The publishing industry is increasingly becoming a tough place to do business. It's no secret that fewer people are willing to shell out the $20 or $25 it costs to buy a new book (much less the $1.50 it costs to buy a newspaper). And why should they? All they have to do is turn on their computer and fire up their Web browser and they can get the latest news and all the savvy analysis and in-depth articles they want -- for free. While this is a great thing for consumers of information, it's a not-so-great thing for those traditional publishers that are selling fewer books today than they were a few years ago. Many of these smaller publishers are simply closing their doors and going out of business, while the larger ones are feeling the heat -- and responding by drastically cutting costs, laying off staff, and reducing the number of books they publish.
A couple of years ago, Steven Piersanti -- founder and president of Berrett-Koehler Publishers published an article titled "10 Awful Truths about Book Publishing." For anyone who's thinking about starting a publishing business -- or hoping to write and sell a book to a publishing company -- its a sobering article indeed. Although the data is now a couple of years old, the publishing industry trend has since gotten worse. Here are a few of Steven's 10 awful truths:
3. Average book sales are shockingly small, and falling fast. “Here’s the reality of the book industry: in 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. The average book in America sells about 500 copies.”
4. Bookstore sales peaked in 2004 and have been declining since. Bookstore sales declined 1% in 2005, 3% in 2006, and 4% in the first five months of 2007.
6. It is getting harder and harder every year to sell books. Many book categories – including business, current affairs, and self-help – have become oversaturated. It is increasingly hard to make any book stand out. New titles are not just competing with almost 300,000 other new books, they are competing with more than five million previously published books available for sale. And other media are claiming more and more of people’s time. Result: the same amount of marketing investment and effort today as a few years ago will yield a fraction of the sales previously experienced.
9. No other industry has so many new product introductions. Every new book is a new product, needing to be acquired, developed, reworked, designed, produced, named, manufactured, packaged, introduced, marketed, warehoused, and sold. And the average new book generates only $100,000 to $200,000 in sales, which needs to cover all of these product expenses, leaving only small amounts available for each area of expense. This more than anything makes publishing a crazy business.
Publishing is a tough business, and it's getting tougher every day. If you're thinking of starting a publishing business, you'll find yourself in a very competitive industry, and you'll need something very special to stand out and to get your product on the shelves of a bookstore today. Margins are thin and the competition fierce. And if you're thinking of getting published, you'll find that publishers are far more selective about the books they choose to publish. Entrepreneurs with a great story to tell who would have been routinely published a few years ago are now having a tough time finding a publisher that will take a chance on them. Self-publishing is becoming an increasingly viable (and necessary) option for many authors-to-be.
