Book Trends

Articles about trends in bookselling and the publishing industry.

Shocking WSJ Discovery: Higher Prices=Lower Volume!

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This piece by Barry Eisler originally appeared as a guest post on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing on 8/4/15.

Barry Eisler here. Joe, thanks as always for the guest slot. I was going to mock this Wall Street Journal article somewhere, and there’s no better place than A Newbie’s Guide for that…

So okay, today the Wall Street Journal ran a piece headlined, “E-Book Sales Fall After New Amazon Contracts: Prices Rise, but Revenue Takes a Hit.” The article is behind a paywall, but you can access it by cutting and pasting the headline into your browser and clicking on the result of the search.

I just want to make sure I’m the first to congratulate the Wall Street Journal on its shocking discovery of a correlation between higher prices and lower demand. And, while I’m no economist, I’d like to humbly propose that the WSJ call its discovery something like, “The Demand Curve.” If this doesn’t win the newspaper a Pulitzer, I have one more suggestion: an even more radically new article on how a round object fastened to an axle can work as something called…a wheel.

Apologies for the snark, but where else but in publishing could a notion like “higher prices lead to lower revenues” even be controversial, let alone newsworthy? But the publishing industry is notoriously special, and Joe has been beating this drum for years. Five years ago, he wrote:

Naturally, people would rather pay less for something than more. And in a digital world, like we’re rapidly becoming, consumers have shown consistently in other forms of media that they place less value on downloads than on physical products.

When companies price digital content too high, consumers respond by pirating that content. That’s the ultimate in “devaluing.”

 

Read the full post on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

 

How The Sad Puppies Won — By Losing

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This post by Tasha Robinson originally appeared on NPR on 8/26/15.

“We smacked the Sad Puppies with a rolled-up newspaper,” said a woman on the shuttle bus between hotels at WorldCon in Spokane, Wash., on Sunday night. “It’s the only way to teach them.”

The presentation for the 2015 Hugo Awards had ended an hour earlier, and this was the mood in public areas at the convention: ebullient, relieved and more than a little smug. 2015 was the year science-fiction fandom’s most prestigious award was dominated by a voting bloc calling themselves the Sad Puppies, and a more extreme offshoot, the Rabid Puppies. The Puppies claim the Hugos have been taken over by affirmative-action-driven voters pushing a diversity agenda by nominating women and non-white writers, regardless of the quality of their work. For 2015, they organized their own corrective slates, consisting largely of conservative, straight white males — including themselves.

Sunday night’s ceremony revealed that the Hugo voters turned out in inflated numbers to reject the Puppy candidates. According to the awards’ official site, nearly 6,000 of the 11,635 eligible WorldCon members voted this year, up from 3,587 in 2014.

 

Read the full post on NPR.

 

The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t

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This article by Steven Johnson originally appeared on The New York Times Magazine site on 8/19/15.

In the digital economy, it was supposed to be impossible to make money by making art. Instead, creative careers are thriving — but in complicated and unexpected ways.

On July 11, 2000, in one of the more unlikely moments in the history of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Orrin Hatch handed the microphone to Metallica’s drummer, Lars Ulrich, to hear his thoughts on art in the age of digital reproduction. Ulrich’s primary concern was a new online service called Napster, which had debuted a little more than a year before. As Ulrich explained in his statement, the band began investigating Napster after unreleased versions of one of their songs began playing on radio stations around the country. They discovered that their entire catalog of music was available there for free.

Ulrich’s trip to Washington coincided with a lawsuit that Metallica had just filed against Napster — a suit that would ultimately play a role in the company’s bankruptcy filing. But in retrospect, we can also see Ulrich’s appearance as an intellectual milestone of sorts, in that he articulated a critique of the Internet-­era creative economy that became increasingly commonplace over time. ‘‘We typically employ a record producer, recording engineers, programmers, assistants and, occasionally, other musicians,’’ Ulrich told the Senate committee. ‘‘We rent time for months at recording studios, which are owned by small-­business men who have risked their own capital to buy, maintain and constantly upgrade very expensive equipment and facilities. Our record releases are supported by hundreds of record companies’ employees and provide programming for numerous radio and television stations. … It’s clear, then, that if music is free for downloading, the music industry is not viable. All the jobs I just talked about will be lost, and the diverse voices of the artists will disappear.’’

