempts and bilateral negotiations. We heard about profit and loss projections, marketing budgets, and distribution. We heard about visibility in bookstores and discoverability via algorithms—all the transactions that make reading possible.