The Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) newsletter for September 2011 (published in paper and many of its articles will not be available in virtual form) had a piece about E-book publishing and where the sales are going.
The result of information gathering by “Sourcebooks” reveals that for paper printed books, 42.3% of sales were adult nonfiction, 25.2% were adult fiction, 7% were juvenile/children (both fiction and nonfiction) and 25.5% were calendars/audio/journals, etc.
Of the 42.3% of paper books that represented adult nonfiction, sales were broken down further into the top five largest categories: reference 15%, general nonfiction 12%, health/fitness/medicine/sports 11%, religion/Bibles 11%, and biography/autobiography/memoir 9%.
However, the pie chart representing sE-books reveals that about 82% of sales were adult fiction (narrative), while adult nonfiction was maybe 15% and children/juvenile maybe 3%.
This tells us that the strongest place for independent authors that are either self-published or published by a small indie press is to focus on adult narrative fiction, because the small, indie author’s best market is E-books.
And this is because the largest and mid-sized traditional publishers have the brick-and-mortar bookstore market pretty much locked up. When the average brick-and-mortar bookstore carries between 20 and 50 thousand titles and the average super sized brick-and-mortar bookstore carrieds about 150,000 titles while more than 3.3 million new titles were published in 2010 (over 3 million from indie authors and about 300,000 from the traditional publishing industry), we discover there isn’t enough shelf space in brick-and-mortar bookstores for indie authors.
In addition, only a limited amount of shelf space in brick-and-mortar bookstore is available for new titles. Visit a local indie brick-and-mortar bookstore or a Barnes and Noble superstore and count the new titles that are displayed on the new release shelves/tables. The rest of the book in that bookstore are mostly old titles that still sell well months/years after being released and most of them are from traditional publishers.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Bookselling, Brick and mortar business, Fiction, Non-fiction, Publishing, Sales | 2 Comments »
