The
Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group revealed a
number of statistics that authors and publishers should be interested in except
that one has to question how accurate they are.
Book
sales come in many forms, from many sources, and I am not sure how these
studies account for things such as books sold directly by authors. For
instance, who is reccording the sales of self-published authors? For
another, what if an author purchases
1,000 books from his or her publisher and then resells them on his site of
through a bulk sale to an organization? Was any of this accounted for? Is this
study counting up ALL sales, from all possible channels?
That said,
however the study attempted to be complete and accurate, it reports:
·
Book
publishing revenue was down 2.5% in 2011, but it didn’t note how this impacted
profits. Still, $27.2 billion was spent in 2011 on books.
·
The
total number of books sold rose by 3.4%, to 2.77 billion books. The
lower-priced ebook’s growing share of the marketplace is to blame for an increase in units could lead to a decrease in
revenue.
·
388
million ebooks were sold last year – up 210% from 2010. Ebook revenue more than
doubled, to $2.074 billion.
·
Brick-and-mortar
sales are still the No. 1 source of sales for books, but sales declined 12.6%
to $8.59 billion, largely due to the loss of Borders’ 500+ retail outlets.
·
Online
retail sales grew 35% -- to $5.04 billion – representing 18% of total book
revenue.
·
The
biggest growing genre was children’s/young adult books, which saw a 12% jump in
revenue.
So what can one
conclude from these numbers?
·
Ebook
sales will continue to rise and paper book sales will continue to decline.
·
Ebook
pricing will need to rise, to make up for the decreased print revenue and
because the ebook market will eventually dominate the marketplace.
·
Authors
will have to write more books to generate the same amount of revenue from dong
fewer books today.
·
More
comprehensive research needs to be done to figure out how many book sales are
not being measured or accounted for in order to get a true understanding of
whether the book industry is growing, stagnating, or shrinking.
Regardless
of these numbers and an endless analysis of them, writers will continue to
write and publishers will continue to publish books that are promotable and
profitable. So don’t get caught up in anything else. The next bestseller awaits
its writing.
Interview With UK Thriller Author Peter Smith
1. What
type of books do you write?
Mainly they're thrillers. I was first publishedin the UK by Macmillan
under the nom de plume 'James Barrington', and I wrote six books for that
publishing house: Overkill, Pandemic,
Foxbat, Timebomb, Payback and Manhunt. These were all mainstream thrillers, in
the Tom Clancy mode. While I was still writing this series, my agent was
approached by a commissioning editor at Penguin, and I then ghosted a
non-fiction book – Joint Force Harrier – about British Harrier operations in Afghanistan, writing the
book with Commander Ade Orchard, the British Royal Navy's most senior frontline
Harrier pilot. At Macmillan, I followed up the 'James Barrington' novels with a
couple of Second World War thrillers – To Do or Die and Right and Glory – written as 'Max Adams'. My literary
agent, Luigi Bonomi of LBA in London, then 'sold' me to Transworld and,
writing as 'James Becker', I've now had five novels published by that company: The
First Apostle, The Moses Stone, The Messiah Secret, The Nosferatu Scroll and Echo of the Reich. Luigi then found me another home, with
Simon & Schuster, to write conspiracy thrillers and the first book for that
publishing house – The Titanic Secret – by 'Jack Steel' was released early this year. And while all that
lot's been going on, I've also ventured into the exciting new world of
electronic publishing, writing as 'Tom Kasey' for The Endeavour Press – Trade
Off and Sanctuary – as well is reviving my 'James
Barrington' alter ego for another non-fiction book – Falklands:
Voyage to War – and a new writing
name, 'Thomas Payne' for a non-fiction rant entitled Uncommon Sense.
2. What
is your latest or upcoming book about? Apart from the Kindle books, all of which were published this year,
I've had two novels released by Simon & Schuster and Transworld –The Titanic Secret and Echo of the Reich respectively – and I have two more scheduled for publication
later in 2012 and in 2013, by the same two publishing houses. These will be The
Ripper Secret and The
Pantera Testimony. The subject matter
of all four books is fairly diverse. The Titanic Secret was a novel set around the actual
sinking of the Titanic, but involving a German plot to plunge the world into
war; Echo of the Reich is
about a Nazi secret weapon being revived for use in a terrorist attack aimed at
the London Olympic Games; The Ripper Secret is a new take on the series of murders perpetrated by Jack the
Ripper, and links those events in London to the finding of an ancient relic in
Jerusalem. And, finally, The Pantera Testimony begins two thousand years ago in Judea
with a rape and then shifts to the present day when evidence of that
crime surfaces with potentially catastrophic results for the Catholic Church.
3. What
inspired you to write it?
I've always been lucky enough to be able to write about things that
interest me. When I was a student, a very long time ago, history was one of the
subjects I studied, and ancient history in particular has always fascinated me.
I've used the knowledge I gained to guide the books for Transworld, and I
always try with all my books to ground them firmly in fact. To this end, I
always include an author's note in the novels to explain something about the
reality which underpins the fiction. As for the specifics of the two books
coming out later this year and in 2013, the true identity of Jack the Ripper
has never been established with any degree of certainty, and nor have his
reasons for beginning and ending his reign of terror in Whitechapel. So I
wondered if there was more to it than just a series of murders, and I've built
the novel around the premise that the killer was an intelligent and organized
man who was carrying out the murders for a very specific reason. In the other
book, the story of Pantera has been around since about the third century, and
has been argued about ever since then. I wondered what would happen if
unarguable proof that event suddenly appeared today, and in particular how the
Catholic Church would react to it. That is the basis of the novel, which I'm still
writing.
