As 2013 started I’ve planned to create and publish more ebooks, courses, other digital stuff and also to enter the music producing scene with one project. Today I’ve discovered in one of the newsletters I follow – The Laptop Millionaire a great to share article about
“The 10 Awful Truths About Book Publishing” written by Steven Piersanti, President of Berrett-Koehler Publishers. I’ve found it inspirational to know the state of market which of course doesn’t mean to stop in any way the creative flow:
1. The number of books being published in the U.S. has exploded.
“Bowker reports that over one million (1,052,803) books were published in
the U.S. in 2009, which is more than triple the number of books published
four years earlier (2005) in the U.S.
More than two thirds of these books are self-published books, reprints
of public domain works, and other print-on-demand books, which is where
most of the growth in recent years has taken place. In addition, hundreds
of thousands of English-language books are published each year in other
countries.
2. Book industry sales are declining, despite the explosion of books published.
Book sales in the U.S. peaked in 2007 and then fell by nearly five percent
between 2007 and 2009, according to the Association of American
Publishers. Similarly, bookstore sales peaked in 2007 and have fallen since,
according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The major bookstore chains have
been especially hard hit, with a 12 percent sales decline between 2007
and 2009.
3. Average book sales are shockingly small, and falling fast.
Combine the explosion of books published with the declining total sales and
you get shrinking sales of each new title. According to Nielsen BookScan
– which tracks most bookstore, online, and other retail sales of books
(including Amazon.com) – only 282 million books were sold in 2009 in the
U.S. in all adult nonfiction categories combined. The average U.S. nonfiction
book is now selling less than 250 copies per year and less than 3,000 copies
over its lifetime. Read More…
