By Peter Stuart
Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Tom Kasey, Thomas Payne
and Jack Steel)
By any standards, 2012 was a very strange year in the
world of American publishing. Nielsen Bookscan, the industry analyst which
monitors roughly three quarters of all sales of printed books, produced some
quite fascinating statistics. Perhaps predictably in terms of overall sales,
the three top spots in the charts for the year went to one single author – E L
James – for the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, which of course began its
life as a self-published book. The following three spots went to another individual
author, Suzanne Collins, who wrote The Hunger Games series. As a result
of this domination of the charts, half of all the bestselling books in the top
twenty for 2012 came from only these two authors.
Perhaps
more of a surprise was the fact that two of the places in the top eleven books
were held by the American political commentator Bill O'Reilly, a man virtually
unknown outside America, and even more surprisingly the female author who took
of the world by storm with the Harry Potter series only managed to get
as high as number 18 with her latest novel The Casual Vacancy. In
fairness, the reviews of this book could best be described as 'mixed', and it's
clearly nothing like as popular as her earlier works, with only fairly limited
appeal.
Although
Nielsen is probably the most accurate of all the monitoring systems, its figures
are far from comprehensive. The company doesn't track the sale of every printed
book, and has no facility for tracking either ebooks or audiobooks. Interpreting
the numbers is made more difficult by the fact that some books only appear as
printed versions while others are only produced electronically. And although
the two big retailers – Amazon and Barnes & Noble – both sell broadly the
same titles, there are some books which are available from one company but not
from the other, and vice versa. So it’s far from being a complete picture.
But one
trend which the 2012 charts quite clearly show is that some authors do seem to
attract brand loyalty. People who bought any one of the Fifty Shades of Grey
have apparently then gone out and bought the other two novels in the series,
and the same thing seems to have happened with the Suzanne Collins books. And
it was a similar situation a few years ago with the three books in the Stieg
Larsson trilogy.
The fact that Nielsen does not cover ebooks
definitely means that the 2012 figures are inaccurate, not least because of an
unrelated but parallel study by Bowker Market Research. Considering only the
format of books sold, trade paperbacks led the field at 31%, followed – perhaps
surprisingly – by hardcover books at 25%, just ahead of ebooks at 23%, while
mass-market books languished at 12%. This means that almost a quarter of all
books sold in America in 2012, the entire ebook market, is reflected nowhere in
the Nielsen figures.
What's
particularly interesting is taking a look at how the market has changed in the
recent past. Three years ago, hardcover books and trade paperbacks each held a
little over a third of the market, at 35%, while ebooks accounted for a mere 2%
of all book sales. Trade paperbacks still seem to be holding their own, while
hardbacks have dropped back slightly, but ebook sales have increased
enormously, taking over much of the share previously held by mass-market
paperbacks.
The
pricing model in America has changed as well over the same period of time, the
average ebook dropping from a little over $10 to less than $6, and some
categories, most notably romance, costing under $4 each. In contrast, the cost
of print books has increased very slightly.
So can we
learn anything from this? Probably, yes. First, both of the bestselling authors
of 2012 were exploring largely new markets. Instead of following a trend, they
were both establishing one, much as J K Rowling did with her Harry Potter
novels, writing books which presumably appealed to them personally and which
very clearly struck a chord with the reading public. The difficulty that every
writer faces, of course, is knowing what the next 'big thing' in publishing is
going to be, because following a trend very rarely works, as the plethora of Fifty
Shades of Grey clones demonstrates. Setting a trend is always the biggest
challenge.
The
second point is that if you do have a brand-new idea, a type a book which
hasn't been done before, your chances of interesting any commercial publishers
in it are probably fairly slim, simply because it will be unfamiliar territory
to them. So your best bet is to ignore the conventional publishing route and
take the ebook option immediately. That way, if the book takes off it can sell
in enormous numbers very, very quickly, while if it doesn't your costs are
extremely limited.
In
today's market, and if you're lucky, publishing an ebook can make you a fortune
for almost no initial outlay. It really is a business opportunity – because
writing is a business just like any other – with an unlimited upside and
virtually no downside. And if you don't believe me, just ask E L James.
You can contact me at:
Twitter:
@pss_author
Facebook:
Peter Stuart Smith
Blogs: The
Curzon Group
Website link: Brit
Writers
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