6 July 2009

Authors' copies and discounts

Authors should get better discounts on the books they buy direct from publishers, claims Philippa Milnes-Smith, the President of the UK Association of Authors: ‘If an author can make significant sales on his/her behalf should this not be actively facilitated?’

Over the years there’s been an interesting change in how publishers and authors view the ‘author’s copies’ clause in their contracts. In the old days 35%, which was the standard trade discount, was the norm. Most authors would buy a few copies to give to their friends and it was a rare author who actively promoted and sold their own book. There was a feeling that this might cut across booksellers’ efforts, but also it was assumed that authors would take a far more passive role, turning up to do the publicity the publisher had arranged, schmoozing the book trade and doing author signings, but otherwise concentrating on their writing.

Now, many authors are much more active in promoting their own work. Some of them, such as non-fiction writers who give lectures or poets who give readings, may play a major part in selling their work. It’s good to know that a discount of 50% has become the norm, although there are plenty of publishers still offering only 35%. Mark le Fanu, General Secretary of the Society of Authors, says: ‘Of course one would like 80%,’ but this may be an unlikely outcome.

Authors’ royalties are already under sustained pressure because the very high discounts given to bookshop chains and in particular supermarkets and online booksellers mean that publishers often pay royalties at a lower ‘high discount’ rate. You could argue that authors should share the pain, but whether this seems fair depends on where you stand. From an author’s point of view the royalty they earn on an individual copy sold in a supermarket may be only half that relating to a copy sold in a bookshop. If you are a bestselling author, this may make a significant difference to your royalty earnings, which is one of the reasons why agents push for large advances for their big clients.

But for ordinary authors who are not writing bestsellers it’s tough to find that a large proportion of the royalties your book has earned, particularly if it’s sold well online or in the supermarkets, seem to disappear on their way to you.

Inside Publishing on advances and royalties

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29 June 2009

Prizes, prizes

Not a day seems to go by without a literary prize announcement. Even so the news that this week the author Siobhan Dowd has won the Highly-regarded CILIP Carnegie Prize was unusual, for Dowd died in 2007. Her book Bog Child is set in Northern Ireland in 1981, at the height of the troubles, and is about a teenager who discovers a child’s body which has lain undiscovered in the peat for 2,000 years.

Her editor David Fickling accepted the prize on her behalf, using his speech to speak against library cuts: ‘Libraries are struggling to survive on less and less funding and children have access to fewer books. Children need stories. Siobhan believed that stories help children to think and if they can think, then they are free.’

Before she died the author set up the Siobhan Dowd Trust, which receives royalties from all her books and which helps disadvantaged children in care who do not have access to books. Fickling said: ‘It is about offering new possibilities, new life and excitement to children by making books accessible.’

Elsewhere, this week saw the announcement of the inaugural Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets, set up by the British Library, working in partnership with the Poetry Book Society. These support poetry published in pamphlet form and the first winner of the Poetry Award was Elizabeth Burns with The Shortest Days. The innovative Pamphlet Publishers’ Award, intended to support the work of small presses, was won by newcomer Oystercatcher Press. The Awards are intended to bring poetry pamphlets to a wider audience, to support new work and to throw a spotlight on the work of small poetry presses.

Ian McMillan, Chair of the Judges, said: ‘Elizabeth Burns is an outstanding winner from a very strong shortlist because of the maturity and completeness of the work, which fits the pamphlet form perfectly. Oystercatcher Press feels like a publisher taking risks with older and newer writers from outside the perceived centre of British poetry.’

The Carnegie Medal

Guardian story on Siobhan Dowd

The Michael Marks Awards

To buy submitted pamphlets

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22 June 2009

US book-buyers are getting older

Two-thirds of book-buyers in the US are 43 and older. This stark statistic was revealed in the recent Book Industry Study Group study. Book sales in the US are flat, with sales expected to stagnate for at least another year.

The study’s analysis of the US book buying population by age revealed that Matures (born pre 1948) buy 32% of books, Boomers (born (1948-66) buy 35%, Generation X (1967-78) buy17%, Generation Y (born 1979-89) buy 10% and Generation Next (born after 1990) buy just 5%.

You might think that life-stage plays a part in this and hope that these younger purchasers will become more avid readers and buyers as they get older, as they have done in the past, but the research suggests that this may no longer hold true. If you think about the competing calls on their time faced by Generations Y and Next as opposed to the Baby Boomers at the same age, it’s clear that a more pressurised work-place, plus the competing allure of the Internet, computer games and other forms of entertainment, have had a huge effect. Younger people are simply reading less than the previous generation used to at that age, and there’s no real reason to expect that this trend will reverse because fewer young people are becoming avid readers.

A similar trend seems to be evident in the UK. As reported from the Books and Consumer study (News Review 13 April) Steve Bohme, Book Marketing Limited’s Research Director, pointed out: ‘The market has become increasingly reliant on a smaller pool of buyers buying more books each year’ and pointed out that it is also very dependent on older female buyers.

The BISG study presents a stark picture in other ways too. It found that Americans are spending less time reading books and more time online. Perhaps surprisingly, 41% of all books were bought by people earning less than $35,000 (£21,594) ie those who can least afford them.

There’s no doubt though that stereotypes about fewer older people going on the Internet less are rapidly being overturned. The 50 to 64-year-olds are leading the way in adopting the Kindle in the US, whilst in the in the UK a recent Age Concern survey found that 55% of 50 to 59-year-olds and 41% of 60 to 69-year-olds have purchased from the Internet. Silver surfers are turning to the web in increasing numbers.

As a writer you may well feel that it doesn’t matter where people buy books from, as long as they do buy them. More web book sales will make things even more difficult for terrestrial booksellers and will threaten existing bookshops, but authors will still be able to reach readers through online book sales. The US study is alarming though because it suggests that there is a fundamental age-related change going on in reading habits - and that may mean fewer readers in the future.

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15 June 2009

Brilliant new Children's Laureate appointed

The announcement of the sixth UK children’s Laureate this week was greeted with great enthusiasm. Making the announcement to a packed audience from the children’s book world, Andrew Motion, soon to be Sir Andrew Motion, the Chair of the Children’s Laureate Panel, said: ‘Anthony Browne is an absolutely distinctive and extraordinarily skilled artist – someone whose work entrances children and has influenced an entire generation of illustrators.’

Browne has produced 39 much-loved picture books, amongst the best-known are the magical Gorilla, Willy the Wimp and Zoo. In 2000 he received the highest international honour for illustration, the Hans Christian Andersen Award, for his services to children’s literature, the first British illustrator ever to win the prize.

Browne is a really charming author, modest and engaging. Questioned by children involved in the search for the new Laureate after the announcement, he admitted: ‘No, I never had a burning desire to do children’s books, I wanted to be an artist… My first picture-book wasn’t very good, but then I met my editor, Julia McRae at Walker Books, and she taught me everything I know. Now I’m paid for doing what I love. I’m very, very lucky.’

The new Children’s Laureate has announced that he will make picture books the main focus of his laureateship: ‘Picture books are special – they’re not like anything else. Sometimes I hear parents encouraging their children to read what they call proper books (books without pictures), at an earlier and earlier age. This makes me sad, as picture books are perfect for sharing.’

