Book Trends

Articles about trends in bookselling and the publishing industry.

January 2015 Author Earnings Report

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This post originally appeared on the Author Earnings site on 1/28/15.

Executive Summary
AuthorEarnings reports analyze detailed title-level data on 33% of all daily ebook sales in the U.S.

30% of the ebooks being purchased in the U.S. do not use ISBN numbers and are invisible to the industry’s official market surveys and reports; all the ISBN-based estimates of market share reported by Bowker, AAP, BISG, and Nielsen are wildly wrong.

33% of all paid ebook unit sales on Amazon.com are indie self-published ebooks.

20% of all consumer dollars spent on ebooks on Amazon.com are being spent on indie self-published ebooks.

40% of all dollars earned by authors from ebooks on Amazon.com are earned by indie self-published ebooks.

In mid-year 2014, indie-published authors as a cohort began taking home the lion’s share (40%) of all ebook author earnings generated on Amazon.com while authors published by all of the Big Five publishers combined slipped into second place at 35%.

 

Full Report
U.S. ebook sales have plateaued — or are even declining, relative to print — declare some widely-cited industry statistics. Publishing pundits opine that readers’ Kindles are all “full” now, and talk about the “glut” of ebooks. News articles imply that consumers are abandoning ebooks and are returning to print books, and then those articles speculate about whether ebooks were “just a fad.” Other pundits assert that indie authors will no longer be able to compete with the Big Five traditional publishers, now that those publishers have begun to price some of their ebooks lower.

Lots of speculation. Lots of flawed studies based on 2008 methodologies. Lots of inaccurate statistics. And very few facts.

As always, we turn to the data for real answers.

 

Read the full post, which includes numerous charts and graphs with accompanying analysis, on Author Earnings.

 

So What Do I Do Now?

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This post by Wendy Lawton originally appeared on Books&Such on 2/10/15.

How often do writers encounter a wrinkle of one sort or another and wonder, “So what do I do now?”

When I was writing my very first middle grade book on an obscure figure from history I was shocked to find my character featured in another middle grade book by a well-known children’s writer. I was devastated. I figured my story was already done. My big question was, “So what do I do now?” Happily I stepped back and realized that the story treatment was very different from mine and that my concept offered a series that was a unique presentation. I kept plowing forward and not only finished the book but found a publisher for the series.

We come across many a situation where we ask the question. Let me describe a couple. . .

Wrinkle: Say you are a writer who has been slaving away on a steampunk novel only to read that steampunk is dead in the water.

So what do I do now?

 

Read the full post on Books&Such.

 

Indie & Trad Publishing & Flying Monkeys On The Yellow Brick Road!

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This post by Bob Mayer originally appeared on his Write On The River site on 2/12/15.

As you negotiate your journey through the wonderful world of publishing, be careful of those flying monkeys as you gaze in the crystal ball of your career path.

Don’t take anyone else’s monkey as your own! We all are on our unique yellow brick roads to Oz, whatever Oz might be for each of us.

Lately I’ve run into some new writers at conferences who eventually whisper to me they’ve signed a traditional deal, but they’re afraid to mention it to anyone because they get castigated. The attitude seems to be that if the book is good enough to get a book deal, then self-publishing makes more sense.

What a change in just a few years when people would break open a bottle of champagne upon getting a book deal. Now one almost dares not mention it for fear of being ridiculed for not taking the indie route. There are some indie authors saying they will never go back to traditional publishing; the key phrase is “go back”. It’s curious that a lot of us who have been successful as indies actually started in traditional publishing, giving us a distinct leg up; along with a thing called backlist.

 

Read the full post on Write On The River.

 

An Incredibly Brief Introduction to New Media Lit

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This post by Matthew Burnside originally appeared on Ploughshares on 2/5/15.

Let us consider a form mired in its indefinability: new media lit. I’ve found that nothing – not even poetry – can alienate a reader more quickly than encountering it. Normally I would resist trying to encapsulate an entire genre into one shell of a definition, but because we don’t have a lot of time here and my purpose is simply to expose you to the very distant edge of what the genre has to offer (whether you choose to step further is up to you), let’s stick with a radically basic, extremely flawed definition: New media lit is any “literature” that appears online, utilizing the myriad tools of technology and often allowing a greater degree of reader interaction than does offline literature.

