Scanning the market

 

Seemed like a good idea to scan the market and see what's happening out there in the big wide world.

So I checked a few places and settled on :

11 Top Publishing Trends (2023-2025) (explodingtopics.com)

It's an interesting read. 

Snippets: audio-books are on the rise while sales of print books waned over the last decade.

Figures quoted: 2019 65% print and  25% ebook.

Ebook sales totalled $956million in sales, mostly with Amazon kindle.

Amazon has a new subsidiary ACX which will package and list an audio file for you.

Public libraries now offer digital content and the trend is up. Libraries are pushing the publisher rules about what they can and cannot provide. Way to go, libraries!

Read 11 Top Publishing Trends (2023-2025) (explodingtopics.com)  for more detail.

E-book claims

The Publishing Association show that sales of consumer ebooks have dropped by 17%, while sales of physical books are up 8%. Consumer spending on books was up £89m across the board last year, compared with 2015. 

Paula Cocozza wrote a fairly long article about this back in April 2017 asking So why is the physical book winning through? I read it with interest and then found this statement:

The figures from the Publishing Association should be treated with some caution. They exclude self-published books, a sizable market for ebooks. And, according to Dan Franklin, a digital publishing specialist, more than 50% of genre sales are on ebook. Digital book sales overall are up 6%.

I looked back at th earlier figure: ebooks have dropped by 17%  and wondered how to match the two statements in my mind.

“It’s not about the death of ebooks,” Daunt says. (James Daunt of Waterstone) “It’s about ebooks finding their natural level. Even in the years when ebook sales were rising greatly – and clearly cannibalising physical book sales – it was always very clear that we would have a correction and reach an equilibrium.” The UK, he says, has “adopted” ebooks and they will remain a substantial market (while in France, for instance, ebooks are only 3% of the overall market). The last thing he – or any seller or publisher of physical books – wants is the death of the ebook. “We want people to read. We don’t mind how they read,” he stresses. He knows that people who read, sooner or later, will buy books.

If you want to read the whole thing, here's the link: 
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/27/how-ebooks-lost-their-shine-kindles-look-clunky-unhip-

Perhaps you'll be able to explain to me how those two claims match together.

Sales and glitches

While running down the tweets on The FALL, I noticed a couple of interesting links for self-published authors. If you are considering which way to go when publishing your book, then this could be of interest.   It provides the lowdown on what you need, what to expect and better still, lists of what kind of exposure you will get from places like Createspace and Smashwords. Here's the link :

http://writershelpingwriters.net/bookstore/

If, like me, you have been watching your Amazon monthly sales reports and wondering what is going on, then here's the link for you:

http://authorearnings.com/report/october-2016/?src=mc

There are lots of theories as to why even top authors are finding their sales figures dropping, but no conclusive answers as yet. Many suspect a glitch in Amazon's tracking system, or worse, think the company has altered the algorithms to suit different parties. 

https://scriggler.com/SharePost/Opinioncash=eef777d8eda116e438f70f571aa9455d

Another article that every aspiring author should read is behind the third link. Does price matter, does length matter? Do reviews help? All sorts of information gathered together in one place. 

It is an education to read the articles, including the comments section. Get yourself a coffee, sit down with an hour or so to read and inwardly digest what they say.

Cover Issues

This the third cover I've put up for Viking Magic. For some reason this book is lagging behind the others and isn't attracting attention. There may be 101 reasons why from a poor cover to a whiny heroine, but since I've nothing to lose I thought I'd experiment.
The first cover was dramatic, perhaps, with the prow-beast head but maybe the pink background didn't gell very well with Vikings. First mistake. Secondly I went for a purchased photograph and thought the girl looked like the heroine of the story. It was only some time later that I saw John Locke had a cover using the self same portrait. Maybe that went against me.
So I decided on a third attempt. This one conveys the darkness and use of magic in the story of a girl fearful for her soul as well as her life. She is too desperate to be kind-hearted, but uses everything she can to avoid entrapment by the wicked magician.

Let's see if this cover makes any difference. If nothing else, it is an interesting experiment in use of covers.

Books and the Internet

Still hammering away on edits and struggling to find a title that hasn't been used before. The trouble is almost everything has been used already! Especially if you want to use the word Queen. Too many books flooding the market these days - that's something  Amazon has done. Not single-handedly, I admit, but it certainly helped. (Just as it helped me - Yes, I know! Pot calling kettle and all that)

Viking Magic went free for two days just to see what the response was. I remember the first book I put up for free was Fair Border Bride and it rocketed up to something like 15,000 takers, mostly in the USA. That was five or six years ago,  So how did Viking Magic do over two days?

A total of 124 downloads and still the biggest freebie takers are in the US - 86. The UK = 26, Germany 7, France 1, Australia 1 and Canada 3. (It would be nice if a couple of those people wrote a nice review for me! The only one I've received for VM was written by someone who was definitely having a bad day.)