The intersection between commerce, technology and culture has long been a place of anxiety and foreboding. Marxist critics in the 1940s denounced the assembly-line approach to filmmaking that Hollywood had pioneered; in the ’60s, we feared the rise of television’s ‘‘vast wasteland’’; the ’80s demonized the record executives who were making money off violent rap lyrics and ‘‘Darling Nikki’’; in the ’90s, critics accused bookstore chains and Walmart of undermining the subtle curations of independent bookshops and record stores.

 

Read the full article on The New York Times Magazine site.

 

Science Fiction Is Really, Really White

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This post by Jennings Brown originally appeared on Vocativ on 8/21/15.

The Hugo Awards, science fiction’s most prestigious prize, are just around the corner. A Vocativ analysis of the nominees and winners shows it’s almost all white people

The 2015 Hugo Awards, celebrating the year’s best works of science fiction and fantasy, will be held this weekend amid a giant squabble about diversity in the genre. A group of white writers who believe that the voting process has been manipulated to include too many minorities are fighting to steer votes towards authors that are truer to the genre.

But if you crunch the numbers, it’s pretty hard to argue that white writers are being squeezed out at the Hugos. Vocativ tabulated every writer, editor and artist associated with the 65 works nominated this year in all 13 professional categories (there are four categories for fan work). Out of nearly 100 people responsible for those 65 works (some works had multiple authors), only three were non white.

 

Read the full post and chart on Vocativ.

Millennials 'Least Likely to Buy E-books'

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This post by Charlotte Eyre originally appeared on The Bookseller on 6/24/15.

Millennials are less likely to purchase e-books than any other age group, with 63% of 16-24 year-olds saying they have never bought one, according to a report from Deloitte.

For its Media Consumer Report 2015, Deloitte surveyed 2,000 UK consumers about their media habits. It found that 25% of 16-24 year-olds had bought an e-book in the last 24 months, compared to 38% of 25-34 year olds.

Millenials also say they are spending more time using other media, as only 14% of that group read books for more than an hour each day but 67% will watch up to an hour of short form video and 58% will spend more than an hour watching TV.
 

Read the full post on The Bookseller.

 

How Important Is It to Be a “Famous” Writer?

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This post by Lauren Sapala originally appeared on her site on 5/12/15.

For many years it was my dream to be a famous writer. Like, a REALLY famous writer. My idol was Jack Kerouac, and while that was partly because I loved the beauty of his writing (and still do) it was also because of the recognition he achieved. Never mind the fact that fame only contributed to his tragic downward spiral, that’s a story for another day. The point is that I wanted what he had—status, notoriety, and success.

I knew that if I had those things I would be happy.

But a funny thing happened on the way there…I noticed that when I concentrated on using my writing to gain recognition from outside parties, my writing suffered. I suffered too. Writing that way wasn’t much fun. And I also realized that I had no idea what outside parties wanted from me. I would think I had a grand idea for a little while, and then it wouldn’t seem so great. Or I’d try to write something that was really “current” only to find the times had already changed and that thing wasn’t “in” anymore.

 

Read the full post on Lauren Sapala’s site.

 

On Established Authors Singing The Praises Of Self-publishing

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This post by Alan Baxter originally appeared on his Warrior Scribe site on 6/1/15.

Let me start this piece with the following: I have no problem with any method of publishing. Whatever works for you and gets you the results you want is great. I’m a hybrid author – I’ve self-published in the past, I still self-publish a small amount and nowadays I’m mostly traditionally published in both big and small press. This is not about criticising any particular path to publication.

Okay?