This stuff has been around for a while—since Michael Joyce first doled out a floppy disk to his peers bearing the first (arguably) hypertext story entitled “Afternoon, a Story” in the late ’80s—but only on the fringes of literature, existing more as a novelty than as a respectable form. Robert Coover hailed its potential more than anyone, seeing it as perhaps the natural evolution of literature—the product of emerging media and our increased connectedness to technology. At a certain point in the 1990s, for some, new media lit seemed to be the inevitable future.

It was a future that never came to pass. But today, as digital literacy and the capacity for multimodal thought processing increases light years with each new generation beyond the previous one, I think it’s worth dipping into the digital waters again, if only to challenge our notion of what literature is and consider what else it can, and might, one day be.

 

Read the full post, which includes links to some online New Media Lit, on Ploughshares.

 

This Surprising Reading Level Analysis Will Change the Way You Write

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This article by Shane Snow originally appeared on Contently on 1/28/15.

Ernest Hemingway is regarded as one of the world’s greatest writers. After running some nerdy reading level stats, I now respect him even more.

The other day, a friend and I were talking about becoming better writers by looking at the “reading levels” of our work. Scholars have formulas for automatically estimating reading level using syllables, sentence length, and other proxies for vocabulary and concept complexity. After the chat, just for fun, I ran a chapter from my book through the most common one, the Flesch-Kincaid index:

I learned, to my dismay, that I’ve been writing for 8th graders.

Curiosity piqued, I decided to see how I compared to the first famous writer that popped in my head: Hemingway. So I ran a reading level calculation on The Old Man and the Sea. That’s when I was really surprised:

Apparently, my man Ernest, the Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose work shaped 20th-century fiction, wrote for elementary-schoolers.

Upon learning this, I did the only thing a self-respecting geek could do at that point: I ran every bestselling writer I had on my Kindle through the machine.

 

Read the full post, which includes many informative graphs, on Contently.

 

The Self-Curating (Mostly Indie) Slush Pile

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This post by JH Mae originally appeared on IndieReader on 2/4/15.

These days, self-publishing doesn’t necessarily mean your novel will wither and die, unread, on the digital and real life bookshelves. Books with polished writing, a compelling voice, eye-catching covers, promising sales numbers and an author with a decent reader following may be destined for great things. Meaning a traditional book deal.

With so many indie titles released every day, the pool of authors has become something of a resource for literary agents eager to unearth new talent and sign the next breakaway bestseller – and a testing ground. “Traditional publishers let the indie market experiment, then they swoop in and try to grab what has worked,” said literary agent Evan Marshall with the Evan Marshall Agency. “When a (book) is of high quality, the attention and popularity naturally come with it.”

The main indicator is sales rankings, which creates a “slush pile that is self-curating,” added Laurie McLean, a partner at Fuse Literary Inc. Basically, if the numbers just aren’t there and the book isn’t making waves in the indie market, it likely won’t stand a chance in the traditional one, either, added Andrea Hurst, literary agent with Andrea Hurst & Associates.

 

Read the full post on IndieReader.

 

Music, Fiction, and the Value of Attention

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This article by Nicholas Games originally appeared on The New Yorker on 1/27/15.

The protagonist of Richard Powers’s 2014 novel, “Orfeo,” is a composer named Peter Els who, late in life, begins to dabble in biotechnology. Els’s attempts to “compose” in DNA turn him into a suspected bioterrorist fleeing across the country; one of his furtive stops is Champaign, Illinois, where he attended graduate school. In a coffee shop that he remembers from his student days, Els recognizes Steve Reich’s 1995 “Proverb” coming from the speakers. In the bravura passage that follows, Powers describes the way that Els listens to the music:

Another modulation, and the ghosts disperse. He wants the piece to be over. Not because of the thrilling sameness: monotony could almost save him now. Because of the waves of connection lighting up long-dark regions in his head. He knows better, but can’t help it: these spinning, condensed ecstasies, this cascade of echoes, these abstract patterns without significance, this seamless breathing leaves him sure, one more time, of some lush design waiting for him.

