Fourth Wing and Iron Flame Lap the Big Five Publishers
Too Early to Say Existential Threat?
“Biggest” News in Books: 600,000 Books Sold in One Week
Imagine if Game of Thrones weren’t made by prestige TV king HBO and instead took the world by storm while being produced and streamed by Tubi. That is essentially what happened in the world of books this month when Rebecca Yarros’ second dragon-fantasy-romance Iron Flame published on November 7th. It sold 600,000 hardcovers according to Bookscan in its first week on-sale. That’s more than the previous mega-hit of the year, Brittany Spears’ memoir—from the most iconic pop star of the 2000s, a global celebrity with 43 million followers on Instagram—sold in its first week on-sale. With audio and eBook sales (the numbers are not reported publicly this readily), it’s safe to assume that Yarros’ follow-up sold over, if not closer to, one million copies in its first week. Now this week Yarros occupies the top two spots on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list, beating out the first week sales (typically the highest week of sales) of household names like David Baldacci and Mitch Albom.
A couple of months ago we talked about the burgeoning genre of Romantasy—now it has arrived, outselling some of the biggest stalwarts and traditional publications of the year. Sara J. Maas, one of the blockbuster trailblazers of the genre with her A Court of Thrones and Roses series, reportedly has massive preorder numbers for her book coming early next year.
What’s highly unique about Iron Flame’s publication is that Yarros, after spending twenty-odd weeks on the bestseller list with Fourth Wing, did not defect to a traditional publisher to release her second novel. She is still publishing with Entangled Publishing, under the imprint Red Tower Books, a small romance publisher that started in 2011. With Iron Flame, Entangled was briefly the 4th largest front-list (i.e. hardcover books) publisher in the entire industry, ahead of the much larger companies Simon & Schuster and Hachette Books.
There’s an interesting Q&A with the founder of Entangled posted back in 2011. Entangled occupies a space between a self-publishing kind of platform publisher, an independent publisher, and a corporate trade publisher. With a model that’s not quite the self-publishing put-it-out-and-see-what-happens strategy, or the full-service machine of a major trade publisher, or the full service (but with less money) machine of an independent publisher. Entangled does some of the traditional publishing services (editing, marketing, design, etc.) probably with less time and rigor for each title (this is safe to assume given the number of the titles they publish/their number of employees), but with a greater level of author and employee profit sharing, and, presumably, less upfront advance money to the author. They are also notably distributed by Macmillan, one of the smaller book distributors behind juggernauts Random House and Simon & Schuster (in this case “book distribution” refers to publishers that ship books to retailers like Amazon, B&N, and independent bookstores). It’s impressive that Entangled has even achieved this on-sale rollout of getting hundreds of thousands of copies out into stores.
So, is Rebecca Yarros an anomaly or has Entangled found a disruptive way of doing things? Is this a quicker-to-market, profit-sharing-forward model that can challenge the establishment? History shows that for as electrifying as this moment is, Entangled’s model is unlikely to prove a sustainable advantage over traditional publishing. Fifty Shades of Grey, once self-published fan fiction came into the fold of traditional publishing to sells its millions with prestigious publisher Knopf. Likewise, Colleen Hoover who took over the book publishing industry for the better part of the last two years, still dabbles in self-publishing, but her two biggest hits, Verity and It Ends With Us, are published by two separate Big-5 houses. Brandon Sanderson raised 41 million dollars on Kickstarter, but still publishes with traditional publishers Tor and Delacorte for many of his novel and young adult novels.
In a business sense, Entangled’s strength as a publisher—low overhead, high profit sharing—also make it difficult, even with the financial windfall from mega hits like Fourth Wing and Iron Flame, to invest in the infrastructure and signing up new authors to compete in the long run (you need to invest a lot of money in making bets on new books because so few books end up turning a profit). However, neither will the traditional publishers be able to see this trend and box out self-published authors or scrappy publishers like Entangled from making these black-swan hits happen again under their noses. It’s no mistake that all the above-mentioned anomalies—E.L. James, Colleen Hoover, and Brandon Sanderson—are writers in the romance and fantasy genres. These genres generally have audiences with greater loyalty and one-to-one connection to authors, robust fan fiction communities, and online forums, and a faster rate at which the books are read and consumed. This speed of innovation and voracious loyalty of readers will always allow the authors in these genres to bypass the traditional mediator of the publisher if they so choose and take more of the risk and more of the reward for themselves.
Editorial Assistant Book Club: December 2023
The Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
We’re doing it. After multiple months my hold at the library came up and so we are going to zag from the original intent of this book club and dive into this truly unavoidable world of romance dragons. This is to acknowledge another truth of being an editorial assistant or just working in publishing in general: sometimes you have to put pleasure or interest aside and read for pure curiosity. Why is this book resonating with readers and what is it? Whether this is the Oprah-pick, Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, or the comet that comes out of nowhere like Fourth Wing, some novels are so big that they become essential to understanding the business, readers, and culture. Let’s fly.