The Children’s Laureates have done a spectacular job of promoting children’s books and reading. Although it is a huge mark of distinction to be invited to take on the role, it’s also an enormous amount of work. Originally suggested by the poet Ted Hughes, the Children’s Laureates serve for two years and it’s a real roll of honour: Quentin Blake, Anne Fine, Michael Morpurgo, Jacqueline Wilson and Michael Rosen. Rosen, the outgoing Laureate, has campaigned tirelessly on behalf of children’s poetry and picture books. He was instrumental in setting up the new Roald Dahl Funny Prize and is currently heading a new campaign to get children reading, Just Read.

This is a theme which was picked up by Toby Bourne of Waterstones, the sole sponsor of the Children’s Laureate, who said that all the laureates had ‘pushed the issue of reading up the agenda’. And that’s really the point of the appointment, to trumpet the fantastic array of children’s books which are available, and to focus adults and children on the life-changing joys of reading.

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8 June 2009

Salinger sues to protect his copyright

J D Salinger is suing the pseudonymous author who is planning shortly to publish a sequel Salinger's famous novel Catcher in the Rye presents what looks like a strong case of invasion of copyright.

Salinger is notoriously shy and for many years he has lived in the same small New Hampshire town, where the locals are said to protect his privacy by not telling outsiders where he lives. But Catcher in the Rye is a hugely successful novel, having sold some 65 million copies since it was first published, and the temptation to seize some of that fame seems to have been too much for J D California.

Salinger also sued London-based Windupbird Publishing, Sweden-based Nicotext, and SCB Distributors, of Gardena, California. He calls the new book ‘a rip-off pure and simple’ and says the cover of the new book even has a strapline describing it as a ‘sequel to one of our most beloved classics’.

Salinger has form as regards protecting his copyright. In 1987 he succeeded in blocking publication of a biography by the respected biographer Ian Hamilton, forcing Hamilton to rewrite the book without quoting from the author’s unpublished letters. The court’s decision set new rules for fair use of letters, complicating the task of biographers. Hamilton eventually published his book as In Search of J.D. Salinger.

The complaint describes Salinger, accurately, as ‘fiercely protective of his intellectual property.’ It states that Salinger ‘has never allowed any derivative works to be made using either The Catcher in the Rye or his Holden Caulfield character, did not and would not approve of defendants' use of his intellectual property. The right to create a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye or to use the character of Holden Caulfield in any other work belongs to Salinger and Salinger alone, and he has decidedly chosen not to exercise that right.'

The case is reminiscent of the battle fought in court by J K Rowling, who brought the charge of a massive case of plagiarism against by Vander Ark, a fan, who used large chunks of her Harry Potter books without her permission to put together a Harry Potter Lexicon (see News Review 5 May 2008).

Rowling said: ‘I believe this book constitutes wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work. It adds little if anything by way of commentary; the quality of that commentary is derisory; and it debases what I worked so hard to create. What particularly galls me is the lack of quotation marks. If Mr Vander had put quotation makes around everything he had lifted, most of the book would be in quotation marks.’ She won her case.

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1 June 2009

'How many more BEAs?'

This weekend the Javits Center in New York has been thronged with the thousands of people attending BookExpo, the biggest annual book show in North America. It’s clear from the coverage that a mass of interesting author events and the usual promotional round are making this BookExpo seem as busy as ever, and attendance figures are only slightly down. But behind the scenes questions are being asked about this huge and expensive show.

Time was when the American Booksellers Association (ABA), as it was then called, was a major stop in the publishing year, with the huge American book fair attracting vast attendances as it made its stately progress around the country. It favoured different cities each year, although Chicago was often chosen, its geographical position and status as an airline hub meaning that it attracted both East and West coast booksellers.

But that was before bookselling chains got bigger and many independent booksellers found themselves struggling to stay in business. The ABA in those days was about the big American publishers (who have also got larger and fewer) selling in their fall lists to American booksellers, with what seemed to outsiders like a lot of amazingly expensive but exciting razzmatazz.

The ABA never really made it as a rights fair, although publishers from all over the world did make the trip, and it never had a chance of competing with Frankfurt. For American publishers the focus was always their own gigantic domestic market and in a time of recession it’s not surprising that this is still the case. For the rest of the world it’s often easier to get to the London Book Fair, which has supplanted BEA as the spring rights gathering for the book world, with Frankfurt still holding its position as the autumn biggie.

There’s no doubt though that the American book world is suffering worse than the book trade elsewhere. With the US still in the grip of recession there have been large job losses and not much optimism about the future. The Brits still cling to the idea that books do well in times of recession and, although the ride has been bumpy, the overall picture is not so bad there or elsewhere as it is in the States.

Veteran publishing commentator Mike Shatzkin, with 37 ABAs and BEAs to his credit, thinks that the fair is not going to last much longer. Although the end has been staved off by fixing it in a regular New York venue for the next few years (which saves the publishers huge bills for taking their staff to the fair), the real problem is that booksellers, who used to place orders at the convention, are no longer attending BookExpo in the way they used to do.

His blog concludes: ‘The BEA of today isn’t the ABA of old. The booksellers are just about gone. The late-night hospitality suites don’t exist anymore. And hardly any publisher goes to the show expecting to write orders. It is time to organize a betting pool where the question is: how many more BEAs before, like its Canadian counterpart, it simply ceases? Three? Four? Hard to see more than that.’

Publishers Weekly BEA coverage

Mike Shatzkin’s blog

International Books Fairs 2009

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25 May 2009

132% increase in US print on demand

Astonishing new figures just released by Bowker in the States show that US book production declined by 3% in 2008 but print on demand publishing almost doubled. This means that a staggering 275,232 new titles and new editions were published, but this figure is actually down from the 284,370 that were published in 2007.

Out of this number 285,394 print on demand books were produced last year, a huge 132% increase over last year's final total of 123,276 titles. This is the second consecutive year of triple-digit growth in this segment. This is largely due to the explosion in self-publishing, but is also affected by publishers gradually turning to print on demand to keep costs and inventory down.

Kelly Gallagher, Vice-President of Publisher Services at Bowker, commented that: ‘Our statistics for 2008 benchmark an historic development in the U.S. book publishing industry as we crossed a point last year in which On Demand and short-run books exceeded the number of traditional books entering the marketplace. It remains to be seen how this trend will unfold in the coming years before we know if we just experienced a watershed year in the book publishing industry, fueled by the changing dynamics of the marketplace and the proliferation of sophisticated publishing technologies, or an anomaly that caused the major industry trade publishers to retrench.’

The travel category is down 15% and fiction down 11%, perhaps surprisingly as it is usually seen as fairly recession-proof. Fiction still amounts to 47,541 new titles, so American readers won’t be running out of reading-matter anytime soon.

Perhaps this proliferation of titles is good news? Gallagher commented that: ‘The statistics from last year are not just an indicator that the industry had a decline in new titles coming to the market, but they're also a reflection of how publishers are getting smarter and more strategic about the specific kinds of books they're choosing to publish. If you look beyond the numbers, you begin to see that 2008 was a pivotal year that benchmarks the changing face of publishing’.

The latest sales figures coming from the US show a pretty gloomy picture. Book sales fell 17% in March, as reported by 84 publishers to the Association of American Publishers. Adult paperback (which excludes mass market) dropped a staggering 35.8% and audiobooks were down 43.3%, as the recession continued to hit the American book trade. It’s not much comfort to know that e-books rose by 110.4% in the month, off a low base. The e-book revolution is not yet with us, so there’s no escaping the conclusion that the figures tell a truly dismal story.