In the long tradition of novels about music and musicians, this language is new. The listening being depicted is a cognitive event: it happens in the skull and leaps from synapse to synapse, as if it were registering on a brain scan. The imagery of the fMRI machine was, of course, unavailable to Marcel Proust or Thomas Mann, say, who thought of music more in cultural terms than in cognitive terms (though for Proust the subject was, like nearly everything else, intimately connected to memory). But this new language—the lighting up of regions in the head—resonates, because a kind of folk version of neuroscience has entered everyday speech. Nearly all of us now speak of “chemical imbalances,” hormone levels, and how this or that person is “wired.”

 

Read the full article on The New Yorker.

 

Translating John Sargent

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This post by J.A. Konrath originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog on 12/19/14. Note that it contains strong language.

Often times it seems as if those who work in the legacy publishing world are so out of touch with authors that a translator is needed to explain the true meaning of what has been said.

Such is the case with John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, in his recent public letter.

Sargent in crazy bold italics, the translation in common-sense normal font.

Dear Authors, Illustrators, and Agents,
There has been a lot of change in the e-book publishing world of late, so I thought it a good idea to update you on what is going on at Macmillan.

Translation: It will be easier to accept the bad news if I warn you first.

The largest single change happens today, December 18th. Today a portion of our agreement with the Department of Justice (called a consent decree) expires, and we will no longer be required to allow retailers to discount e-books.

Translation: Remember when we illegally colluded with other publishers to price-fix? We did that because we were worried that low-priced ebooks would harm our paper distribution oligopoly.

It doesn’t matter that we have a much higher profit margin on ebooks. It doesn’t matter that since forcing the agency model on Amazon, our authors made less money. What matters is that we foresaw a day where ebook sales surpassed paper sales, and we knew that would put us out of business because savvy authors wouldn’t need our value-added publishing services anymore.

Happily, Amazon won’t be able to discount our ebooks anymore, so we can charge high prices and protect the interests of our business and of the cartel at the expense of your financial situation.

Unless you’re one of the huge bestsellers we publish. Those huge bestsellers sell a shit-ton of paper books. Under this model, they’ll continue to get richer.

 

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

 

Revisiting the Long Tail Theory as Applied to Ebooks

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This post by Marcello Vena originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 1/8/15.

The myth of the Long Tail for ebooks may be fading away as the digital book market grows, and it is operated by few mega e-retailers.

In a limitless world of digital goods, powerful search and recommendation engines, near-zero marginal cost of digital production, storage and distribution, niche products shall get much more market relevance. “Selling less of more” is part of what the “Long Tail” theory has been preaching.

Does it apply to the creative industries too? And how? Should digital book publishers reduce attention on blockbusters and increase focus on the Long Tail as the source of the most profitable growth? Is there a space for unlimited growth of niche ebooks? Who is going to consume a potentially unlimited supply of creative goods?

 

Long Tale Theory is a Decade Old

It is interesting to note that the Long Tail theory was first published — by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson — 10 years ago (October 2004), a few years after the dot-com bubble, when Internet was still in its infancy (it was 11 years old then). Amazon had not yet launched the Kindle (that came at the end of 2007) and the ebook market was still waiting to ignite. The digital music scene was nascent, as Apple launched its iTunes Store only in April 2003, and that was the single most important booster to the digital music market in the years following. When the Long Tail theory was first popularized by Anderson, detailed sales data regarding the digital music in USA was not available yet. It was not until 2005 that Nielsen Soundscan made first sales data available and only at end of that year did Billboard start to take into account paid downloads in the music charts in US. In fact, the first edition of the book (published in 2006) does present some examples of digital music sale, but it doesn’t address the digital market as a whole. No data from iTunes or the entire market (Nielsen Soundscan) was incorporated.

 

Read the full post on Publishing Perspectives.

 

Why Traditionally Publish? A Response To A Comment

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This post by Chuck Wendig originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 1/19/15.

