This week! Books!
A factoid this week about the publishing industry certainly got some eyeballs popping. In an article about how the publishing industry is weathering the pandemic, Alexandra Atler and Elizabeth A. Harris noted that 98% of the books newly published in 2020 sold fewer than 5,000 copies. Sales have inexorably drifted to the backlist, celebrities, and already-bestselling authors. Jane Friedman also notes the ongoing shift to online sales.
How much of this is really an aberration? Lincoln Michel notes that it has always (mostly) been the case that most books don’t really sell very many copies, and I’d add that perceptions of book sales have been skewed historically by the tradition of ludicrous announced “print runs” by publishers that are largely fictional and certainly don’t correlate with actual sales (particularly when returns are taken into account). And bestseller lists are notoriously opaque.
At least from my vantage point, this 98% stat feels more like a culmination of industry trends more than it has always been the case through time. We live in a “winner takes all” moment in history, and the mid-list authors who sold fine but weren’t bestsellers have been largely decimated, at least at traditional publishers. The rich are getting richer, megabestsellers are getting more mega, and everyone else fights for the scraps in the long tail.
None of this takes into account self-publishing, and because that data is largely hoarded by Amazon, the stats understate just how much bookselling has shifted online.
Norton halted distribution of its upcoming Philip Roth biography, already the subject of a scathing New Republic review by Laura Marsh that addresses its problematic treatment of women, due to sexual assault allegations surfacing against biographer Blake Bailey. Ugh.
I’m not the only one who has been revisiting childhood favorites, and Cathi Hanauer re-read some of her Judy Blume favorites to see if they held up. Spoiler: they mostly do.
Also from Lincoln Michel, a deep dive into the history of book word counts and the slimming and fattening of books due to shifts in bookselling and the publishing industry.
Agent Jessica Faust delves into the perennially popular topic of what agents learn from the big books they passed on, and agent Kate McKean talks about how authors should navigate meeting and communicating with editors prior to receiving a book deal.
And I really love this post by Austin Kleon about taking back weekends for rest and idleness.
This week in bestsellers
Here are the top five NY Times bestsellers in a few key categories. (All links are affiliate links):
Adult print and e-book fiction:
- Ocean Prey by John Sandford
- The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman
- The Devil’s Hands by Jack Carr
- The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah
- Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
Adult print and e-book nonfiction:
- On the House by John Boehner
- Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
- The Code Breaker by Walter Isaccson
- Broken Horses by Brandi Carlile
- The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
Young adult hardcover:
- Rule of Wolves by Leigh Bardugo
- Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley
- Stamped by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi
- One of Us is Lying by Karen M. McManus
- The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Middle grade hardcover:
- The Ickabog by J.K. Rowling
- Wonder by R.J. Palacio
- Refugee by Alan Gratz
- The One and Only Bob by Katherine Applegate
- When You Trap a Tiger by Tae Keller
This week on the blog
In case you missed them, here are this week’s posts:
Don’t forget that you can nominate your first page and query for a free critique on the blog:
And keep up with the discussion in all the places!
And finally, if I ever stop blogging it’s because I’ve found a new profession. Scientists are using observation and artificial intelligence to learn to decode whale languages.
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Thank you for the reality check. We in Australia have smaller sales still — we consider 1000-1200 firm sales of a book a good result. The marketing exaggerations that might be true for only a minute percentage of books feed unrealistic expectations among publishers and authors alike. Our view is always to hope for the best but be prepared for the worst, and never to bank on future sales. Publishing is a gamble.
Your catalogue is really spectacular, Emma. I was wondering only the other day if Shirley Barber books could still be purchased. Always been a fan of great art combined with great story, so couldn’t resist.
Oh thank you, so lovely to hear. I have worked with Shirley on and off for over 30 years (I was at The Five Mile Press before starting Brolly). Thank you.
Just some speculations:
The quality of writing is, I feel, better than ever. But are writers giving what readers want to read? Why are readers returning to the classics of decades and centuries ago?
What do readers want to read? I’d like to read something that inspires to have a better life by way of the characters portraying how their lives have been changed in the course of the story. To one degree or another, this has always been the journey characters have undertaken, but I’ve become frustrated with the plot of some fictitious books and movies these days as they seem a bit low-life with an emphasis on titillating rather than bringing something new and beautiful into the lives of the reader. If society keeps doing the same thing, it will only keep getting the same results. We need a new vision, a new enlightenment, a new hope to shine a light onto a future path that’s overgrown with flowers rather than briars. And it needs to be fun and stimulating at the same time. With heart.
Well, that’s what I’d like to read.
I agree with this “speculation”. I think “current trends” in publishing do no meet reader’s demand. In other words, an average client (majority of those who actually buy books) is not interested in topics offered by the industry. I know I’m not. I read a lot, but I rarely buy recently published novels these days.
A month after the pandemic shut us down, I had a conversation with many of my author friends, several are NYT bestsellers. The consensus was exactly as you stated, future book deals will go to celebrities or authors who already have a huge following.
As an author represented by a small press, I can also verify that the moment readers could not get into independent bookstores, we saw sales suffer. Independent bookstores and authors needed that face-to-face experience in order to sell books.
During the pandemic, it no longer mattered that authors were using social media to get the word out; we were now swimming in the figurative ocean with hundreds of thousands of other authors who had also released a book during the pandemic. While Facebook Author groups have helped with sales, I personally prefer READER groups.
However, there’s a thin line between telling the public the truth about your book sales. I appreciate this article because it tells the truth. And sadly, I am in the 98% despite investing and exhausted amount of time, money, and energy.
Moving forward, we have to be honest about where authors go who aren’t signed with a big NYT publisher. Behind closed doors, many of my colleagues are having tough conversations. Do they take a gap year? Do they just give up?Many authors are asking themselves, can I continue to release books knowing that a year later I will be thousands of dollars in debt? Because the other dirty little secret is authors pay for 98 percent of their own publicity. Want to make money writing? Become a publicist. Authors aren’t making money, and readers can feel their desperation with every social media post.
I bet the passive voice is not much used by whales! Meanwhile, I eagerly await “AHAB” by Moby Dick, the true story of a white whale’s long battle with Captain Ahab and his crew.
And amen, Wendysays! Many books seem to be timeless, or perhaps always timely. Some stories and story structures seem primeval, evanascent, almost hardwired, hence the endurance of mythology and the Classics, various religious scripture, fairy tales and other oral traditions.
I agree with this “speculation”. I think “current trends” in publishing do no meet reader’s demand. In other words, an average client (majority of those who actually buy books) is not interested in topics offered by the industry. I know I’m not. I read a lot, but I rarely buy recently published novels these days.