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18 May 2009

Agents in trouble?

Agents are badly hit by the recession. There’s little hard evidence of this, but cutbacks in the number of books being published have had a serious impact on their ability to earn a reasonable living.

Until quite recently successful agents were seen as inhabiting one of the most glamorous parts of the publishing business. A wave of new agents coasted to success during the 80s’ and 90s’ expansion in publishing, some of them becoming nearly as famous as their clients. The activities of well-connected socialite agents such as Ed Victor and Andrew ‘the Jackal’ Wylie were well documented in the book trade press – and even in the newspapers. But there’s also a generation of extremely successful but less famous agents who have built starry client lists over the years. Al Zuckerman and Mort Janklow in the States, and Carole Blake, Gill Coleridge, Darley Anderson, David Godwin and Luigi Bonomi in the UK, are names that spring to mind, but there are many others.

So, how are these stars of the agency world faring now? Mostly pretty well, as they have strong lists of ongoing clients and their ability to find the big new authors and negotiate mega-deals is what gave them their success in the first place. Life may be trickier than it used to be, and even they have their disappointments in terms of authors they cannot sell, or can no longer sell, but they are relatively well-placed.

Also still doing fairly well are the big agencies, where the legacy of the past continues to deliver a stream of cash. When authors move agency their backlist books do not go with them, as each book’s contract has an agency clause ensuring that the agency's percentage for that book will continue to be paid until the end of the contract. This means that successful agencies can have a lot of padding in terms of ongoing royalties to help them weather hard times. Older-established agencies such as A P Watt and Curtis Brown also manage a number of estates and these can be quite lucrative with a bit of luck and some hard work.

PFD, which arose out of an amalgamation involving the long-established firm of A D Peters, has been much in the news because over eighty staff, virtually everyone on the payroll, left to establish a new agency, United Artists. This new venture has plenty of authors, but no backlist, although there has been talk of authors’ challenging their contracts and trying to move their backlist titles to it. But PFD of course now has very little frontlist, as most of the authors have decamped with their agents. Both agencies are thus exposed, but in a recession United Agents may have more of a problem, not least because of their substantial payroll.

The agents who are most at risk are newer, smaller agents who do not have the income from past sales to sustain them through the downturn. For them this is proving really hard and something of a lottery too, as one or two big authors who hit the jackpot with giant deals can make a huge difference to a small agency’s fortunes. For the rest, it’s very hard to make a living.

These agencies are affected by the fact that many midlist authors - who may even have published quite a large number of books - are proving harder to find a home for, once their publisher decides not to continue with them. Many agents are only in business still because their overheads are small and they are reluctant to give up their investment of time and energy. But in the future we should expect to see more news of agencies closing down or amalgamating to cut their overheads.

Authors who have struggled to find an agent may not feel sympathetic to their plight, but this is the reason why it is so hard for unpublished writers to persuade an agent to take them on - the agents have to be convinced not only that the writers are producing good work but also that they can sell that work in an increasingly tough market.

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11 May 2009

New Poet Laureate

The announcement of the new UK Poet Laureate, combined with a series of BBC programmes on poets, has brought poetry into the headlines in the UK in the last couple of weeks. The appointment of Carol Ann Duffy, the first woman to hold the post, also means that the Laureate will be someone whose work is familiar to a very wide range of people, as her books have been very successful and her work has been part of the national curriculum for a number of years. Her poems are often accessible and can be enjoyed by a wide audience, which includes in particular many enthusiastic women readers and a great many children.

Duffy succeeds Andrew Motion, who in his ten years as Laureate (he was the first to have a fixed tenure) has done a huge amount of work to promote poetry. His work on establishing the Poetry Archive, recording the voices of living poets, will be part of his legacy, but his untiring activities on behalf of poetry have had a significant impact and his Laureateship will be remembered for this.

In the States the Poet Laureate serves for just one year and some have argued that this shorter tenure is fairer on the poet concerned. The current American Poet Laureate is Kay Ryan. Motion has made no secret of the effect that his public duties and particularly his public visibility have had on his writing. It is good to note that his new collection, The Cinder Path, sees him back on form with some excellent lyrical and rather personal poems.

On both sides of the Atlantic poetry is flourishing in some ways and doing worse in others. In the UK most poetry publishing is subsidised and it’s therefore a relief to know that for the next two years at least there will be no substantial cuts to the Arts Council which provides the funding. In America things are very different and the subsidised poetry publishing sector does not exist in the same way, but there is still a lot of poetry coming from small presses – let’s hope they can survive the downturn.

Poetry in both countries, and in many others, is flourishing in terms of live events and cities like London and New York offer continuous programmes of poetry events. London has amongst others the extremely successful Poet in the City, the Poetry Society and Apples & Snakes, which specialises in performance poetry, and in New York there are lively programmes from Poets’ House, Poets and Writers and the Academy of American Poets, amongst others. Outside these cities it is a more mixed picture and the availability of poetry in printed form is more important.

Poets are said to outnumber poetry readers in the UK. Nobody knows whether this is just a joke or a reality but any observer of the scene can see that there are a very large number of people writing poetry and trying to get it published, and great pressure on the small number of publishing houses. Poetry is benefiting in a major way from self-publishing, which works well for the poets as they can sell their work after their readings and thus have a direct route to readers.

Poetry Archive

Poetry Archive CDs – 60 minute recordings including Carol Ann Duffy

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4 May 2009

New Brown mega-seller coming this autumn

The surprise announcement of a new novel from Dan Brown to be published in the autumn has emphasised yet again the importance of big bestsellers to the book world.

The sequel to The Da Vinci Code is to be called The Lost Symbol and features the same main character, symbiologist Robert Langdon. It takes place over a twelve-hour period. It is six years since The Da Vinci Code was published and Brown has reportedly suffered from writer’s block but also been distracted by a major court case relating to suspected plagiarism brought by the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

Toby Bourne, Waterstone’s Head of Fiction, said: ‘The book is good news because not only is it a guaranteed bestseller, it is one of those books that will bring in people who are not regular bookshop customers.’ And it is this appeal to people who are not usually book-buyers which was the secret of Brown’s spectacular success with the earlier book.

Dan Brown’s books have sold 11.7 million copes and racked up more than £61m ($91m) in sales in the UK alone since he was first published in 2003. The Da Vinci Code was the bestselling hardcover adult novel of all time with 81 million copies in print worldwide. It spent 144 weeks on the New York Times hardback bestseller list and has been translated into 51 languages.

News of another recent big sale illustrates yet again the importance of bestsellers to the book world. Audrey Niffenegger, author of the mega-selling The Time Traveller’s Wife, has come up with a second novel which has caused huge excitement and sold for $5m (£3.35m) in the States. Her US editor, Nan Graham, said: ‘She really has defied custom and written a spectacular second novel, which is one of the hardest things to do in the universe.’ Rather surprisingly perhaps, Her Fearful Symmetry is set in and around Highgate Cemetery in north London and it involves elements of the supernatural rather than the time-travel element of her earlier book.

The book world is immensely cheered by the thought of these two bestselling authors helping to bring customers into bookshops and creating excitement and word-of-mouth enthusiasm for books during the key autumn season.

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27 April 2009

Google grabs rights to digitised books

Google’s recent class action settlement in the US will award sweeping rights to manage and sell digitised versions of every work published or made available in the US. The settlement allows Google – which has already digitised more than seven million books – the non-exclusive right to digitise every book published before 5th January this year. Authors who wish to exclude their books from the settlement must inform Google by 5th May. But opting out of the settlement ‘does not exclude your books’. Authors will still have to go after Google to make sure they are removed.

