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Sandra Parshall
The Publishers Weekly annual report on the previous year’s bestselling books usually has a sameness to it – same household name writers selling about the same number of copies – but this year there’s a difference. For the first time, e-books became a real force in the book business in 2011.
You’ve read and heard it before: print sales down, e-book sales up. In 2009, 156 hardcover fiction titles sold more than 100,000 copies each in the U.S. In 2011, the number was down to 111. Only one hardcover novel sold over a million copies: The Litigators by John Grisham. James Patterson had seven of the top sellers, Janet Evanovich had two, and Nora Roberts, Danielle Steel, and Clive Cussler had three each.
Only two new authors had books among the top 30 fiction titles: George R.R. Martin, whose A Dance with Dragons sold 750,000 copies and is ranked fifth for the year despite being released in July, when the year was half over; and Paula McCain, whose The Paris Wife sold 301,883 copies and ranked twenty-seventh.
Martin also made a splash in mass market paperback last year, publishing four books with total sales of more than 5.5 million copies. He was the only newcomer to the million-copy ranks, as mass market sales continued their steep drop. PW reports that in 2001, eight paperbacks sold more than two million copies and 39 more sold over one million. In 2011, only six books went over a million copies. Among higher-priced trade paperbacks, 106 titles – a record low -- sold more than 100,000 copies each.
That doesn’t mean people are buying fewer books or reading less, only that they’re buying and reading in a different way. E-book sales continued to break records. PW lists four and a half pages of titles that sold more than 25,000 downloads each – and that’s a partial accounting, using only figures solicited from select publishers. The biggest seller was The Help by Kathryn Stockett, which sold 1,950,000 downloads during the calendar year (and is still going strong). The number two e-book was the inspirational Heaven is for Real by Todd Burpo (958,837). Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife sold more e-copies (332,169) than hardcovers.
E-books already account for a big slice of the sales at most publishers, and the percentage has grown so rapidly in the past 18 months that some in the industry predict e-books will soon make up more than 50% of sales from established, royalty-paying publishers.
With all these figures in my head, I had to laugh when I was doing some research and came across a comment by a reader on a blog way back in 2007. He asked, “Have you seen that Sony e-reader thing?” and said he hoped he wouldn’t live to see the day when people preferred e-books to printed books. His comment was posted a couple of months before Amazon introduced the Kindle. I hope he has reconsidered what he can and cannot learn to live with.
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8 comments:
January 2012 was a banner month for book publishing, with e-book sales leading the way:
http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2012/e-books-drive-revenue-growth-across-book-trade/
It's just possible that e-books could save publishing rather than destroying it.
I know for me personally that ebook sales keep me afloat. But I'm still a fan of paper books. I like to see them lining my shelves. I like the tactile feel of them.
Ebooks are obviously here to stay and keep readers reading (which is the big thing), as long as publishers realize this and offer reasonable royalties accordingly to their authors. If hardcover print runs drop--as they surely will--publishers need to make sure they don't cut their own throats by running scared and eliminate the midlist. That's where most authors live--including me. Just rework your marketing plan, I say, and treat hardcovers as you used to treat ebooks. Make the switch over and it won't be as painful.
Interesting article! I can't believe I'm saying this, but I have begun to prefer e-books to print books, except for paperbacks. I don't collect books. I just read them. E-books are quicker -- you don't have to wait for the mail (I don't have access to a bookstore).
My only objection is pricing. If an e-book is the same price as a paperback, I will usually go with the paperback, look for it in the library or just forget it. I have no book budget at this time, but I have found some great freebies and 99 cent books in the Kindle store. People who turn up their noses at them are missing out.
Pat Browning
Digital publishing will neither save nor destroy publishing, in my opinion. It will change it, but my guess is both media will continue to exist. Remember that sales figures, like most statistics, can be put forth to show both the thing and its opposite. I'm sure e sales are up--they are a relatively new technology and people are exploring it (and liking it). That these figures will continue to rise at the same level is not a foregone conclusion however.
Many things will affect how they do or do not rise, such as, people's love for print (I hear this from 2 years olds to 102 years olds, and ages in between); how indie published volumes enter the marketplace and whether content filtering measures are put in place so that the quality volumes can be found (and read); pricing; the environment; and probably assorted other unpredictables that keep this from being a clear or sure thing.
My hope is that both media will persist, with their unique advantages experienced by all.
The publishing world has always been dynamic, and will continue to be, with ebooks becoming another layer. I think any writer or reader should eventually be comfortable with treasured hard copies, easy to keep around paper backs, and ebooks to load up and keep nearby (or in any other configuration). All these formats can co-exist. The curious thing to me is how little discussion there is now about POD books. For a while there I thought there would never be another issue as bug--but I was wrong. Now it's ebooks.
I hope the ratio levels out around 50/50. I don't want books or physical bookstores to disappear. E-books are gaining market share at such a furious rate, though, that many people in publishing have predicted they'll hit the 50% point sooner rather than later. I don't expect e-book growth to simply come to an abrupt halt there. They'll keep growing, but perhaps at a slower rate.
The readers who will decide the future of printed books are not the people in my age group who are passionate about physical books and can't imagine a world without them. The future will be decided by young people who have never known a world that wasn't digital to a large extent. They don't have the resistance to digital products that many older people do, and they don't have a deep attachment to print. Whether we dinosaurs like it or not, we are not the future, and we will not decide the future of books. The generations coming after us will do that.
I'm with you, Sandy - a 50-50 split between e-books and printed books would be about right. The wider the range of reading formats, the more people will read and keep on reading. I'm personally of the generation that will always think of printed books as "real" books, but I expect, when printing first arrived, there were plenty of monks producing wonderful manuscripts who felt that hand-written books were the only real ones!
I'm with you, Sandy - a 50-50 split between e-books and printed books would be about right. The wider the range of reading formats, the more people will read and keep on reading. I'm personally of the generation that will always think of printed books as "real" books, but I expect, when printing first arrived, there were plenty of monks producing wonderful manuscripts who felt that hand-written books were the only real ones!
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