Good. Glad we’ve got that covered. What I do want to talk about is a thing I’ve seen a lot of lately, most recently in this article by Harry Bingham. There have been several of these things, (Konrath is the feral posterboy for the movement – search him up yourself if you’re interested) but in a nutshell, the case they’re stating is this:

The great machine of publishing is constantly morphing and moving on, but we’re now in the era of self-publishing and that’s the way forward for everyone. They cite their own recent successes as evidence.

Now, self-publishing is in a huge renaissance and it is a great way forward for many people. But these authors going on about how they’re leaving the behemoth of traditional publishing for the clear, honest waters of self-publishing success are being disingenuous at best and wilfully ignorant at worst.

 

Read the full post on Warrior Scribe.

 

New Barnes and Noble CEO Will Kill NooK

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This post by Michael Kozlowski originally appeared on GoodEreader on 7/3/15.

Barnes and Noble has lost over one billion dollars on trying to make the Nook brand into a viable business model. Since 2009 the largest bookseller in the US has gone through two CEO’s and has just announced they have hired their third, Ron Boire, who starts this September. It looks like the Nook brand is in seriously jeopardy.

Boire—who has only been CEO of the faltering Sears Canada department store chain for the last ten months has kept the store in business by closing retail locations and axing thousands of job will be the new CEO of Barnes and Noble. His number one priority with the company is to stem the blood loss from the ailing Nook division. Last week Barnes and Noble announced that Nook hardware and e-books sales fell 40% in the three months ending May 2 and declined 48% year on year.

 

Read the full post on GoodEreader.

 

Kindle Royalty Payment Changes Roundup

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Amazon has recently announced a major overhaul of how it will calculate royalties to be paid on Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Select Lending Library borrows.

Since most authors seem perplexed at how the new system works, and will affect them, here’s a roundup of reactions from people who’ve done some analysis.

Over on the Melville House blog, the outlook on these changes is gloomy:

When Kindle Unlimited was first formed, it offered royalties to authors as long as book borrowers read 10% of the text. Now authors are likely to make less money each time the book’s borrowed, unless his or her readers complete a considerable chunk of the text (or even–gasp–read the whole thing).

Trent Evans isn’t so sure, and he lays out a very detailed and intricate financial analysis to back up his theory that the changes could be a good thing for authors, since they will very likely force authors to stop slicing and dicing their books into much shorter novellas in order to get more borrows:

The more I think about this, the more I suspect this change is almost wholly focused on combating the rampant gaming of KU that’s been going on. The absurd ease with which KU (in its current form) can be ruthlessly gamed is one of the many reasons why I stayed far away (after my initial experiment with it).

 

C.E. Kilgore is in agreement with Evans on the “gaming” aspect, but her overall opinion of the changes is still negative and she calls Amazon’s sample payout scenarios into question:

Now, being paid per page means that the 25 page novellas filling the pool are going to be earning significantly less than their 250 page swimming-buddies. But, exactly how significantly less isn’t being honestly represented.

In [Amazon’s] redonk [payout calculation] example, they are giving each page a $10 worth. Excuse me for a moment while I LOL at that. Authors, please – stop right there and don’t even get any ideas about that actually happening. No way is Amazon EVER going to pay out anything close to $10 per page.

A more reasonably achievable figure is 1 penny per page (but I believe it will end up being something more like 0.006 cents – 0.008 cents per page ‘ i.e. not even a penny per page) payouts.

 

Read the different perspectives and analyses before making up your mind about the likely impact on your own Kindle books.

 

The Crisis In Non-Fiction Publishing

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This editorial by Sam Leith originally appeared on The Guardian on 6/26/15.

When it comes to high-calibre non-fiction, risk-averse trade publishing houses are producing too many copycat ‘smart thinking’ books that promise more than they deliver. But praise should be given to the university presses

mid the ambient wails of doom about the publishing industry, I’d like to enter a note of encouragement. The mainstream may be getting dumber by the day, but we are living in what looks like a golden age of publishing for, of all people, the university presses.