4. What
did you do before you became an author? I worked in a number of jobs, including a mortuary and a factory,
before joining the British Royal Navy as a pilot, and I served for 21 years in
the Fleet Air Arm, first as a pilot and then as an air traffic control officer
and later as a staff officer in London. During my time in the Navy, I was
involved in the Falklands campaign on board the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious, which formed the background to my non-fiction e-book about the ship.
5. How
does it feel to be a published author? I genuinely think that being an author is arguably one of the best jobs
in the world. I can work anywhere as long as I have a computer, and I've been
able to do useful work in cafés, on trains, in aircraft and on board ship. I've
also been lucky in that I'm represented by one of the best literary agents in
the business, who is forever suggesting new avenues to explore, and then
managing to sell what I write to publishers. As for how it feels, there is a
genuine thrill in walking into a bookshop and seeing one of my books on display
on a shelf. I think it was Joyce Grenfell who said that holding a copy of her
first book was the greatest moment of her life, even more significant to her
than her marriage or the birth of her first child, and I do know what she
means. Holding that paperback or hardback and seeing your name on the front
cover – or in my case one of my names! – is a kind of vindication of the hours
spent sitting alone in front of a computer and trying to turn the images
cascading through your mind into sentences on a page that you hope will grip
and hold your readers. But it is very special. There's no doubt about that.
6. Any
advice for struggling writers? I remember having a
conversation with my literary agent over a long and leisurely lunch when the
subject of getting published came up. He asked me what I thought the most
important characteristic was for any aspiring writer, and we batted ideas back
and forth for a while. Obviously, the ability to use the English language
correctly, with correct punctuation and spelling, is extremely important. It's
also clearly vital that an author has a story to tell, a story that will be of
interest to other people. He needs to be able to draw characters, to describe
action, to produce vivid descriptions and to write dialogue that sounds
life-like. But the one single characteristic that we both agreed was absolutely
vital was persistence. Talent and ability help, obviously, but what any
aspiring author has to do is get their work out there, to put it in front of
agents and publishers, because nobody ever sold a book that simply sat in a
drawer or on a computer's hard disk.
When I was trying to find an agent I had two
'packages' for two different books doing the rounds. Using one of the British
guides to agents, I had literally started at the letter 'A' and was working my
way down to 'Z'. Every single approach had ended in a curt rejection slip until
one wonderful week when I received two telephone calls from two different
agents, each of whom wanted to represent me. But one agent's name began with a
'W', so I was virtually at the end of the alphabet, and although the name of
the other agent was Luigi Bonomi, he worked for a London company named Sheil
Land Associates, which meant I was near the end of the alphabet with him as
well. But, and I suppose this is the point, if all I'd received were rejection
slips my plan was quite simple. I was going to revise both of the packages, try
to find out what was putting people off, and then start the process all over
again.
One other point which is indirectly related to
getting published is that every author must absolutely accept editorial
guidance. I've done a bit of coaching of writers in the past and a few times
I've come across people who've said words to the effect that 'if a publisher
wants this book, I'm not changing a single word of it'. Not only is this kind
of attitude extraordinarily arrogant, but it virtually guarantees that no agent
or publisher will take them on. It doesn't matter how talented writer you are,
as an author you are simply too close to your own work to see its faults and it
takes an independent analysis to show what is wrong with a manuscript. I also
believe that every manuscript ever produced, irrespective of the fame or
ability of the author, needs editing. In some cases, severe editing. And I am
also acquainted with a number of authors who are prepared to argue for two
weeks over the placement of a comma, and who are such a nightmare for an editor
to deal with that their publishing contracts are simply not being renewed.
Every author absolutely must accept editorial direction.
7. Where
do you see book publishing heading? And this, I suppose, is the million dollar question. The short and
snappy answer is that nobody knows, and my guess is just as likely to be right
– or wrong – as any other. My personal feeling is that, because of the rise of
the Kindle and other e-book readers, the world of publishing in the next decade
is going to change out of all recognition. I think that within ten years the
hardback novel will simply cease to exist, and a very, very small number of
paperbacks will be produced. Because a novel is almost by definition a book
that is read once and then given away – it's a disposable item – I think that
most will be produced as electronic downloads. At the moment, publishers
haven't really grasped how the e-book world works, and they seem to think that
they can sell e-books for pretty much the same price as paperbacks, despite the
very obvious fact that the electronic download costs almost nothing to produce,
in comparison with the price of printing a paperback,, and can then be sold as
many times as there are people want to buy it.
What I think will happen is that the publishing
houses will have to reduce the price of an e-book to about the same as a cup of
coffee, so that it will become a genuine impulse purchase, and when they do
they will see sales vastly increase. I also believe that reference books of all
sorts will continue to sell as physical copies, probably alongside electronic
versions, and we might perhaps see the book becoming more of a piece of
art than simply a collection of words. If you're looking for a present for
somebody, you can't really buy them a Kindle download, so perhaps we will start
to see the return of leather bound books and other attractive bindings. But as
I said at the start of the answer to this question, I really don't know.
Brian Feinblum’s
views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of
his employer, the nation’s largest book promoter. You can follow him on Twitter
@theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in
the third-person.
