I’ll be the first to admit there’s been some bad news for bookstores lately. Borders is facing liquidation. Barnes & Noble is doing better, but they’ve had a few speed bumps as well.
So what does this all mean? Are we seeing the long-predicted Death of Print Books? Are the folks who claim New York publishers are dinosaurs, and everyone should run to self/e-publish instead, actually right?1
I did see a dropoff in my Bookscan numbers when Borders closed a group of their stores earlier this year. Maybe doomsday is finally here. Maybe the print book is finally going the way of the 8-track.
The more speculation I read, the more eager I became to see my Bookscan numbers for Snow Queen’s Shadow, which came out at the start of this month. Maybe the end of print, which I’ve been told is just around the corner for roughly a decade now, had arrived at last.
Behold, my print sales for each of my books after release week:
The first thing most folks will notice is the big jump from Red Hood’s Revenge, and the dropoff when Snow Queen came out. Aha! Print is dying!
Actually, Red Hood is an anomaly. Penguin/DAW arranged to get that book included in a riser display in Barnes & Noble, which means the biggest chain in the U.S. ordered more copies and displayed the book more prominently, leading to much higher early sales.
If you eliminate Red Hood, then according to Bookscan, the new book sold more print copies in its first week than any of my previous books, just edging out Mermaid’s Madness.
What does this all mean? Not too much, to be honest. I’m one author, and there could be any number of factors going on here. Maybe I’ve been getting more popular, and the increase in my readership was significant enough to offset dwindling print sales. Maybe because this was the last book in the series, everyone rushed out to get it right away, and I’ll see a faster dropoff in future weeks’ sales. Maybe my Mom bought 1000 copies because she loves me.
But the fact that my print sales are continuing on this curve suggests to me that despite some problems, print ain’t dead yet.
Sure, that doesn’t mean paper books won’t go belly-up tomorrow. But I’ve been hearing predictions of the end of books and commercial publishing for a long time, and I’m just not seeing the data to support it. A new equilibrium between print and e-books, absolutely. The death of print? So far, not so much.
—
- I really wish we had a simple term for self publishing electronically. ↩
Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.
My Books
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Comments
Those folks who love print books will continue to buy them, though with the loss of Borders that consolidates the number of places available for those purchases. While e-book sales have soared, the number of print titles has remained strong as well. I still love browsing in a bookstore and an online "wander" through the "stacks" doesn't compare.
That reminds me, I need to finish getting Kitemaster proofed and published...
Losing Borders stings, and will likely sting more depending on what happens in the next few days. But we still have B&N, Chapters, independents, not to mention Amazon selling a ton of books both print and electronic.
However, as a reader, I download everything to my Kindle . . . so that sort of makes me a hypocrite (smiles).
So, perhaps the stats on Libromancer might be more telling.
Just sayin'
That said, I do find the numbers ... suggestive. I'd *really* like to have e-book numbers to go with 'em, but I probably won't see those for six months to a year...
That said, there are so many places that print books are still more convenient than ebooks, so many print books that aren't available as ebooks, that it's still something people want.... heck, in this economy in particular there are still many more people who can afford a $7 paperback but not a Kindle, Kobo, or Nook even if they weren't wary about e-reading technology in the first place, that rumors of print's death have been greatly exaggerated.
It would be more accurate to say that print is sitting by the hearse singing "I Feel Pretty" while digital aficionados hiss "Shut up, you're dead!" at it.
Though I will make this concession - with the growing number of books in our stagnant-sized apartment, going electronic for books I'm not quite as addicted to rereading might have to be considered. And that for some reason makes me very sad.
But I don't think the end point of that change is going to be the elimination of print, any more than the introduction of mass market paperbacks meant the death of hardcover. Instead, publishing shifted and reached a new balance point between hardcovers and mass markets.
The last B&N I was at, I did notice a lot more variety in what they were offering, including several displays of LEGO Star Wars and Harry Potter toys. Which made it even harder to get my son out of the store...
Print's not dead, it just lost its monopoly. That doesn't mean there aren't huge numbers of people who prefer it and will buy a paperback over an e-book any day.
1. No more remaindering
2. No more stacks of books sitting in warehouse
3. Bookstores can still carry an extensive selection, yet won't need as much store space
4. Better for the environment (no more wasted paper)
I envision future bookstores someday with computer terminals, where customers browse and choose what books they want. They place their order, and after payment has cleared, if they've chosen "printed copies" as opposed to electronic, in the back of the store is a printer that prints the book and its cover, binds it all together, and the books are then given to the customer, who walks out with freshly-printed books.
People still love and seek out print. Print is still how a publisher gets taken seriously and makes sales. Print is FAR from dead.
I'd just about given up in frustration that the bookstore wasn't stocked yet, and only spotted the copy because I was frustrated and gave the new in genre case one last look. I certainly hope mine was atypical for how easy it would be for fans to find the book in the store.
I suspect it varies from store to store. I don't know if there's an assigned position in the new books display -- if some publishers pay more for higher spots, and I got bumped to the bottom this time, or if that's just at the whim of whoever's doing the shelving.
The B&N we stopped at on the way back from vacation had two on the new books display and one in the SF/F shelf. (Which hopefully, if I understand the standard orders this time around, means a few had already sold...)
E/=self-publishing.
Format/=how a book is published.
This may be part of your issue...
Snow Queen they did not have (not that I see young Navy personal being big fans of princesses). I may ask someone in the states to get it as a gift. I'd hate to buy it as an e-book and not have the last book in the series, since I have all the others.
The main difference this time seems to be that those predicting it actively want and are hoping for it and keep pre-emptively dancing over it's corpse.
Sure, there'll be more ebooks. (Though only something like 15% of people overall have ereaders now.) Many of those will actually come from traditional publishing, something those equating ebooks with the death of traditional publishing keep forgetting.
And for this who choose to self-pub, the financial outlay will be cheaper. A handful more people may even make a living doing so--maybe we'll all talk about the same three dozen self publishing successes instead of the same dozen.
That still puts self-publishing's odds of success, especially for new books by unknown writers, orders of magnitude behind traditional publishing. Self publishing still doesn't look like the way to be from here. (And even for the successes, I hear complaints abot quality and editing.)
But the idea of taking control and putting New York publishers in their place makes a compelling story that many people want to believe without qualfiers, for sure. It gets wearying, because so much is anecdotal and doesn't look at all self-published writers we never hear about, and because it keeps insisting no one can sell to New York anymore, even though every day more do than the numbers of those anecdotal self-publishing successes.
And along the way, those of us who've struggled to sell traditionally are dismissed as unreliable precisely because we've sold traditionally. After a while, it becomes a frustrating conversation to have.