One Look at the Reading Market Not Based on Sales

As reactions to the Publishers Association’s 2016 report make clear, looking at current sales data to understand how the business is performing can be problematic. Since we don’t have the sales data we’d like, we can look at another measure of industry health—the consumer survey.

This is something long capitalized on by Nielsen Book—the US division of which was recently sold to NPD. Their deep-dive studies of the markets for specific genres have been illuminating in many cases. (Here’s a story Porter wrote on one of these studies, for which he was hired to write the executive summary.)

Targoz Strategic Marketing, based in Nashville, is another company doing consumer survey work in the reader space. They recently contacted us, and we’ll share some of what their latest report contains, although the same caveats apply to this consumer survey as apply to any other: we don’t see this research done, and we can’t vouch for its accuracy any more than we can for Nielsen/NPD’s work or Gallup’s or anyone else’s.

Targoz has a division called Reading Pulse, which is fielding a six-year tracking poll on consumer reading. The most recent round of consumer questioning was conducted a year ago, in May 2016, and involved a sampling of 2,826 American adults 18 or older. The sample is said to be weighted “to mirror the geographic distribution of the population for age, gender, and ethnicity.” The survey work is done online (and many in the business will say that online surveys are less effective than telephone or in-person surveys). The company claims a 95 percent confidence level in its results and a margin of error of plus or minus 1.9 percent.

Their data doesn’t come cheap. A single-user license for each report costs $2,450. Clearly, the target audience here is publishers, not authors, although Targoz says they’re working on a shorter, lower-priced version of the report tailored to indie authors. Keep an eye out for it later this month.

For now, we’ll quote a few highlights from the Reading Pulse report that are particularly interesting because they run counter to some of the print-promoting narrative of traditional industry measures:

• “E-reading is actually growing. Ebook fatigue is a myth.”
• “For the first time in our six years of tracking, half (50 percent) of readers say they have purchased an ebook in the past year, up 6 percent from 2015. Nearly one out of three readers (30 percent)” claims to “subscribe to an online ebook subscription service, up slightly from 2015.”
• “Readers question the quality of any non-hardcover book priced below $1.00. While a popular strategy in the self-publishing world, discounting below $1.00 or $.99 can actually hurt sales.”
• “The value prices cited by readers in our surveys are all lower than the current prices we see from traditionally published titles.”
• “Publishers are missing a huge opportunity to break out new fiction authors and franchises because they are pricing these titles out of the market.”

One piece of data from Reading Pulse of interest to authors in particular: one in five adults responding claims to be working on a book. That could mean that as much as 20 percent of the population factors into your competition. Most of those are college graduates, under age 50, and more likely to be male, married, and white.

Bottom line: Not only are sales-based industry gauges becoming increasingly suspect as online retail and publishing expand, but consumer-survey data reports, as in the Reading Pulse material, appear to run sharply counter to what trade industry metrics allege. And without the mass of data we all need from online retailers in order to truly understand the digital sector, consumer-survey efforts may well surpass the crippled sales-based dataset the industry is limping along with now.