[LMB] the economics of books

[Lois McMaster Bujold]

[LMB] the economics of books
Francis Turner francis.turner at gmail.com
Sun Feb 7 20:06:48 GMT 2010

 >
 > What's the difference between the fiction I buy for my pleasure 
reading and the
 > non-fiction I buy for my pleasure reading?

I think the critical difference is between the books you buy (such as
textbooks) because you have to buy them, and those you buy voluntarily
for pleasure.


***  Correct.

It bemuses me that, for some reason, the poster on the other forum, 
zombie, also wanted to delete and dismiss romance novels from his 
accounting of books that count, even though romance readers keep half of 
fiction publishing afloat.  Undercut his argument a bit, there...



Authors such as Lois are competing for crumbs of disposable income
against computer games movies, DVDs, luxury ice-cream, pizza & beer in
a bar instead of something at home and so on.


***  And, what's becoming even more important, books compete for 
disposable *time*.  People can raise their income levels, sometimes.  
Nobody, no matter their income, can get more than 24/7 hours in a week.  
It's a hard limit.

And even retirees spend more than half their time in basic life 
maintenance -- sleep, eating, paying bills, cleaning up -- and one can 
also hit pure saturation on entertainment, trying to consume it all.  
I've started dubbing it "engagement fatigue" -- or, "I don't *want* to 
care what happens to yet more characters!"

As far as entertainment goes, the post-scarcity culture has arrived.    



There are 300million
(more or less) US inhabitants. Only about 5 million buy books for
pleasure. This is a problem.
 


***  Only for the 4 million of 'em who want to write books, I suppose.

Or so it sometimes seems...

In ecological terms, the predator/prey ratio is off, here.




JK Rowling may have sold more than 5 million copies in the USA of each
of the first few Harry Potters. Dan Brown's books may be equally big.
Few if any other authors have sold anywhere close to these numbers in
recent years. Lois has probably sold over a million copies of all her
books put together (I hope she has anyway) but that's divided between
what 20 books?

Francis



***  I added it up a few years back, and I had passed the 
one-million-units mark, yes, domestically.  It might be pushing 2 
million by now.  I have no idea what my foreign sales come to, although 
many of the markets are minuscule.  E-books and audiobooks have come 
along since then, too.  E-books are still a drop in the bucket, although 
with enough titles it adds up to a nice drop for me (maybe 10% of my 
backlist paperback sales by dollar); audiobooks have been doing very 
well, equal to my paperback royalties in the last two years (also 
aggregated from a boatload of titles, bless you Blackstone).

All my recent frontlist e-book sales have come through HarperCollins, 
whose royalty reports are, um... shall we say, not laid out in as 
intuitively useful a way as Baen's; working out a sense of what's what 
is a major puzzle, though it can be done.  (Nobody gives lifetime unit 
totals.)  I didn't try to figure total e versus tree percentages on 
those the last round, though if I get a really idle moment, I might.

Note that that's spread not only over more than 20 books, but also over 
more than 20 years.  The execs who want hot profits want them all *this* 
year, while they are still employed wherever they are.  I have a whole 
rant on "corporate amnesia", but perhaps not today.  

Ta, L.