At the moment, I don’t think there’s a trade publishing house producing high-calibre, serious non-fiction of the quality and variety of Yale University Press; and snapping at its heels are Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, Cambridge and Chicago. As the literary editor of a middlebrow news magazine I’m finding ever more of the reviews I commission are from such presses.

Where 15 or 20 years ago the big trade publishers were, oddly, swamping the market with sort-of-scholarly micro-histories of salt or longitude, they now seem, with exceptions of course, to be tiptoeing away from specific, knotty, deeply researched and nuanced books about things. The sorts of book on which they tend now to rely are investigations of “big ideas”. Their lodestars or exemplars are the Malcolm Gladwells and Daniel Kahnemans and Nicholas Carrs. I do not mean to denigrate those individual authors, rather to say that they produce a particular type of work.

 

Read the full editorial on The Guardian.

 

New Struggles in Self-Publishing

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This post by David Farland originally appeared on his site on 6/23/15.

I hesitate to mention problems with self-publishing. In some genres, such as romance or self-help books, the industry is doing great. But for those who are trying to sell fiction, it seems that the markets are contracting, and it appears that things will go from bad to worse.

If you’ve been self-publishing for the past few years, you probably remember the good old days. For example, a few years ago I put my novel The Golden Queen up as a free e-book for a week and forgot about it. I was going to mention on my social media what I had done, but seriously got busy with something else. Three days later, I got an email from someone who said, “Why don’t you take your free e-book down and let someone else have a shot at the #1 spot.” I’d given away 15,000 copies in three days, and had sold thousands of dollars in inventory on the other two books in the series.

Today, even getting readers to look at a free book is nearly impossible. People have seen so many promotions for bad books that they stay away in droves. In this past year alone, I’ve read that nearly three million e-books were created, and another three million are anticipated this year. With so much “white noise,” how is a good author to be heard?

 

Read the full post on David Farland’s site.

 

Kindle’s New Bookerly Font and Other Typography Features

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This post by Joel Friedlander originally appeared on his The Book Designer on 6/22/15.

Many ebook readers—and not just us typography nerds and designers, either—have complained about the limited font set provided with the major e-readers.

Considering the vast sums that have been spent on developing these devices, it’s always seemed odd to me that they would trumpet their e-reading devices and commitment to book readers, then ship a product that aims to fulfill these promises… but only in one of these fonts:

  • Baskerville
  • Caecilia
  • Georgia
  • Helvetica
  • Palatino

I’ve typeset books in Baskerville, but there’s Baskerville, then there’s Baskerville, a sturdy face with high stroke contrast and lovely long serifs, not the weak-tea version on the Kindle.

Now Amazon has put some work into upgrading both the font selection on its Kindle devices and apps, but also on other areas of typography that Kindle has historically fallen down on.

The rollout of these features seems to be happening slowly along Amazon’s product line, and it’s hard to tell which devices have received which upgrades.

On Amazon’s own site for the new Kindle PaperWhite, they list 5 new features:

 

Read the full post on The Book Designer.

 

A Golden Era for Young Readers: The Story Behind Little Golden Books

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This post by Rob Lammle originally appeared on Mental Floss on 6/12/15.

There’s a good chance you grew up reading the adventures of The Poky Little Puppy, Tootle, or Scuffy the Tugboat in the pages of Little Golden Books. But how much do you know about the story behind these beloved tales?

Before the introduction of Little Golden Books in 1942, children’s books weren’t necessarily made with children’s interests in mind. They were usually large volumes that were too difficult for young readers to handle or comprehend, and were awfully expensive at $2 to $3 each (that’s about $28 – $42 today). But George Duplaix of the Artist’s and Writer’s Guild, in partnership with Simon & Schuster Publications and Western Printing, wanted to change all that.

Duplaix thought the solution was small, sturdy, inexpensive books with fewer pages, simpler stories, and more illustrations so little kids could actually enjoy them. Western was already publishing a line for kids called Golden Books, so Duplaix and his team piggy-backed on those marketing efforts, calling the new line Little Golden Books.