So how on earth have we reached this extraordinary situation where authors may find their books have been digitised without their knowledge or consent, just because copies of them are in US libraries? Google’s digitisation programme is nothing new, but just how has it managed to gain the initiative and what should authors do? The first thing is that if you want to opt out, you must do so by 5^th May.

It’s hard to read this extraordinary legal mess, but opting in may allow rights holders to have some say on the limitations placed on how their works might be accessed. Doing nothing automatically binds works to the settlement. Lynn Chu wrote In the Wall Street Journal that Google's Books Rights Registry is ‘a massive burden on everyone in the book industry, making us all, in effect, Google's data-entry slaves’. The Registry, which is being set up following Google's settlement with the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers, threatens ‘to destroy the health in the system that individual bargaining preserves’. She said: ‘Say goodbye to your rights, forever, authors, if this mess goes through.’

The current edition of the UK Society of Authors’ magazine, The Author, shows how the US settlement affects writers elsewhere, too, if their works are held in the relevant US libraries. It says authors need to act. They should check details at the settlement website, and register titles there; if they want to opt out, they must do so by 5 May 2009. To receive payments, they have to create an account with the Registry by 5 January 2010.

The UK Publishers Association has stressed that UK publishers who fail to respond to the US-based Google Settlement will still be bound by the agreement, but will receive no compensation for those books already digitised by the giant search engine. The PA said that Google could begin rolling out a consumer offer to its US search engine users as early as mid-July, though admitted that the agreement could yet become mired in a lengthy appeals process even after it is approved by a US judge in June.

Under the terms of the settlement agreed between Google and the Association of American Publishers and US Authors' Guild in October last year, Google has agreed to pay $60 per title for 'in print' books it has already digitised with the overall bill expected to be around $45m (out of a total settlement cost to Google of $125m): but it is up to publishers, including UK presses, to make a claim.

There are estimates that there are up to 1m 'in print' titles already digitized out of a total of 7m. Google has refused to provide publishers with a list of titles it has already digitised—the books could have been passed to Google by US libraries or even second-hand booksellers.

Both the UK Publishers’ Association and the Association of American Publishers are advising non-US publishers to claim all of their titles, though compensation will only be paid on titles Google has digitised that were registered with the US Copyright Office by 5th January 2009. Even if compensation is not applicable, by registering with Google publishers will gain the right to "manage" how their books are used by the search engine.

Under the terms of the agreement Google’s offer could include offering downloads of the full text to consumers and institutions, and selling advertising. Publishers who 'opt in' have the ability to turn off any or all of these revenue generators, and set a price for their books to be sold at by Google, which is otherwise determined by a Google algorithm.

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20 April 2009

Turning non-readers into readers

Recent rather disturbing figures have revealed that there is a potential market of 20 million potential readers in the UK who do not read books. In the US a recent survey revealed that one in four Americans didn’t read a single book last year. So who are these huge potential markets and can anything be done to activate them?

The UK figures came as part of some research conducted at the end of National Year of Reading by the project, HarperCollins and the Trade Publishers Council. The survey was conducted amongst the C2DE socio-economic group, characterised as lower income, non-professional families, or what used to be defined as working class and lower middle class.

These families saw books as alien and unattractive. Crucially, reading is seen as an anti-social activity for loners and as such has little place in a culture centred around family, work and sporting groups. Bookshops are felt to be alien and intimidating.

Honor Wilson, the National Year of Reading Director, said: ‘These are good solid families who don’t have literacy problems but who just don’t read. They are one step away from book-buying, they do consume lots of leisure products and may have up to 300 DVDs in the house. But intentionally or otherwise, a lot of people in the book world are conveying the impression that reading is associated with a particular area of society and lifestyle.’

The schools may bear some of the blame for this, as they are focused on literacy, rather than enjoyment of books, as the goal. Of course literacy is an essential prerequisite of reading books, but encouraging children to read for pleasure, not just for literacy, ought to be a crucial part of the schools’ role.

The annual output of new titles in the US is soaring towards half a million at the same time as the survey quoted above revealed that one in four Americans didn’t read a single book last year. On both sides of the Atlantic, and in many other parts of the world, celebrity biographies are becoming increasingly popular and non-writers – pop stars, chefs, sports personalities – are increasingly dominating the bestseller lists.

Lest we despair, another survey recently found some interesting growth in the UK book club, or reading group, numbers, which have doubled over the past year. This is however the converted, as people who join book groups can be assumed to be members of the heavy reader group.

This survey also revealed that 44% of children claimed they would rather be reading books than speaking to their friends on social networking sites, reading magazines, using Twitter or blogging. Let’s hope this is a truthful answer, as it gives hope that young people are becoming readers, but it has to be said that it contradicts the evidence which seems all around us – which is that children and young people are increasingly spending their leisure time on many things other than books.

But perhaps the non-readers are writing instead of reading? In another survey for World Book Day undertaken by Sky Arts’ "The Book Show", it was revealed that 56% of people would like to write a book, with most women (18%) wanting to write crime/thriller or mystery and most men (20%) wanting to write sci fi and fantasy.

11% of those asked also revealed that they have written a book but not yet had it published. Now this is a number that visitors to this site may be able to identify with...

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13 April 2009

Book sales - volume up, value down

This year’s Book Marketing Limited study Books and Consumers in 2008 showed some worrying trends in book purchasing in the UK, whilst demonstrating that books have fared comparatively well compared to music and DVDs. Volume purchases of both of the latter grew much faster than books, but both of them suffered from a huge drop in price – averages of 23% for DVDs and 34% for music.

Price does however play a big part in the sales picture for books. The 330m figure for books bought by consumers in 2008, although less than 2007, was ahead of 2006 levels and 10% up over the last five years as a whole. With average prices falling in each of the last three years, the longer-term volume growth brought only a 4% increase in spending. This represents a 6% decrease in real terms, once inflation is taken into account.

Steve Bohme, BML Research Director, pointed out: ‘The market has become increasingly reliant on a smaller pool of buyers buying more books each year.’ The book trade is very dependant on these heavy readers and will be disproportionately affected if they fare badly in the recession.

The BML study also revealed a contrast between sales of adults’ and children’s books. Between 2004 and 2008 purchases of adult books increased by 9% in volume but only 2% in value, reflecting a 6% decline in average price paid. By contrast, children’s book sales were much more robust, with the average price paid up by 3% over this period, turning a 12% volume increase into 15% value growth.

The Internet has doubled its volume market share of books to 14% last year from 7% in 2004. At the same time supermarkets grew their share to 14% from 8% five years ago. The market share of the independent sector dropped only 1% over the same period, but UK chains’ volume declined from 39% to 34% and direct mail slumped 5% to 11% over the same period.

So, fewer consumers are buying more books at a bigger discount, often in supermarkets or on the Internet. It’s clear also that regular book purchasers are well aware of the cheapest places to buy books – and that that’s where they will go. The pressure to discount is not going to go away as we battle our way through the recession, and both publishers and retailers are going to have to take account of the now ingrained public expectation that that they will get their reading matter at a discount.

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6 April 2009

Large print breakthrough

Working with the Publishers’ Licensing Society, the Royal National Institute for the Blind in the UK has initiated and funded Focus, an £800,000 ($1,187) project to publish large print books. It is publishing the books in association with BBC Audiobooks, Penguin, Random House and HarperCollins.