So, as a way of gathering readers, going free doesn't seem like the tool it was. Times change, and they change exceedingly fast in Internet world. Twitter and Facebook seem the most obvious alternatives, but even there, marketing persons seem to be taking over and plugging the same titles over and over again.

Amazon v Hachette

Amazon is in dispute with Hachette book Group in the US. I've been vaguely aware of this for a while, but didn't think it affected me. Except perhaps that my Amazon sales have been very poor this last month. But then, August is a bad month as everyone, but everyone, goes on holiday and forgets reading.

The squabble is affecting writers like Stephen King, Lee Child and James Patterson. They claim Amazon is sanctioning books - I'm not sure what they mean by that, but I think it means they don't supply them in the usual way when asked - but it affects 2,500 Hachette authors and over 7,000 titles.

 Sales for these books have declined by between 50% to 90%. The struggle has been going on for six months and really hurts debut and midlist authors. 

In a nutshell, Amazon says it is fighting for lower prices which benefit the consumer. Yay! Authors United, who oppose what Amazon is doing, are seen as a group of  "rich authors who are seeking higher e-book prices." 

I don't know the rights and wrongs of this squabble, but I do know I won't pay £10 for a Kindle copy of any book. I'll wait. Eventually the price comes down. I'd hesitate to pay £5, but then maybe I'm mean. I'd pay £6, £7, even £8 for a paperback copy - but not a Kindle copy. I think I'm siding with Amazon.

Current publishing in the UK

Elvet Bridge - the other side

Here are the current stats for  UK book sales, comparing Jan-June 2012 with the same period 2011. The UK Publishers Association states that the value of total sales of books (all formats) has increased by 7.1%

Sales of digital fiction increased by 188% in value terms

Overall digital sales (fiction, non-fiction and children’s books) increased to £84m against £30m last year; 12.9% of the total value of sales, up from 7.2%

CEO of the Publishers’ Association thinks these figures indicate that publishing in the UK continues to perform well in spite of the recession and that digital sales demonstrate that readers and publishers are embracing e-book reading.
I think this is good news, too! Looking at Sales Reports for  Self-Published Kindle books - which is fascinating and can soon become addictive! - it is astonishing to see the difference in UK sales and US sales. Of course, the populations are so very different, something like 62 million against 220 million (the last time I looked), very nearly 4 times larger. Heaven knows I may not be typical, but my US sales are between 2 and 3 times greater than my UK sales.
Everyone is waiting to see what impact India will have, since the US reports now include sales in that country, which has another huge population. Given that there may only be a small percentage of Indian residents who can afford to buy a Kindle and books through it, there may not be a great difference. It is also said that India has a very good range of books at very low prices, and that most book publishers prices will be way too high to compete. We shall see!

This is the link to the original report: http://www.thebookseller.com/trackback/177906

 

One more gripe

The newspapers are saying that E-books are skewing the book ratings. It seems that because digital sales are known only to Amazon and its equivalents, we have little idea what the UK is reading. This, they say, makes it difficult for publishers and agents to assess the market accurately, and doubly difficult to invest in the future. How can they tell what is the coming trend, except by having complete sales figures?

Amazon declines to share its sales figures. It has released a list of the top ten British e-book best-sellers, but keeps the figures to itself. Genre fiction – thrillers, romance – are selling well thanks to e-books, and they say that people buy three times the titles they once did now they have an electronic reader. I know I do.

The US and the EU may decide to break up the system whereby publishers set the price at which electronic books are sold, thus keeping the price high. Since the NBA on print books was abolished decades ago, that seems only fair to me, even though I was against the NBA when it came in.

2011 saw a 500 per cent increase in e-book sales, and a similar increase is expected this year. (I guess Amazon must have released the numbers for last year, but perhaps only totals?) There is an interesting rumour that women’s commercial fiction now has a male readership because of the anonymity of e-books. I never hesitated to read whatever I wanted to read – ah, but I have to admit I drew the line at reading category romances in public! Those covers! But that too is probably irrelevant now. I can read whatever I want on my Kindle, in public or out of it, and the only person who will know is me.

E-book sales rising

Here in the UK we bought almost two and a half million fewer books than in the opening weeks of 2011. Incude non-fiction and childrens's books and the total number of books sold in the UK fell by 4.7 million to 25 million over the same eight week period, according to Nielsen BookScan. We are talking printed books, of course.

Almost 1.4 million e-readers were sold in the UK over Christmas, double the amount sold the year before, and e-books sales are soaring by as much as 623 per cent between January and June last year.

It seems the writing is on the wall for the independant bookseller, and the bigger chains may well be worried. I've rarely patronised an independant, not as a conscious decision, but because I live in an area that is well supplied with bookshops of the larger variety, yet I'm always sorry when one goes out of business. I don't try and square that with preferring to buy a book as cheaply as possible. Getting a good read for less will always appeal. It's the way I am, the way most of society is these days, if we're honest. And not many of us can afford to buy as many books as we'd like these days. Twelve and thirteen pounds for a paperback seems way off the mark to me. What we need is another man like the one who set up the first Penguin paperbacks - a good read, but a cheap read.