So, the other day I said something about how in publishing no real debate exists and hey isn’t it super-nifty that we have lots of options and all options are equal and valid in the eyes of WRITING JESUS and I dunno, I probably said something else but I tend to fade out.

One such comment on that post was the following, by addadinsane:

You think that’s just vanity publishing? There’s no difference between how much work you have to do in marketing whether you’re trad published or self-published. The only authors that get a marketing budget nowadays are the huge sellers. (Even my friend who is A-list doesn’t get one – he’s still not big enough.)

It was funny, I was on a panel a couple of months back with a bunch of traditionally published authors and someone in the audience brought this up, said to me “But don’t you have to do all the marketing yourself?” So I turned to the other five panellists and said “Hey guys, how much marketing do you have to do?” Answers ranged from “Loads” to “All of it”.

And trad publishers take a lot more than 50%. One wonders what for.

I’m all in favour of “no debate” but I think people should be accurately informed about the truth of traditional publishing rather than looking through rose-tinted spectacles. Then they can make an informed decision.

Frankly I don’t know why anyone goes trad published to be honest. The only reason I’ve heard recently is that they want to be a “proper” author. And if that isn’t vanity, I don’t know what is.

And I wanted to respond to it. But I started to write up my response and found it too long for a mere paltry comment, and figured, hey, well, I’ll take up some oxygen at the blog, proper.

 

Read the full post on terribleminds.

 

Is Reading a Right or a Privilege?

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This post by Cathe Shubert originally appeared on Ploughshares on 1/27/15.

After almost a year of protests by free speech advocates and famous authors, the UK’s Ministry of Justice is going to give prisoners the right to receive books in parcels from family, starting in February. Perhaps the most curious aspect of this case is not that books, among other items that a family member might send via packages as personal property, were banned, but that this case saw lawyers demanding that law be more nuanced with regard to determining whether books are rights or privileges.

Obviously (perhaps more obviously to those of us who have inhaled two seasons of Orange Is The New Black) prisons restrict what is allowed on their premises to prevent the smuggling of drugs and other paraphilia—and it must be noted that the public library system in British prisons was never in danger of being removed. But this case still feels like a victory for free speech and art in one society’s most limited venues.

And it makes me wonder about our prison system in the United States. I did a tiny bit of research and found out that in Florida, inmates often are restricted to having only four books in their possession, and those books must come directly from a publisher or mail distributor—if a family member attempts to send a book via a package service (like UPS) it will be rejected, just as books were restricted in the UK before the amendment to prison policy.

 

Read the full post on Ploughshares.

 

Among The Disrupted

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This essay by Leon Wieseltier originally appeared on The New York Times Sunday Book Review on 1/7/15.

Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind. Everybody talks frantically about media, a second-order subject if ever there was one, as content disappears into “content.” What does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life? Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous.

Meanwhile the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Economic concepts go rampaging through noneconomic realms: Economists are our experts on happiness! Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be. Quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything. It is enabled by the idolatry of data, which has itself been enabled by the almost unimaginable data-generating capabilities of the new technology. The distinction between knowledge and information is a thing of the past, and there is no greater disgrace than to be a thing of the past. Beyond its impact upon culture, the new technology penetrates even deeper levels of identity and experience, to cognition and to consciousness. Such transformations embolden certain high priests in the church of tech to espouse the doctrine of “transhumanism” and to suggest, without any recollection of the bankruptcy of utopia, without any consideration of the cost to human dignity, that our computational ability will carry us magnificently beyond our humanity and “allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. . . . There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine.” (The author of that updated mechanistic nonsense is a director of engineering at Google.)
Read the full essay on The New York Times Sunday Book Review. Note that The New York Times may move this material behind a paywall in the future.

 

Social Media is a Waste of Time for Writers—Hmmm, Think Again

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This post by Kristen Lamb originally appeared on her blog on 1/20/15.

We’ve been talking a lot about social media lately and I am always grateful for your comments and thoughts. This kind of feedback not only helps me improve my blog, but my also books, because I get a glimpse of your worries, weaknesses, fears, loves, and strengths.

