Monday, June 18, 2012

Ready To Compete With 4,000 New Books Each Day?



There is wild growth in book publishing... at least in the number of titles being released.

In 20120 Bowker Market Research said 133,000 self-published ebooks and printed books were released. That number ballooned to 211,000 in 2011 -- an increase of over 60%!

Further, the number of traditionally published books -- those of mainstream houses, increased modestly, by 6% -- to 347,178 in 2011. Combined, that's about 559,000 books -- or more than 11,000 per week. you can also add on another million or so of non-traditional books, such as print-on-demand titles. That increases the number of new books released - -weekly -- to 30,000. It was more than double that a year ago but there was a falloff in the area of POD houses that specialize in public domain titles that are mainly sold online. Several million fewer titles are being published this year, as a result, but those books were a different species, so to speak.

The same Bowker report, whose results were released at Book Expo America, showed e-books accounted for 41 percent of the units sold but only accounted for 11 percent of sales revenue – because their price is so low. I can only conclude two things: one, is that more units will be sold online but then at some point, the price of e-books will have to rise for the industry to be profitable.

In terms of the traditionally published books by the Random Houses and Harper Collins of the world, the number of new titles has steadily grown every year. 274,000 were put out in 2006, then 284,000 in 2007, and 289,000 in 2008. They jumped almost 10 percent in 2010, when they went from 302,000 to 328,000. This shows publishing is still healthy if they are adding more titles to the mix of competition but it also shows the battle to promote these books is getting to be ever-more challenging.

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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person.

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