Certain trends seem ready to hit inflection points, and it may not be too reckless to propose three such areas for authors in 2016.
Trend 1: Authors, especially indies, will leave the field as the sheer volume of content increases the difficulty of finding readership and gaining visibility.
This is where we can nod along with Mark Coker of Smashwords when he asserts, “Many full-time indies will quit or scale back production in 2016…. Many indies who quit their day jobs to pursue writing full time will find they need to return to a ‘real’ job.”
We, too, see the pressure building, with some estimates of U.S. output alone reaching 600,000 and 700,000 titles per year. “I witnessed a growing desperation among many bestsellers” in 2015, Coker writes. We saw parallels among more modestly selling authors reacting to a Writer Unboxed piece in September.
Trend 2: Exacerbating the effect of more titles on the market, English-language authors may feel new competition as more non-English-language writers enter English markets in translation.
Expect to see new English-language partnerships among publishers, as mentioned by IPR License’s Tom Chalmers, especially as English becomes the world’s lingua franca for literature.
Trend 3: Authors, like publishers, will need to place more emphasis on mobile as the most robust new driver of sales and distribution.
New research from Nielsen in 2015 shows a growing number of people read on their phones, and industry insiders believe the future of digital reading will be on the phone, not tablets or e-reading devices. Such shifts will eventually inform how authors’ marketing plans come together—more likely emphasizing instant book consumption on the go.
And one reason that Aer.io’s merger with Ingram Content Group (see our last edition) is important is that it may enable authors to use mobile more aggressively to reach and retain readers.
Bottom line: Coker’s assertion (in his long blog post) that “2016 will be more challenging than ever for all writers” sounds right. Authors will depend more on sharply delineating their individual voices and keeping their business heads tuned to shifts in the markets and industry. Over time, we’re cultivating a smarter, worldlier, more market-capable author than we’ve seen in past decades, but that role isn’t easy to fill. What seems clear: 2016 won’t be the year to sit back and coast.
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.
