On the final day of Digital Book World, one of the most tweetable sessions (aside from the Godin talk) was the Nielsen presentation on long-term changes in the print and ebook market by Jonathan Nowell.
Key stats include:
- Overall U.S. print book sales in 2014: 37% juvenile, 23% adult fiction, and 40% adult nonfiction. If you read the day 1 recap, then you know that 80% of YA purchases are by adult readers, for adult readers. I had a conversation with a librarian, who said part of the appeal for adults is that YA is fast-paced and quick to read—you can finish a book in a day. (Your thoughts? Please comment!)
- In the latest quarter, adult fiction accounts for 65% of ebook sales.
- Fiction print book sales: They were up 20% from 2004–2009, and have decreased 37% since then (as a result of ebooks picking up momentum).
- Fiction ebook sales: Romance started off as the strongest genre in ebook format, and has remained dominant since. Today it constitutes 24% of all ebook sales.
- Do ebook fiction sales cannibalize print fiction sales? No. From 2008–2010, three mainstay fiction authors sold 27 million print units collectively. From 2010–2012, they sold 23 million print units PLUS 28 million ebook units.
- Nonfiction print book sales: They were up 18% from 2004–2009, and have decreased 23% since then. The hardest hit categories: travel (-50%) and reference (-37%). The flourishing categories: religion/bibles (+43%), cooking/entertaining (+11%), the latter specifically driven by celebrities.
- The juvenile category (which includes YA) had its best sales year ever in 2014. Sales are up 12% from the prior year.
The slide pack from Nielsen is full of fascinating data—go take a look.
Seth Godin’s Advice to Publishers
Marketing guru Seth Godin has a background in publishing, and occasionally runs publishing experiments. He was invited to give a brief keynote talk at Digital Book World, followed by a discussion with Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch. Here are some of my favorite points.
- On the importance of knowing your readership: Godin says one of the fundamental questions is: Who is your customer? “The obvious answer is the reader,” he says, “But if I walk down the street to any publishing house, and ask for people who answer phone calls from readers, or people who track readers” … you won’t find anyone. “But if I ask, ‘Show me the sales force,’ those are people selling to bookstores. Book publishing sells stuff that bookstores want to buy and measures success based on shelf space to be in front of people who pay money. When digital showed up, [the question became] how do we get Amazon, Apple to be our customer? Not: Oh, there’s a different game to be played here.”
- Until you can answer the question about who your customer is—know who they are and what they want to buy—Godin says, “You’re going to be playing a different game than people who have been winning on the internet for a very long time.”
- On thinking beyond the book: “If you say what I do for a living is find information and give it to people who need it, that can take a lot of different forms. There’s a huge range of things you could be doing” aside from creating and publishing a book, regardless of its format.
- On the possible need for even bigger scale publishers to compete against Amazon: “Why did we need general trade publishers? It’s an efficient way to make bookstores happy. Bookstores didn’t want 100,000 publishers but 12. They have time to meet with 12 sales reps. Why is it more efficient to be at that scale?”
- On Amazon: Godin says the underreported insight about Amazon is that they are culturally and algorithmically very good at selling everything, but they’re not particularly good at selling anything. For publishers, “The challenge is relationships with millions of people—that’s the scale we need, that’s the future of publishing. If readers want to hear from you, you’re going to do fine.”
- On using digital media to reach readers: “A person telling a person telling a person [about a book] is the holy grail of publishing. The internet allows you amplify that, but only if you know who the reader is.” Godin says that, at this stage of his career, “I don’t grow the audience any more, the audience grows the audience.”
- On whether authors should be using social media: “The challenge we have is not all of your authors want to be good at social media. And not all of them have something to say when they’re not writing a book. Is the only way to sell books to dance faster than everyone else? I don’t think it is. … What we have to figure out is not merely does this author have 70,000 good words to say in a row, but do they have a following, can we help them get a following, are they the kind of person where a reader says, ‘I can’t wait for your next work.’ The long tail punishes people who are merely interesting to many. It rewards people who there is passion from a few. That’s the sort of thing that when we publish it people embrace it and talk about it.”
- On ebook subscription services: “Every time people pay money for anything, they’re telling themselves a story. You can’t argue someone into [something]. The challenge isn’t ‘Will this hurt our unit economics?’ But what story do we tell people when they choose to subscribe? … People who will buy because it’s cheaper aren’t going to buy. The story will make it work. The ability to say this is special, not cheap, is a reason why people will cross the street to do it.”
Jane Friedman (@JaneFriedman) has nearly 25 years of experience in the media & publishing industry. She is the publisher of The Hot Sheet, the essential newsletter on the publishing industry for authors, and was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World in 2019.
In addition to being a professor with The Great Courses (How to Publish Your Book), she is the author of The Business of Being a Writer (University of Chicago Press), which received a starred review from Library Journal.
Jane speaks regularly at conferences and industry events such as Digital Book World and Frankfurt Book Fair, and has served on panels with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Creative Work Fund. Find out more.