As a teacher/mentor/expert, it’s my job to address those fears and put you at ease or reinforce when you’re headed the right direction and give you tools and tips to take what you’re doing to another level.

There’ve been some comments that have piqued my attention lately. Namely this notion to give up on social media completely to write more books (out of vexation for the medium and the task).

Oh-kay….

Social Media is a TOTAL Waste of Time

Write more books instead of tweeting or blogging. Social media is a giant time-suck better spent writing great books.

I don’t know how to answer this besides, Er? *screeching brakes* Personally, I can think of no larger waste of time than researching and reading and spending countless hours crafting a wonderful book of 60,000-110,000 words and then?

No one knows the book exists so few people ever read it, enjoy it or are changed by the author’s story.

It’s like spending six months to a year on an oil painting to hang it in an attic.

 

Read the full post on Kristen Lamb’s blog.

 

A Look Ahead to Self-Publishing in 2015

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This post by Jennifer McCartney originally appeared on Publishers Weekly on 1/16/15.

Industry insiders predict an increase in diversity, serialization, and hybrid publishing

Self-publishing saw another successful year in 2014, with authors like Deborah Bladon and Jen McLaughlin hitting the New York Times bestseller lists, fanfic authors like Sophie Jackson receiving six-figure advances, and many millions of titles being published across the industry’s numerous platforms. The view of self-publishing as an outlet of last resort for desperate authors is also changing—the negative stigma that’s long been associated with the industry is being discarded for a more progressive outlook, along with the acknowledgement that self-publishing and traditional publishing can coexist and even benefit one another. And self-publishing platforms are increasingly serving as a kind of testing ground for traditional publishers, which are snapping up successful indie authors and offering them, in some cases, million-dollar advances. Further, some traditionally published authors are becoming more open to exploring self-publishing as a supplement to or as a replacement for their traditional publishing careers.

A year ago, we predicted that the self-publishing industry would mature in 2014, with writers taking ownership of their role as both authors and business owners. As 2015 begins, we once again anticipate a year of growth, despite some concerns about market saturation. For this year’s preview, we talked to a number of industry insiders about the current state of self-publishing, the trends they’ve noticed over the past year, and the current challenges facing indie authors in an increasingly crowded market, along with some of their predictions for 2015.

As an example of continued industry growth, Ashleigh Gardner, head of content at Wattpad, noted that in 2014 the social publishing site gained millions of users who shared 15 million works of fan fiction alone—resulting in breakout publishing stars like Anna Todd, whose One Direction fanfic, After, got her a four-book deal with Gallery Books at Simon & Schuster.

Established self-publishing sites like Lulu also saw growth over the past year, according to the company’s v-p of marketing, Dan Dillon, as a result of new initiatives like Lulu Jr.—a brand enabling children to become published authors. In addition to Lulu Jr., the company announced a partnership with Crayola to develop a line of co-branded book-making kits for kids.

Across all segments of self-publishing, there were signs of continued growth and innovation—from Crayola to fanfic to hybrid publishing to the rise of serialization, we break it all down for you here.

 

The Rise of the “Authorpreneur”

 

Read the full post on Publishers Weekly.

 

These Days, Writing Isn’t A Career. It’s A Rich Man’s Hobby

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This article by Toby Young originally appeared on The Telegraph on 1/16/15.

Writing’s always been lopsided, but it’s got a lot worse in the last decade

I envy William Hague. Not the £2.5 million country house he’s just bought in Wales, although that would be nice. Rather, the fact that he plans to spend his retirement writing books.

These days, you need a substantial private income – or a public sector pension – to be a full-time writer. Last year, a survey of 2,500 professional authors found that their median income in 2013 was £11,000. That’s a drop of 29 per cent since 2005 and significantly below the minimum salary required to achieve a decent standard of living.

The writing game is notoriously lopsided, in which a small handful of bestselling authors earn a fortune and the vast majority live on scraps, but it’s got worse in the past decade. “You’ve always been able to comfortably house the British literary writers who can earn all their living from books in a single room,” says the author Will Self, whose own royalties have tailed off in recent years. “That room used to be a reception one, now it’s a back bedroom.”

 

Read the full article on The Telegraph.