Nate Hoffelder links us to this 2020 story from Berrett-Koehler Publishers telling us 10 Awful Truths About Publishing. They seem to have been doing the math, and let us in on the news that “the average U.S. book is now selling less than 200 copies per year and less than 1,000 copies over its lifetime”. Apparently there are now over 4 million titles being published in the USA every year, ten times as many as were published in 2007 when dollar sales peaked. A different world. One driven by self publishing of course, which, seeing how Brandon Sanderson did on Kickstarter, could turn out to be the way best-selling authors choose to go from now on?
Still these scare stats don’t scare me. As an average over 4 million items, 200 is a pretty decent number. It suggests a whole lot of people are doing a whole lot of reading. And like all averages, it is just an average: many books will have sold massively, and a massive number of books hardly at all. You’d need to get the numbers behind the blog post if you wanted to see what’s really going on, but I’d suspect that many traditionally published books are on the right side of the bell curve while lots of self publishers are content to bump along to the left, where of course they will be being joined by lots of traditionally published books, some of which failed, and many more of which were expected to sell exactly those sorts of low numbers. We hear about the wildly successful self publishers, but many have more modest aims. I was just speaking to my cousin the other day, who is about to self-publish a family history. An ex-printer, he’s gotten a book manufacturer who’ll print and bind 150 copies for him at a price he can tolerate. Don’t look for reprints. I take this as a nice reminder that self publishing actually existed long before the internet facilitated its explosive growth.
I can’t help thinking trade publishing, which is about as far from this model as you can get without being a Hollywood movie producer, is going to get more and more different from the rest of book publishing as time goes on. Trade publishing has evolved a system dependent to a significant extent on having their books displayed in retail establishments so that as many people as possible are exposed to a book at the time it is published. The rest of us have gone along with this methodology too. For the analog world this was a pretty efficient system, but digital techniques begin to make it look rather clunky.
Nothing stays the same, but self-publishing is, according to Nielsen, looking more and more like traditional publishing, as Publishing Perspectives told us a few years ago. Maybe the Brandon Sanderson operation has a little in common with the James Patterson operation, but I’d doubt that Mr Patterson is longing to set up a marketing and distribution system — why’d he need to? I don’t believe self-publishing will be becoming more like traditional publishing — I believe that the vast majority of self-publishers have no such intention, indeed many of them are militantly opposed to any such notion. Yes, some of the more successful ones may end up almost being forced in that direction, but such moguls are few and far between, though disproportionately represented in media coverage. (And, by the way, I don’t see any reason why traditional publishing would ever want to become more like self publishing. Maybe they will end up paying a slightly higher royalty rate though.) Nobody expresses surprise that magazines never became newspapers, and vice versa.
In 2017 Cory Doctorow talked about launching a website which would enable authors to sell not only their self-published books, but also books published by traditional publishers. The Digital Reader, and The Passive Voice (Link no longer active) were aghast. I can’t see that Mr Doctorow’s idea ever came to fruition, but in principle I don’t see why it shouldn’t be perfectly viable, as long as the author’s not out to make a fortune off the other books they sell. Obviously a successful indie author has a large on-line following eager for the sort of books that author writes: offering other similar books at the author’s website would seem such a glaringly obvious idea that I can’t believe it isn’t already happening. In a way all that is needed to see this occur is that the publisher open a bookselling account with the author/self-publisher, offering some discounting, and arranging for transmission of any orders to a distribution center, their own or Ingram’s or Barnes & Noble’s say. Finances need working out, but if the end result is, as it’d almost have to be, the sale of more books, who’d object?