“The death of books has been greatly exaggerated,” says novelist Lloyd Shepherd in the Guardian. He has written a detailed statistical analysis of the long-term trends in the trade and presents a positive outlook, perhaps too positive.
His case hinges on two standout facts. Book sales in the UK have increased by 42 per cent over the last ten years and UK publishing sales have increased by 36 per cent during the same period. The industry yielded £1.7 billion last year.
“Why the gloom?” Shepherd asks. The answer, it seems, is simple. As this blog illustrated here and here, retailers haven’t been able to compete with Amazon on either price or overheads. Amazon’s success has come at the expense of mainstays of the High Street – Borders and Woolworths – and countless independent bookstores. Publishers are also facing what Faber and Faber’s Stephen Page has described as “the perils of transition”. For example, Barnes and Noble turned-over a record $7 billion last year, but still made a loss on the year: $59 million in the last quarter. Meanwhile, Amazon was recently estimated to be worth $90 billion and it publishes robust sales figures with the frequency that James Patterson churns out bestsellers. The competition is likely to become fiercer as Kindle continues to grow.
The biggest losers, to my mind, appear to be authors. Shepherd notes that the volume of book sales has increased dramatically in the last decade, but that figure cannot be viewed in isolation. At the same time, the number of annual book titles has also increased from 101,000 in 2001 to over 150,000 in 2010. Impoverished literary agents have a catch-phrase at present, “£10K is the new £50k”, because increased sales volumes have not transferred into increased earnings for writers. One reason for this is that there are many more authors sharing the pot. Membership of the Society of Authors has grown steadily throughout this, going past 9,000 for the first time in its history. A second, apparently more pervasive reason is that publishers have cut advances, which has led to earnings remaining static throughout this period. Shepherd writes:
‘The Society of Authors did a survey in 2000 that showed the average annual figure was £16,600; only 5% of authors earned over £75,000; 75% earned less than £20,000. A more recent survey, done by the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society, came up with very similar figures.’
This suggests that publishers have been trimming soft costs in order to compete in a rapidly changing market. The death of books has indeed been greatly exaggerated, but the traditional book trade looks a little peaky.
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