News Flash! What's New in Bookselling?
by Cindy Layton
The accountant in me will never die. That’s not a bad thing but it often seems at odds with the creative world I imagined writers inhabit. While writers do live in a creative world, the flip side is that book selling is a business. Big business. And one undergoing massive changes. So, what’s the latest in the news about bookselling?
The BBC News reports that Microsoft E-Book Store is closing, and it’s taking all their books with them. Turns out, you never really bought books, you just bought the right to access a book. This doesn’t seem fundamentally different than a lending library except you paid for those books.
Despite that fact, in July 2019, Microsoft will empty its virtual shelves and yours too. Readers will no longer have access to the books they believed they owned since the license for the book is regulated by DRM (digital rights management), a type of software that restricts the purchaser’s ability to share the content. The same is found in music downloads and other types of restricted licenses, and, as BBC reports, DRM is a feature bound to accelerate with the advent of the 5G upgrade. The technology advances in 5G, increasing speed and bandwidth across platforms, will further the concept of creating temporary “ownership” rights.
It’s an open question how readers will react. They’ve mostly made the mind-shift to electronic books, shrugging off the non-loanable quality of their purchase, (readers being famous for loaning their books) forgoing the feel of paper, pages full of folded corners and fancy bookmarks. But will they balk at the idea that they’ve purchased something where the ownership is dependent on the viability of the platform provider’s business model? Will they care that the “product” can be clawed back at any time? Or will they shuffle along on the technology conveyor belt, accepting of the limitations of their deal with Big Tech and adjust their expectations going forward?
This article from Publishers Weekly, is all about Fast-growing Independent Publishers. Topping the list is Mango Publishing, whose success is attributed to selecting a widely diverse list. What is most interesting to me is this:
To help drive sales, Mango has an analytics team looking for patterns relating to book discoverability. The company also has two statisticians on staff who focus on understanding online book-buying behavior.
Clearly, data analysis is an increasing factor in the screening of manuscripts and their ultimate selection, as I wrote about in my blog piece Does Your Book Have DNA?, and this is another application of that.
What’s also interesting is the geographic nature of the list, with three of the twelve based in Massachusetts and four in California.
For all the statistics nerds and former accountants-turned-novel-writers (that’s a big group, right?):
Here’s a rundown of book sales data for January, 2019 from Association of American Publishers (AAP), that breaks down the information by genre and by format. Adult books took a dive by about 7% over the same month last year but were offset somewhat by a rise in Christian book sales and Young Adult.
More interesting is the breakdown by format with, again, audio sales posting an increase of over 36% and a nearly 20% increase in board books (get moving children’s authors!)
Sadly, e-Books, paperback and hardcover books all decreased comparably from the prior year.
Month-to-month sales comparisons are a small sample size and may not indicate new trends, but it will validate what’s happened in the near past, as in the ever-increasing audio sector, which is exploding with content and innovation. Check out Serial Box, an audio platform that releases 40-minute segments of an audio book weekly. The app lets you switch between audio and e-Book format.
Lastly, it was announced, Porter Square Books will occupy the ground floor retail space in the new Seaport District Literary Center. Eve Bridburg, Executive Director of Grub Street, told those in attendance at the annual conference, Muse and the Marketplace, that the non-profit and the book store will be associated as part of the new “civic-cultural space’’ planned for the city.
