Recently, Publishers Weekly looked at government statistics that show the number of publishing jobs has declined significantly over the last 30 years—by roughly 40 percent since 1997. The big question: Is it really as bad as it looks?
Employment in book publishing peaked in 1997 and didn’t decline in a big way until the recession of 2007–2009. The real bottoming out came in 2021, and the situation has improved a little bit since then.
Publishers Weekly’s interpretation? “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.” As PW notes, while no one would dispute the industry has realized more “efficiencies” and shrunk due to consolidation, it’s hard to factor in how jobs may have migrated to other sectors, such as the self-publishing arena and freelancing, not to mention digital media and tech companies, which aren’t captured as part of traditional book publishing employment by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