The first 12 titles were released on October 1, 1942, at a price of only a quarter a piece. They were an instant success. After only five months on the market, 1.5 million copies had been sold and many titles were already in their third printing; by 1945, most were in their seventh printing. One of the keys to their sales success was the fact that they were available in unusual places, such as department stores, drug stores, and supermarkets. Busy parents could keep rambunctious children occupied while they ran errands, and not feel guilty about the additional 25 cents tacked onto their final bills.

 

Read the full post on Mental Floss.

 

“Let's Talk About Genre”: Neil Gaiman And Kazuo Ishiguro In Conversation

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This conversation between Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro originally appeared on New Statesman on 6/4/15.

The two literary heavyweights talk about the politics of storytelling, the art of the swordfight and why dragons are good for the economy.

Neil Gaiman’s New York Times review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel began a debate about the borders between fantasy and literary fiction. For a special issue guest-edited by Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer​, the New Statesman brought the pair together to discuss genre snobbery and the evolution of stories.

Neil Gaiman Let’s talk about genre. Why does it matter? Your book The Buried Giant – which was published not as a fantasy novel, although it contains an awful lot of elements that would be familiar to readers of fantasy – seemed to stir people up from both sides of the literary divide. The fantasy people, in the shape of Ursula Le Guin (although she later retracted it) said, “This is fantasy, and your refusal to put on the mantle of fantasy is evidence of an author slumming it.” And then Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times reviewed it with utter bafflement. Meanwhile, readers and a lot of reviewers had no trouble figuring out what kind of book it is and enjoyed it hugely.

Kazuo Ishiguro I felt like I’d stepped into some larger discussion that had been going on for some time. I expected some of my usual readers to say, “What’s this? There are ogres in it . . .” but I didn’t anticipate this bigger debate. Why are people so preoccupied? What is genre in the first place? Who invented it? Why am I perceived to have crossed a kind of boundary?

NG I think if you were a novelist writing in 1920 or 1930, you would simply be perceived as having written another novel. When Dickens published A Christmas Carol nobody went, “Ah, this respectable social novelist has suddenly become a fantasy novelist: look, there are ghosts and magic.”

 

Read the full conversation on New Statesman.

 

Advice For An Author Looking For A Literary Agent

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This post by Mike Shatzkin originally appeared on The Shatzkin Files on 5/20/15.

Until last week, I hadn’t stopped to think about how often I’m advising authors about how to deal with the publishing business. I would imagine this is something that most of us in the industry find ourselves doing very frequently. There are, after all, a lot of aspiring authors in the world and when one’s a friend, or a friend of a friend, they ask. And you try to help them.

As I wrote in an April post, I had assumed until very recently that an author couldn’t do herself any harm by self-publishing her work on her way to finding an agent or a publisher. When an agent I know and respect told an author I’d sent to him that he really found it hard to sell publishers already self-published books, it stopped me short. I sent out a query to a long list of agents and the consensus opinion that came back was that publishers are really uncomfortable picking up a book that has already made an appearance in the marketplace. (A deeper look at the results of this canvassing will be the subject of a future post.)

Although we all know stories of self-published books that went on to have fabulous runs with a publisher (“50 Shades of Gray” being the obvious example), it seems that most agents think that most publishers see the previous publishing history as a challenge. If the book didn’t do well, they don’t attribute it to poor or non-existent marketing. And if it did well, they sometimes wonder if the audience has been exhausted.

Obviously, there are both agents and editors who don’t think that way, but I was really surprised to learn that so many of them apparently do.

I would never attempt to advise an author on the techniques for self-publishing. That’s not what I know and there are many people, starting with our friend Jane Friedman (not the one from Open Road), who specialize in that (although she knows about finding agents and regular publishing too). But I have long had a formulation of how to recruit an agent which I passed along when asked.

 

Read the full post on The Shatzkin Files.