John Godber, Head of Products and Publications at RNIB, said that it was time for people to stop apologising for their blindness and time for society at large to recognise that blind people were neither ‘different’ nor ‘separate’ and had as much right to the pleasures of life as the sighted. Equally, he said, the blind and partially sighted must not expect charity: authors and publishers had to be paid, whatever the format or type size.

Up to now, large print has been the province of a handful of specialist publishers who sold to libraries. It has been hard to find large print books in bookshops. Short run and PoD technology, as well as XML, which allows for the multi-purposing of content, now makes large print books commercially viable for both producers and consumers.

Author Karin Slaughter has said: ‘Reading is a gift that should not be denied anyone and books should be in large print if that helps more people enjoy their pastime’. In the UK there are around two million people suffering significant sight loss. It's estimated that around 100 people every day in the UK will start to lose their sight - and by no means in all cases is the loss age-related.

US figures show that 1.3 million Americans are legally blind’ of which 55,200 are children, and a further ‘5.5 million are visually impaired’.

All round the world, those whose sight is impaired include many keen readers who have lost access to something of immense importance to them, the ability to pick up a book and read it. Your sight doesn’t need to be significantly impaired for you to find print size a factor when you are buying a book, but for those who need large print to read comfortably it will be good news that large print books are becoming available in bookshops.

Focus launches with seven new and recently published titles by big-name authors from HarperCollins, Random House and Penguin, including novels by Clive Cussler, Karin Slaughter, Cathy Kelly, Ruth Rendell and Barbara Taylor Bradford, in large print trade paperback versions. A further 46 titles will be available on a print-on-demand basis and they will all sell for £12.99 or £16.99.

The scheme is backed by a £150,000 advertising campaign, including high street posters and national press advertising, and a PR drive handled by agency Colman Getty.

If you are a self-publisher and want to make your work available in a large print edition, this is relatively easy and fairly inexpensive to do and you will find a ready market for your book in an area where there is little competition.

Our article on books for the visually impaired

30 March 2009

Bologna - steady business but fewer attendees

Although there were fears that the Bologna Children’s Book Fair was going to be less busy this year as a result of the recession, the most important annual rights fair for children’s publishers seems to have been business as usual. There were fewer delegates from some parts of the world, particularly the United States (notably neither Random House Inc nor Puffin US sent delegates), but there were still plenty of deals being made at the 46^th Fair.

The Bookseller reported that Oxford University Press's rights manager for the educational division, Philippa Payne, said: ‘We are literally back-to-back with meetings, if not more than ever. Everyone seems to be being a little bit more selective. The fact that publishers are being more selective is no bad thing. It forces them to be more selective after the fair.’

Payne said that this could mean deals are sewn up more quickly after Bologna. But she added the lighter US turnout might provide difficulties for some publishers. ‘The US contingent is really small this year but luckily we have travelled a lot during the year and are going to BEA (Book Expo in New York), so this cushions us.’

Publishers are being cautious about picture books and tend to have only a small list of big names or really outstanding newcomers. Novelty books have suffered from higher production prices. Fiction, especially for older children and teenagers, has been more in demand.

Rights and co-edition sales have been focused on Europe, rather than the US, and relatively new markets such as Slovenia and Brazil. Cally Poplak, Director of Egmont Press in the UK, said that TV and film companies were still spending and were particularly interested in family-orientated stories.

New figures from the US suggest that the children’s market is holding up well, but cynics might note that this is only because it includes teenage novels, particularly what is now being termed ‘bite-lit’ – vampire novels. A lot of this is down to Stephenie Meyer and last year, as the final volume in her Twilight series was published (six million copies sold) and the Twilight film was released (US domestic box office: $191 million), Little, Brown sold a massive 27.5 million copies of her four vampire novels.

The third volume in Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle, Brisingr, sold 2.6 million copies (the series sold 3.2 million in total last year) and, although it was not a new Harry Potter novel, J.K. Rowling’s collection of Beedle the Bard tales sold 3.5 million copies.

These figures show that there is still a lot of money being made out of children’s books, but that the market is reaching for big names and is cautious about areas such as picture books and novelties, where builidng up the international co-edition is a necessity.

There is a view amongst publishers that adults who have to economise on books because money is tight will nonetheless prioritise the purchase of books for their children. Many parents see books as educational and have become convinced of the undoubted educational advantages to their children of developing the reading habit. Many writers are focusing on the children’s market, a challenging and demanding one but one which may deliver great rewards to successful writers. We shall shortly be offering excerpts from a new book on writing for children on the site.

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23 March 2009

Libraries - the fight-back

Our libraries seem to have been facing inexorable decline. In the boom times people switched from libraries and started buying their books in greater numbers. The free internet access libraries provided proved attractive, particularly to younger library visitors, but became less of a draw as home internet access has become the norm.

The latest news is of cash-strapped councils in the UK, most recently in the Wirral and Swindon, closing large numbers of libraries to make economies. The irony of this is that there is evidence from both the US and the UK that people are turning to libraries in this time of recession. That is when people remember what libraries stand for and what the wide range of free services can offer them.

In the UK library campaigners Tim Coates and Desmond Clarke have fought a long-running battle to prevent the inexorable decline in the proportion of library budgets spent on books. Coates has proved that it is possible to make economies elsewhere and successfully run a library service which spends a much greater percentage of its money on books.

Librarians feel under threat, not just because of the book budget cuts and library closures, but also because this once proud profession, which is full of people who genuinely believe in the importance of what they do, finds itself undergoing death by a thousand cuts, with shorter opening hours, fewer staff and less qualified ones the norm.

But libraries are fighting back. Fiona Marriott at Luton Libraries calculated that the amount a regular borrower of books and CDs can save in a year by borrowing from the library rather than buying is, surprisingly, nearly £1,000 ($1,447) The slogan ‘Buy none, get eight free’ has been hitting home.

Libraries have re-energised themselves and have done a great deal of excellent work to encourage people to use them. The Reading Agency (TRA), which works to promote libraries’ work in the UK, found in 2008 that the number of library reading groups had nearly trebled since 2004, with 100,000 people belonging to 10,000 groups. Last year’s National Year of Reading was successful in getting 2.3 million people to join their local library, 2 million more than more than the campaign had expected.

Liz Dubber and Miranda McKearney of TRA write that: ‘On the face of it, the latest Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) statistics about the use of public libraries do not make for very happy reading. Visits to public libraries fell by 2.7% in 2007-08, while issues of books slipped by 2.3%. Loans of books have been declining steadily for well over a decade now.

But despite these falls, there is some cause for optimism. The number of children’s books borrowed has risen in each of the last four years; the increase in 2007-08 was modest, but an increase nonetheless.’

There’s been a particular success story with children and libraries’ programmes for young people have been a notable success: ‘There has been an explosion of reading activities – author events, story times, reading groups, challenges, book awards, promotions… In last year’s Summer Reading Challenge 690,000 children took part in "Team Read", and 2.8 million books were borrowed as a result.’

So what we see is a mixed picture. Successful big promotions have shown that there is still plenty of life in libraries. People are flocking back to them in this time of recession. But libraries can only do their job if they are funded sufficiently to stay open (with sensible opening hours); have decent book buying budgets to keep their stock up to date and attractive to borrowers; and continue to be staffed by knowledgeable library professionals.

