Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch, arguably the foremost expert in reading the tea leaves of publishing industry data, offered DBW an overview of what we know and how we know it when it comes to print and ebook sales.
He listed the biggest misleading conclusions appearing in news headlines—conclusions that consistently misinterpret the sales data.
- Print is back!
- E-books are dead!
- Bookstores are back!
- Amazon’s publishing division failed!
- If only we could count self-publishing, ebooks are booming!
Cader discussed advantages and disadvantages of the three main data sources of publishing industry sales:
- Association of American Publishers (AAP) reports monthly sales on a dollar basis (but not unit sales) from 1,200 publishers.
- Nielsen BookScan reports print-only unit sales from retailers.
- PubTrack Digital (owned by Nielsen) reports ebook-only unit sales on a three-month delay and from a limited number of large publishers. It doesn’t align with the other data sets in terms of publishers represented.
Cader says a big challenge is that neither AAP nor BookScan has kept the same measuring stick through the digital transition of print to ebook format and bricks-and-mortar to online retail sales. In other words, to compare what’s happening now with what happened in 2007, 2008, or 2009 isn’t possible with data we have.
His key points about the current industry data:
- The flattening of ebook sales started happening back in 2013. Some of the ebook decline we’re seeing may be attributable to rapidly falling Nook sales.
- Adult ebook sales have been relatively stable; the big decline is in children’s/YA ebook sales due to the lack of a big franchise hit in 2015.
- A big question is whether customers may be transitioning from ebook purchases to audiobook purchases.
- Recent print sales gains are driven by coloring books.
Cader’s data presentation was immediately followed by a first-ever public presentation by Author Earnings’ Data Guy, who scrapes the Amazon website to come up with what might be seen as a fourth data set for us to consider.
As for the question of who Data Guy is, he’s a self-publishing author of two books who comes from the video-game industry. Without fanfare, this mild-mannered, calmly pacing, number-crunching writer explained the rationale for his and Hugh Howey’s Author Earnings analyses of the last two years. This was the important mission—as set up by Cader—who stressed the various inadequacies of the three main statistical reporting programs the traditional industry uses.
Data Guy highlighted two points for this industry-facing conference:
- The Author Earnings approach renders near immediacy. While traditional analysis systems take some four months to render their results and reports, the Author Earnings program needs twenty-four hours or so of heavy server use to crawl sales pages and crunch its numbers, and the outcome is presented.
- The Author Earnings approach is an effort to quantify the non-traditional market—this is the missing part of the market not reported in sales information by the biggest online retailers and the “invisible” action (to standard metrics) of the self-publishing sector and small/independent presses.
Little if any new data was brought to this session. (None was needed, as Author Earnings has made its latest quarterly report quite recently.) But one interesting data set demonstrated a shift of importance to debut authors.
- In 2014, using daily Amazon ebook sales by price range, Author Earnings reported 22 percent of debut author unit sales coming from the Big Five publishers.
- In 2015, that number of debut author unit sales from Big Five publishers had been cut in half, to 11 percent.
- In 2016, Big Five publishers fell again in the first quarterly report to 9 percent.
Data Guy recommended that publishers give debut authors a different pricing structure so that they can find their audience, then graduate to higher price points. A Q&A this afternoon at DBW may surface more answers; we’ll be there and will report any findings in future editions.
Bottom line: To understand the full picture of industry sales requires triangulation of multiple data sources and an understanding of what sales those sources account for (and how the accounting has changed over the years). No single source offers a complete picture, and historical comparisons are difficult. One thing is for sure, however: most mainstream outlets, such as the New York Times, misunderstand the data and apply misleading headlines.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
