Tomorrow, Nielsen is co-locating its first Romance Book Summit at the Romance Writers of America (RWA) conference in San Diego.
As is Nielsen’s custom with a conference of this kind, it has conducted specific research into the issues, and The Hot Sheet has been given permission to share a few highlights with our subscribers.
In its overview, Nielsen’s team writes that the very fact romance has been treated by the trade as publishing’s “feather-headed little sister” means that it “has created an entire sector that is more entrepreneurial, more experimental, and generally more independent than just about any other genre.”
Nevertheless, “Those who make their living off romance—publishers, authors, and agents—are facing some big challenges as [they] struggle for discovery in a saturated landscape, wrestle with the complexities of diversity in an evolving market, and work to make romance pay in a pricing climate that seems like a ‘race to zero.’”
Using its Books & Consumers research, Nielsen is working to leverage reader-response studies (72,000 respondents) to make up for the dearth in self-published sales data on ebooks. “When combined with our print sales data,” organizers write, “we are able to get a good sense of what is driving romance.”
The most interesting outcome in that regard is the report’s educated guess at the size of the self-publishing market in romance: “We estimate [it is] an additional 25 percent above and beyond what is reported in our Trade POS [point of sale] systems.”
For traditional romance publishers, print and ebook romance sales have shown a gradual decline since 2012, but with the self-pub numbers added in, the trajectory reverses. Instead of topping out at 72 million units in 2015, that estimated 25 percent puts 2015 romance sales up to about 90 million units.
Big Five romance publishing has declined from 45 percent of the market to 36 percent from 2013 to 2015, the report says. During the same three years, Nielsen’s survey suggests that medium-sized publishers have held their own (10, 7, and 8 percent for each of the three years). Small publishers have jumped from 12 percent in 2013 to 26 percent in 2015. And self-publishing has risen in the last year, having stood at 14 percent in 2013 and risen to 25 percent in 2015.
Lastly, the romance subcategories of suspense, erotica, and Western have grown, the last showing a huge jump of 91 percent from 2013–2014 to 2015–2016. Contemporary, historical, and paranormal romance appear to be showing declines in popularity over the same period.
Bottom line: More from Nielsen’s deep dive on romance will be reported at the conference tomorrow. The hashtag is #RomSum16, and the event begins at 9 a.m. Pacific. Issues of diversity in the genre’s writers, readers, and market potentials have a key place on the Romance Book Summit agenda, as do analyses of author income and reader behavior. Perhaps of most interest, however, is the question of just how much content the romance market can handle. Romance consumers are generally called voracious readers. But the arrival of so much self-publishing in the sector does mean, as Nielsen’s people observe, a market saturated. Romance already trends lower than others in pricing, Nielsen will point out: getting new readership into the mix may be the highest priority.
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.