A good public library system is a prerequisite of a civilised society and one to which many developing countries aspire. In this time of economic crisis and huge pressure on local resources, we need to say clearly to local and national government that libraries are a top priority.

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16 March 2009

Recession and the book trade

How is the economic slowdown affecting books? We’ve managed to stay off the subject of the recession for over two months, so now is the time to have another look at how it is affecting the book business.

The first thing to say is that things look bleaker in the US than they do in the UK, although no-one is having a particularly comfortable time. The big American publishing corporations acted sooner in the face of falling sales. On 3 December, a day christened ‘Black Wednesday’ by American publishing insiders, lay-offs were announced at Houghton Mifflin, Thomas Nelson and McGraw-Hill, with a reorganisation at Random House. Further rounds of job cuts have followed, with Simon and Schuster, Oxford University Press and McGraw-Hill in the forefront.

In the UK sales have held up better, but Random House and HarperCollins have both recently announced job cuts of 5%. Both companies have taken the view that it would be prudent to act now, as the recession deepens and its end is not in sight, but their fundamental health is not in doubt. Large companies are particularly vulnerable to recession because of their high cost base, but small publishers are also vulnerable as they may not be able to borrow the money they need to invest and sustain their activities.

Collateral damage from the recession may be anticipated falls in attendance at the big book fairs coming up soon, particularly the London Book Fair and Bologna Children’s Book Fair. BookExpo Canada has been cancelled for this year. The longstanding editor-in-chief of Publishers’ Weekly, Sara Nelson, and two of her colleagues lost their jobs, whilst in the UK the much-lamented Publishing News was closed down last year, due to lack of advertising revenue from publishers.

A fundamental difference between the US and the UK is in the bookselling environment. In the US Borders is extremely exposed by its lack of liquidity and the biggest US bookselling chain Barnes and Noble made 100 redundancies in January, for the first time in its history. Its CEO said: ‘never in all my years as a bookseller have I seen a retail climate as poor as the one we are in, nothing even close.’

But according to Nielsen Bookscan figures US book sales fell only .02% in 2008, compared to 2007, so it is the anxiety about the future that is the big factor.

In the UK, Waterstone’s chief Gerry Johnson admitted at last week’s Independent Publishers Group conference that: ‘the recession is affecting business’ and said that: ‘the first rule is to survive’. But on the publishing side both Penguin (buoyed by the high dollar exchange rate) and Hachette (helped on both sides of the Atlantic by Stephenie Mayer’s phenomenal sales) announced good results. Latest figures suggest that in the UK books are outperforming the wider economy.

In the midst of a very tough retail environment the optimists who predicted that books would weather the recession better than other retail sectors may be proved right. It all depends how deep the recession becomes and how widely people are affected. In both countries, if you still have your job you may feel better off, as mortgage rates are at historic lows and inflation is down. Books are still a cheap form of entertainment, an inexpensive treat and for many heavy readers a necessity.

But what about readers? A comforting statistic comes from the US, where the US Census Bureau reports that adult readers last year went over 50% of the population. It’s a loose definition of readers, but it’s good to know that male readers have increased from 37.6% to 41.9% since 2002, whilst female readers went up from 5.1% to 58%. We shouldn’t write off the book trade just yet.

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9 March 2009

A triumphant World Book Day 2009

World Book Day 2009 has been a great success. Celebrated in 100 countries around the world, it’s especially strong in the UK, so it’s worth looking at it to see what can be achieved in having an annual day to promote the book.

This year almost 3,000 UK bookshops took part and almost all public libraries, with events involving a whole host of children’s authors. £1 book tokens were given away to children across the country. Last year WBD increased traffic to its site by a whopping 71%.

Michael Rosen, the UK Children’s Laureate, used WBD 2009 to highlight the initial success of Just Read, ten-week push to get children in a Cardiff school reading, followed in a BBC series which started on 6 February. Rosen argues that children need to read whole books, not just selected extracts or anthologies, if they are to get the reading habit and find out what enjoyment they can get from books. So far, he is claiming success for his programme. He also said that he had written to government ministers about his 20 point plan, and that the best plan of all for improving literacy was to read whole books (not "torn-up books, otherwise known as worksheets)’.

Outside in launched its new Reading Around the World campaign, with input from an international cast of authors and illustrators from all over the world. Spread the Word had a very successful poll to find Books to Talk about, which had no less than 8,000 participants and encouraged everyone to think and talk about books.

More frivolously, on the adult side, a survey carried out by World Book Day found that two thirds of people have claimed to have read a book they haven't. The most popular book to have lied about reading is 1984 by George Orwell, with 42% of surveyed people saying they had said they had read it even if they hadn't.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy came second with 31%, and Ulysses by James Joyce was in third place with 25%. When asked why they had lied the main reason was to impress the person they were speaking to. J K Rowling was the most popular author, with 61% of respondents saying that she is the author they really enjoy. 91% of respondents said that they had stayed up late at night to finish reading a book.

The survey also found that people can't bear to throw their books away, with 77% of respondents saying they buy extra bookshelves when they are full.

Finally, the new set of ten Quick Reads seems to have been a great success. Focusing on providing accessible and enjoyable books for emerging adult readers, this programme has already proved that the books can play a major part in helping adults who have difficulties with literacy. Figures show that 12 million adults in the UK struggle with literacy, while, in England alone, 5.2 million adults (aged 16-65 years old) have literacy levels below Level 1 and would be unable to pass an English GCSE.

Data gathered from literacy tutors nationwide shows that the books are having a positive impact on improving the reading levels of adults, with 98% believing the books have been useful in helping their learners’ progress, and 76% reporting that more than half their learners go on to read other Quick Reads. A further 62% say that more than half of their learners then go on to read other books.

Given the huge levels of illiteracy around the world, this programme shows a promising way of encouraging adults to read books.

World Book Day 2009

Just Books - Michael Rosen’s Guardian article

Spread the Word’s Books to Talk about

Bookbrunch Report on Quick Reads survey

Quick Reads

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2 March 2009

Does the new Kindle herald the end of the book?

It may seem like old news now, but News Review has been on holiday so it seems worth tracking back to Amazon’s announcement of its new version of the Kindle (see News Review 2 February), which became available last week, only in the US, although wider release is expected to follow soon.

Publishers’ Lunch review went along these lines: ‘Thinner ("pencil thin"--a third of an inch); a new five-way controller to improve navigation, which particularly helps for newspaper reading; improved placement of the page-turning buttons; a new E ink display…; 20 percent faster page turn; 25% longer battery life; seven times more storage (though who knows why); USB-charge capability and a more portable charger; and yes, still apparently designed by Jeff Bezos's brother-in-law in his spare time and priced at $359.

The new Whispersync lets you switch among multiple Kindles and other devices without losing your place, and "experimental" text-to-speech feature lets Kindle read aloud to you in a computerized voice at any time without losing your place in the work.’

So the Kindle is better in a number of ways and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos still seems to be working on his original aims for the device: ‘We want to make Kindle a bookstore -- the largest e-bookstore in the world, with 230,000 titles and growing. We want to make those titles also available on a bunch of different devices and then synchronize them with Kindle.’

Two things about the announcement have caused furore in the book world. Publishers would clearly and understandably prefer that one retailer did not so totally dominate the bookselling world as Amazon has long been trying to do. A three-way tussle between Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s E-reader and Google, which has 1.5 million books scanned and available through the iPhone, may be about to commence.

