Book stats…
Book stats are hard to come by, harder to organize in a meaningful way so we don’t compare apples and oranges, and even harder to use to predict where the industry is going. Online retailers like Amazon and the Big Five publishers covet their data. Professionals in the industry pretend to know what they’re talking about, but making sense out of the current status of the publishing industry is a nearly impossible task, especially for a single writer trying to understand it and what goes on with her or his books.
Part of the problem is that there are many books published now. More than 700,000 indie books were self-published in 2015; more than 300,000 traditional books were traditionally published in 2013 (Bowker Report). There are so many on the market that the average reader can’t keep up with what’s available, let alone try to read some. There are many good books and good authors; there are many authors who shouldn’t have bothered to write their books. The average reader is faced with a sea of books, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and has neither the tools nor the time to select those that rise above the average sea level.
Some readers rely on friends and family, but they can mislead you as much as a stranger. Others choose books that have won awards, but they can be boring tomes of literary fiction that go nowhere. In fact, books receiving prestigious awards often don’t sell many copies. Man Booker winner Anne Enright, sold only 9000 copies in the U.K. of a recent book. (Maybe a few others like me don’t like literary fiction and think it’s the trash can of all the genres?) The old saw that winning an award leads to more book sales could be wrong.
Writers, agents, and editors aren’t often forthcoming about these stats, or, if they are, it’s to discourage new writers because there is an oversupply of good ones. Incompetent agents pretend they know what will become a bestseller—if a ball player had the low batting average they have, though, he’d be in the minor leagues. That takes us to a topic that is so uncomfortable to some writers that a group banned me because I had the audacity to say it: no one likes to admit that there’s luck involved, and too many propagate the myth that a writer without a successful book is NOT a good writer. The afore-mentioned prizes show that’s not true. Having a successful book is like winning the lottery, and it doesn’t matter whether you are indie or traditionally published—just ask Mark Weir (The Martian) and Hugh Howey (Wool).
Jane Dystel, an agent who probably rejected several of my early manuscripts, has been a bit more candid. She says selling 25,000 copies of one book is a sensational number nowadays—that’s winning a small lottery, but the stats above show that such a number is an extreme outlier. This, of course, translates into earnings: An Author Guild survey of 1400 writers showed 50% earned less than $11,670 (the 2014 federal poverty level). Author Guild doesn’t represent all authors and has carried on a war against indies, but traditionally published books are in the same boat as self-published…or worse. Very many traditionally published authors sell less than 1000 books. (Some indies attack traditional publishing too—Eisler and Konrath are good examples. In their defense, they’re attacking some abuses often found amongst the Big Five publishers.)
Some of this sorry situation is due to the fact that readership is down. Pew (2014) reports that 23% of the people they surveyed didn’t read a book in the last year. Only 28% read 11 or more books. Total readership is down; avid readership is down. Assuming people are answering honestly, a continuation of this trend doesn’t bode well for the future of publishing. In the past, readership was correlated with education: college grads tended to read more. But readership is dwindling there too. There are many distractions from a reading life—curling up with a good book sounds boring to many people. Colleges aren’t demanding the reading they once did, and college educations are being watered down as institutions of higher learning follow elementary and secondary education’s march to mediocrity: “teach to the average.” One can even argue that emphasis on high tech and its high salaries is killing readership, except for the readership of technical publications.
I couldn’t find much about what readers are reading. Romance and erotica have anecdotal stats that hint that fluff sells well. Publishers also love books by celebs because they seem to do well, although I find them boring. Books by celebs tend to be confessions or exposes or full of dripping sentimentality (like romances, erotica, and other fluff), but we have a new wrinkle: frustrated first-husband Bill Clinton and assembly-line-author James Patterson are collaborating on a mystery (Patterson is one of the leaders in Author Guild and elsewhere who loves to attack indies—you’d think with his book factory he could stand a wee bit of competition). It might be as big a flop as Rowling’s mysteries, mimicking HRC’s election flop, but with celebs there’s always the curiosity factor that will attract a reader of People Magazine but not the kind of reader I care about here.
Attention spans for reading even a short story, let alone a novel, are found lacking. Ancillary proof of that: website gurus estimate that a website has 3-5 seconds to catch a visitor’s eye on a webpage. There’s now an impatience for lengthy written material and a lack of respect for those who can write it. Even literary agents emphasize the elevator pitch and book blurb. Few agents bother to ask for sample chapters or a complete manuscript—they don’t want to take the time.
Finally, there is no predictability to the market. If some writing guru tries to tell you to “write for the market,” you can forget about whatever else s/he recommends—that advice will be equally worthless. No guru and no agent could have predicted the wild success of the Clancy books or the Harry Potter series—the first books in those series were almost left unpublished. No guru and no agent could predict the smashing success of Wool, The Martian, and Fifty Shades of Gray. This is related to the lottery effect: Many good books are written, few are a wild success. Publishing has little predictability regarding the success of its products.
Readers don’t have to worry about the state of publishing today, of course. It’s a reader’s world—so many good books and good authors can be found if s/he can avoid the bad ones. Writers publish their books for many reasons—from a simple love of storytelling, to an ego trip (“Look, Ma, I wrote a book!”), to a desire to see a number of their books in the NY Times bestseller list and/or with millions of dollars in royalties from their writing.
The stats show most writers will fail, others will sell a few books, and a very few win the lottery with a bestseller. But if a writer ever stops having fun telling a good story, s/he should stop writing. Anything beyond that satisfaction is frosting on the cake.
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In libris libertas!
