[LMB] the economics of books

[Lois McMaster Bujold]

[LMB] the economics of books
Francis Turner francis.turner at gmail.com
Sun Feb 7 15:43:50 GMT 2010

  

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 3:44 PM, Howard Brazee <howard at brazee.net> wrote:
 >
 > On Feb 7, 2010, at 7:33 AM, Francis Turner wrote:
 >
 >>> When is this doomsday scenario predicted to happen (and 98% of what 
population?)
 >>
 >> It has already happened. The claim is made that there are only about 5
 >> million purchasers of books in the US - working out as about 2% of the
 >> population.
 >>
 >> I think the claim is wrong - but not wildly wrong. As in it may be
 >> understating things but it isn't out by an order of magnitude and I
 >> can certainly believe that only 5 million people in the US regularly
 >> buy books for pleasure (as opposed to being forced to buy them because
 >> they are textbooks or similar)
 >
 >
 > It may be, but I'm not convinced.     Why should that figure discount 
text books?

Because the primary focus of the article is on how to pay authors of
fiction.


(many snips)



***  Precisely.  People who read but do not buy are not casting an 
economic vote, here, and the conversation is about, among other things, 
economics.  (Tho' people who read for free now may buy later, if they 
get in the habit, of which more below.)  (Although ref. that 
conversation between Kareen and Ekaterin on what people get for free, 
and how they come to expect it -- I am reminded of it when listening to 
certain e-book enthusiasts kevetch about e-prices.)

Just for a standard of comparison, subscribers to _World of Warcraft_ 
are said to number 40 million.

I, too, would be interested in some more scientifically acquired data 
than "a number I got off the internet", but the figure sounds 
intuitively right to me.  The very best-selling of the best selling 
books maybe get up to 2 million copies sold, and those are outliers.   I 
believe a new TV series with only 2 million viewers would be considered 
a flop?  (What *are* those numbers?  I used to know them.)  The average 
*successful* genre paperback sells maybe 30,000 copies.  (That figure 
was 60,000 when I started my career, 200,000 a writer-generation 
before.)   Most books sell even less.  You only need about 35k 
hardcovers sold, over a sufficiently short period of time, to crack the 
NYTimes bestseller list.  (Something I've not yet succeeded in doing, I 
note wistfully.)

Tom Daugherty, founder of Tor Books, came up not through the editorial 
side, but through the sales side.  He's been saying for years that what 
built book sales in the US was the casual market --  drugstore and 
grocery store racks, airport bookstores, other places not dedicated 
bookstores where people made impulse purchases.  These used to be filled 
by some several hundred independent distributors, all making different 
choices and supporting a broad midlist of writers.  In the mid-1990s, 
this distribution system underwent an implosion/consolidation, turning 
into just half a dozen big distributors, where a few people make the 
choices for the whole country.  It was a huge blow to the paperback 
industry, and did a lot to bifurcate it into the "a few best sellers -- 
everyone else nowhere" that we now see.  Apparently very analogous to 
what's happened to the music industry, btw, and for the same economic 
reasons; people trying to market art by the same efficient means they 
use for cereal.

Anyway, what Tom thought was most important about the old drugstore-rack 
distribution was that it *grew new readers*, growing the reading market 
for all books, and that there really hasn't been anything along that has 
replaced that function.

It's unclear yet what the Net is going to do to the world of fiction and 
fiction writing.  Vast amounts of reading, for free, to be sure -- 
forex, here we all are -- and we are surely developing reading habits, 
oh yes.  But.  My private suspicion is that the Literature of the 21st 
Century is going to be fan fiction, but we'll have to see.  I'm kind of 
glad I got my writing career in while it was still possible to have one, 
though.

Ta, L.