Simon Juden, CEO of the UK Publishers’ Association, said: ‘Authors contribute £3.45bn to the UK’s economy and we look forward to working with Amazon to ensure authors’ rights continue to be fully respected.’

This is a reference to the other contentious thing about the Kindle’s relaunch, which is that the text to speech capacity, presented as just another feature, cuts across authors’ rights to license audio rights and receive income from them. Paul Aiken, executive director of the US Authors Guild said in the Wall Street Journal: ‘They don't have the right to read a book out loud. That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.’

Behind all this is publishers’ anxiety that the Kindle will replace the physical book. Julian Rivers, a well-respected commentator in the UK, predicts: ‘I’m not sure when precisely books will meet their end but I am clear that the impact of e-books on their demise is accelerating. My research is extensive. Last Christmas, friends aged eighteen, 48 and 80 were given Sony Readers. They are all now evangelists.’

The scary example of the music business is influencing how people in the book world feel. In a recent article in the Bookseller Tom Tivnan concluded: ‘People engage with books and music in completely different ways. But if there is one lesson to be learned from the music industry it is that age-old practices and consumer behaviour can be altered in a flash.’ He quoted Danny Ryan, intellectual property expert at LECG: ‘The main thing the music business didn’t realise at first is that digitalisation isn’t about distributing the same content in another way. It changes the way people consume content and what is consumed.’ Tivnan’s conclusion is that the book trade needs to be ready for this.

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9 February 2009

Books published in English soar to 381,250

HarperCollins’ worldwide sales have plunged 25% in the last quarter, with book publishing income falling 65 percent to $23 million. Partly this is in comparison to last year when the company had a trio of bestsellers, and HarperCollins UK CEO Victoria Barnsley insists that that the company’s UK sales increased by 13.5% in this period.

News Corporation is having a difficult time because of the structural difficulties in the newspaper world. Rupert Murdoch said: ‘We are implementing rigorous cost-cutting across all operations and reducing head count where appropriate’ and added: ‘This is the worst global economics crisis we witnessed since NewsCorp was established more than 50 years ago.’

Against this gloomy backdrop it is surprising to report that the number of new books published in the UK increased by 4% last year to120,947, which, while it remains below the record 129,762 recorded in 2003, is still a huge number. This figure also includes ebooks, which are beginning to have some impact on the figures.

Whilst the big publishers have been cutting their lists, as the HarperCollins news suggests, there has been a surge in activity from very small publishers and from self-publishers. In 2008, there were applications for ISBN prefixes from 2,842 new publishers - slightly down on the 2007 figure, but 20% ahead of 2001. This reflects the ease of entry into the publishing world, now that print on demand is generally available and a small publisher can start up without needing as much capital as in the past.

The figure of 120,947 does not include English-language titles published overseas and distributed in the UK, which would bring the figure for new English-language books published worldwide in 2008 up to 381,250 - a whopping 31% increase on 2007. Behind this figure there is a real and cheering increase in publishing in English-speaking countries across the world.

Finally, it’s astounding to note that the 2007 figure for US title output (the latest available) was 276,649. In other words, the US, a country with five times the population of the UK, produces only just over twice as many books, so far less per head of population. But the big change internationally is that difficulties with finding a big publisher to take on your book no longer mean that you’re completely stuck – small presses and self-publishing offer other alternatives.

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2 February 2009

Amazon just gets bigger and bigger

Amazon has just announced an increase in sales of 18% to $6.7 billion (£4.6bn) in the last quarter. Its net income rose 9% to $225 million (£155m), above analysts’ expectations, and it was a truly amazing result in relation to the sharp downturn shown by virtually every other retailer.

The company’s ‘media’ sales from its US business are now $5.35 billion (£3.68bn)for the year, making it for the first time larger than the leading offline US booksellers Barnes and Noble by hundreds of millions of dollars.

So, how does Amazon use its power? Its credo of delivering great service at a great price has won it millions of customers across the globe. It’s hard to remember what it was like when the only way you could find an out-of-the-way book was to search it out in a large bookshop and, if that failed, to get them to order it for you - a rather laborious process in those days, although potentially much faster now.

Amazon drives a hard bargain with publishers. Its dispute with Headline in the UK over its demand for improved terms simmers on (News Review 10 November). There were rumours in the UK of Amazon driving its employees hard, and of temporary Christmas staff who got sick being punished. The business is very driven and the culture doesn’t have much time for those who can’t keep up. The company receives nearly one million orders a day from around the world and has successfully expanded its range out of books and music to make itself into the biggest global online retailer.

There don’t seem to be detailed figures available yet, but it looks as if book-buyers switched to Amazon in even greater numbers this Christmas. Other factors may have played their part but there was really one simple reason for this – it was possible to buy just one book and get free delivery. Given the company’s income from delivery charges, this must have delivered a massive hit to their overall margins, but the big increase in volume made it worth it.

The Kindle has always been the killer application and there are signs that Amazon may be about to announce Kindle 2 – slightly strangely given that it has still not launched the existing device outside the US. Comfortingly, CEO Jeff Bezos says: ‘We see that when people buy a Kindle, they actually continue to buy the same number of physical books going forward as they did before they owned a Kindle. And then incrementally, they buy about 1.6 to 1.7 electronic books, Kindle books, for every physical book that they buy.’

Now that there are 225,000 titles available from Amazon.com for download onto the Kindle, the moment may be right to launch it worldwide with a huge catalogue available – although to offer the same versions outside the US would run roughshod over considerations of territorial rights.

Whichever way you look at it, Amazon is in an unassailable and hugely powerful position. Let’s hope it doesn’t use this power to act in ways that would be detrimental to the book business which has been the foundation of its success.

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26 January 2009

Book discounting - danger or opportunity?

Book discounting has come back into the news with the announcement that, despite falling sales in 2008 and all the turbulence in the world economy, the level of discounting in book sales in the UK actually increased last year. The value of sales declined from £1.80bn ($2.48bn) to £1.78bn ($2.46bn). If all books had been sold at the recommended retail price, publishers would have earned £2.27bn ($3.13bn) in 2008.

Simon Juden, CEO of the UK Publishers’ Association, condemned the level of discounting: ‘What we sell the most of we charge the least amount for. Books are a valuable and cultural good and should be sold as such.’

Lest you should think that heavy discounting is a problem affecting only the UK, it’s worth reflecting on the fact that across the world booksellers want to know if discounting in the UK has worked and whether it has led to a democratisation of reading. A benchmarking study published by the UK Booksellers’ Association last November looked at discounting in the UK, Ireland, the USA, Finland, Sweden and Holland, and concluded that UK bookshops are making fewer profits and seeing less growth than those in any of the other countries studied, although the United States had the lowest average selling price for books.

Until the Net Book Agreement ended in 1997, the UK still had fixed prices. Many countries still have them, including France, where they are currently under attack. The argument in 1997 was that enabling booksellers to discount prices would free them to price promote and lead to more sales.

So, has this worked? It’s hard to be clear on this, particularly since the two new kinds of booksellers most successfully using price as a selling tool did not do so or did not exist in the 1990s. It’s arguable that supermarkets would not have bothered to sell books on any scale unless they could discount them and in some famous cases, such as the Harry Potter titles, use them as loss leaders. The same is true of price warehouses in the States and big discounters who sell books everywhere. Amazon and other online book retailers would undoubtedly not have flourished and grown as they have without the ability to offer large discounts.

