After a year when publishing industry layoffs have frequently been in the headlines, it will surprise no one that the total number of jobs in the industry is in decline. But in an era marked by corporate consolidation, increased competition for consumer attention, and the emergence of alternative publishing models, the most recent government data suggests the loss of publishing jobs over the past three decades has been dramatic.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people employed in book publishing in the United States fell to 54,822 in 2023, down from 91,100 in 1997. If accurate, that represents a loss of about 40% of traditional publishing jobs in less than 30 years.
The BLS stats are drawn from detailed employment data for book publishers, which, according to the agency, includes businesses that “carry out design, editing, and marketing activities necessary for producing and distributing books,” whether “in print, electronic, or audio form.”
In 1990, the BLS recorded total book publishing employment at 85,800. Employment then peaked at 91,100 in June 1997, and was at 84,600 as late as December 2008. But the number of industry jobs appears not to have rebounded from the retooling that followed the Great Recession of 2007–2009. In 2012, employment had dropped to roughly 70,000, and in 2016 to approximately 60,000. The annual average bottomed out in 2021 at 51,161, down an eye-opening 44% from the BLS’s peak. In 2023—the most recent stats, released last month—employment has rebounded slightly, to 54,822.
Notably, about 20% of publishing industry employment in 2016—10,269 jobs—was in New York City. In 2023, that number had slipped to 9,540, or about 17.4% of the publishing workforce.
While government figures show that full-time employment in book publishing has been in decline since the 1990s, context is key. There have been significant shifts, including new technology and consolidation, that make it difficult to compare today’s publishing industry to the industry that existed three decades ago.
For example, a 1992 report produced by Simba Information listed 20 companies across all publishing segments with sales of at least $200 million. Of those 20 publishers, 10 exist today, having swallowed up the other 10. And with every acquisition comes integration and a consequent net loss of jobs as companies improve their operating efficiencies.
Indeed, publishing has become more efficient in the digital age. After all, despite the significant decline in publishing jobs, industry sales are still growing—although that growth is not keeping up with inflation, and even in absolute terms it appears to be slowing. During the 1990s, for example, sales growth in publishing exceeded 5% annually. By the early 2000s, it had slowed to about 1.5% per year and hit $25 billion in 2007, according to data from the Association of American Publishers. Meanwhile, the most recent AAP numbers show sales in 2023 were $29.9 billion.
While publishing industry data is notoriously tricky to pin down given shifting accounting methods and data sources, the trend lines are nevertheless clear: book publishing employment has dropped by about a third, and sales have ticked up modestly.
Certainly, profitability has improved. At the 2022 U.S. Book Show, Morgan Entrekin, longtime head of Grove Atlantic, pointed to the growing pressure on publishers—especially publicly traded ones—to deliver higher margins. “In 46 years, [trade book publishers have] never seen these levels of profitability,” he said, noting that historically, profit margins in the 5% range were seen as a healthy return. Today, the four of the Big Five trade publishers that report their financial results (next year it will be three with S&S now private) typically have margins above 10%.
Traditional publishing has also ceded territory to new models. For example, digital self-publishing began to make its presence felt around 2007 with the launch of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. According to Bowker, in 2021 the number of self-published books—including e-books, print books, and digital audio—jumped to nearly three million, from just over 500,000 in 2011.
Of course, self-publishing sales data is scarcer and more unreliable than data for the traditional publishing industry. Amazon recently revealed that in the 10 years Kindle Unlimited has been active, KDP authors have earned more than $3.5 billion in royalties, with more than $650 million of that coming in just the past 12 months. When you add in à la carte sales of self-published print and e-books by KDP authors as well as sales from other players in the self-publishing field, total self-publishing sales could be well north of $3 billion annually.
But how many people would say they are employed in self-publishing? More to the point, where do they factor into publishing industry statistics? Few self-published authors are in the game full-time. And it is unlikely in any case that Amazon and the myriad other self-publishing companies (BookBaby, Draft2Digital, IngramSpark, and Lulu among them), which all run lean, have absorbed a significant number of the job losses reported by the BLS.
Then there is the anecdotal evidence, which suggests that some of the “efficiency” realized by book publishers today has been achieved on the backs of staff: fewer full-time editors, designers, and production personnel, with more work shifted to the assistant level or outsourced to freelancers foreign and domestic—labor that would not be counted in the government’s statistics on publishing industry employment.
With all the shifts of the past few decades, are the BLS stats an accurate portrait of the publishing industry job market? It’s hard to say. Surely no one in the industry would dispute that their ranks are shrinking, however. And what is certain is that the structure of employment in publishing has changed dramatically—a trend that is likely to continue.
A version of this article appeared in the 09/23/2024 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Where Have All the Publishing Jobs Gone?