Last week’s Bookseller editorial points out that that the £500m that UK publishers might have earned last year if there was no discounting is a totally notional figure, as fewer books would have been sold. The thing about discounting is to discover the right level for prices and to deal with the absurdity of the bestsellers – the books readers want the most – being the most highly discounted.

Kate Mosse, bestselling author and founder of the Orange Prize, thinks that in the end discounted prices have benefited readers. Most importantly, her view is that that they have not adversely affected the perceived value of books. Speaking for writers she says: ‘For the most part writers do not need their novels to look special to be read. Most of us would rather our books were borrowed or loaned or shared than not read at all. It’s not the physical object itself that matters but the content of it.’

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19 January 2009

Bestsellers across the globe

So who are the most popular fiction writers across the globe? Rather surprisingly, a recent study shows that Khaled Hosseini and Ken Follett share that accolade. They are the only writers to have books in the top ten in seven out of the nine countries where data was available.

Follett is a long-standing international favourite whose books have sold extremely well for a many years and his latest, World without End, is following that pattern. Hosseini is more of a surprise. The author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns did benefit from selection by Richard and Judy in the UK but the novels’ international success seems to be based on their novelty, since they are highly original books from an interesting new writer. Hosseini’s writing has great narrative drive and his books open up Afghan society to western readers. They are generally regarded as rather ‘literary’ and their strong themes make them popular with reading groups.

Coming behind these two writers on the list are the Swedish writer Stieg Larsson and the much better known John Grisham. Other more obvious names such as Stephenie Meyer, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, the European bestseller Henning Mankell and J K Rowling make it into the top 10 fiction lists of just four countries. There’s also Muriel Barbery, a French writer virtually unknown in the UK and US, who is in the same category.

In total 387 writers featured in the top 10 lists of the nine countries where the lists were examined – which were France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, China, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US (so they do not encompass the whole world). But only 48 of these had top 10 hits in more than one country, suggesting that fiction bestsellerdom may vary more than we think from one place to another.

The data is taken from book trade magazines in the countries listed above by the consultant Rudiger Wischenbart. Perhaps even in this era of globalisation these figures show that each market is unique. Some British and American writers have appeal across the globe, but there are not actually very many of them. Each country has its own favourites and translates and sells internationally bestselling authors according to the internal dictates of their own market. It could be argued that the strong appeal of each country’s own writers to their readers is a good thing and essential for the maintenance of a healthy local publishing industry and for continued cultural diversity across the globe.

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12 January 2009

Children's books still booming

Children’s books are still doing well in spite of the recession. In the UK Christmas sales were up by 8.5% (£4 million - $6 million) on the previous year. The publication of J K Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard contributed handsomely to this, but sales of Stephenie Meyer’s Twlight series (see News Review 18 August 2008) made a major contribution to book sales across the world and continued the focus on successful teenage fiction.

Prospects for the children’s book market may be rosier than those for books for adults. Francesca Dow, MD of Puffin in the UK, says: ‘Children’s books may be hit less hard than adult books because parents will still spend on their children.’ It is still going to be difficult though for publishers to find the marketing spend for kids’ books in a year when budgets will be tight. Gillian Laskier, Group Sales Director for Egmont, said: ‘Retailers will focus more on a smaller range of bestsellers – not just the frontlist books but the cream of the frontlist.’

Outside the arena of big publishing, there are clear signs that self-publishing may offer a particularly effective starting-point for children’s authors. Christopher Paolini’s Eragon (see News Review 1 December 2008) is a notable case of this, but a recent article in the US Publishers’ Weekly detailed a number of other successful children’s authors who had followed this route.

An interesting trend in the UK market has been the impact of high-profile publicly funded campaigns to promote books and reading. The current Children’s Laureate, Michael Rosen, has like his predecessors done a terrific job in promoting children’s books, with in his case a special focus on picture books and children’s poetry. The recent Old Possum’s Children’s Poetry Competition, for which he was Chair of the Judges, tapped a vein of 7-11 year-old creativity across the world – for a cheering indication of what the children themselves can do just look at the wining poems on the Children’s Poetry Bookshelf website.

The Big Picture campaign in 2007 drew attention to picture books and there has indeed been an improvement in this area, with a cautious number of new books and new authors being published. Booktrust’s many publicly-funded book-gifting schemes have proved that giving books to young children d can make a big difference to their reading and their education in general.

The biggest promotion of the year in the UK has been the National Year of Reading. Amongst its many successes it has persuaded nearly two million people, many of them children, to join their local library. The campaign, which has been distinguished by a lively, ever-changing website and year-long parade of imaginative monthly promotions, is a model of its kind. It is reckoned to be such a success that it is going to morph into an ongoing promotion, Reading for Life.

Publishers’ Weekly on children’s self-publishing

WritersPrintShop - our self-publishing service

The UK Children’s Laureate

Old Possum’s Children’s Poetry Competition

Children’s Poetry Bookshelf

Booktrust

National Year of Reading

Reading for Life

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5 January 2009

So what about the book business in 2009?

No-one could call 2008 an easy year. As well as an unprecedented worldwide credit crisis it has ended with an abrupt slide into a severe global recession, which will affect every country in the world and all aspects of life.

Publishing will not be immune and already there are signs of cutbacks, particularly in US publishing, where one of the big bookselling chains also looks unsteady. Early hopes that books, traditionally thought to do well in a recession, would escape unscathed, have proved to be unfounded. At the time of writing it is not clear how the all-important Christmas selling season panned out for booksellers, but as we enter the New Year it doesn’t look as if it saved the day.

The holiday fell in such a way that Christmas present buyers could postpone their purchasing to the very last moment – and they did. In the UK there was the appalling timing of Woolworths going down, taking in its wake the EUK distribution business, which supplies most of the big supermarkets, and also affecting the wholesaler Bertrams, the supplier of many independent bookshops.

Across the globe people are being forced to focus on basic essentials and for many these essentials do not include books. But we should all take heart from the fact that the international book trade rests very largely on the purchases of heavy book buyers -and for them books are a necessity. Even for lighter buyers, as has often been pointed out, books make good gifts, not too expensive but showing thought and discrimination.

There’s no doubt though that publishers are going to be even more cautious than usual in 2009. American publishers have already started cutting staff and it’s possible that publishers in other countries will follow. At the very best they will reduce their risks by taking on fewer books. This means that agents will struggle to sell new authors in particular, unless they are thought to be bestseller material. And that of course means that agents in their turn will be extremely careful about taking on new authors.

Before we come to an utterly depressing conclusion however we shouldn’t forget that readers will still be buying books, and they may even devote more time to reading and other home pursuits as these are infinitely cheaper than going out. Reading sits well with the new austerity, being thought rather improving as well as inexpensive. Publishers still have to publish something and there will of course be an ongoing market for new books in bookshops everywhere.

It may however be a year when it makes more sense for writers to concentrate on improving their writing and getting it into good shape, rather than a scattergun approach to submitting it to an indifferent market. The Internet and the possibility of self-publishing also offer new ways for writers to reach their audience which have never existed in previous recessions. So self-help is the order of the day and writers can make the most of the opportunities that offer themselves to draft and redraft their work; research and inform themselves online; join online writing communities; promote their writing on the web; and to try out the new opportunities that self-publishing and selling online present.

A happy New Year to all our visitors and we hope you will find it a good year for developing your writing!

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