British publishing houses broke all previous revenue records in 2017 to see their collective sales rise 5% to £5.7bn, driven by a growth in export sales which now account for 60% of publishers' revenues. However, while most areas of business performed robustly, domestic sales of textbooks to schools took a 12% hit, revealing that savage public sector cuts are starting to bite in the education. Sales of children's books also slid by 3%, while domestic sales of consumer e-books plunged by 9%.
Links of the week July 16 2018 (29)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
16 July 2018
David Shelley, c.e.o. of Hachette UK, said: "The story of 2017 in consumer publishing is one of a sector showing remarkable resilience - material increases in sales for both fiction and non-fiction, and a buoyant underlying market for children's books...All told, given a challenging high street environment for book retailers in the UK and increasing competition for people's time and attention, the 2017 numbers speak to the creativity and innovation of the UK trade publishing industry and show it to be in excellent health, with an increasing international focus."
Reading ebooks and print are on the decline and everyone involved in retail and the publishing industry are trying to figure out why. Are people simply not reading for pleasure anymore and consuming original Netflix content or listening to Spotify? What we do know is that between 2003 and 2016, the amount of time that the average American devoted to reading for personal interest on a daily basis dropped from 0.36 hours to 0.29 hours.
Here are some heart wrenching statistics. 33% of high school graduates never read another book the rest of their lives and 42% of college grads never read another book after college. 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years and 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
Biography combines history, psychology, and gossip, and there will always be a market for its insights into the Life (how careers crest or crater) and the Times (the context of each life) of a stranger.
Students of US politics, for example, hunger for a fifth volume of two-time Pulitzer-winning author Robert A. Caro's biography of thirty-sixth president Lyndon B. Johnson. Aside from the jaw-dropping details about Johnson's personal habits (issuing orders to subordinates while he defecated) and political achievements (the Great Society), there is Caro's larger theme. In his words, "I always wanted to use the life of a man to examine political power, because democracy shapes our lives."
Caro may dominate the biography world today, but five volumes, totalling many thousands of pages, about Johnson with publication spread over nearly three decades?
In twenty-five years, how many readers will want a heavyweight linear narrative about a Dead White Male? How many publishers will support such a marathon?
Whether you've been blogging for a while, began this year or are setting up your blog for a New Year launch, I know what you want. You want to create the best blogging year possible. You want to attract lots of visitors, gain tons of subscribers and even make some money on your services and products, which could include a book you blogged. How can you do that?
Let me tell you...
I've heard the reasons why most people don't manifest their dreams or achieve their goals. Maybe you've said something similar: You don't have the money. You don't have the time. Your significant other (or your mother or siblings or friends) won't approve. You don't think you're good enough, smart enough, expert enough, old enough, or young enough. You have too many responsibilities.
The loving and attentive reader of children's books knows that the best of them are not one-dimensional oversimplifications of life but stories that tackle with elegant simplicity such complexities as uncertainty, loneliness, loss, and the cycle of life. And anyone who sits with this awareness for a moment becomes suddenly skeptical of the very notion of a "children's" book.
Maurice Sendak certainly knew that when he scoffed in his final interview: "I don't write for children. I write - and somebody says, ‘That's for children!'" Seven decades earlier, J.R.R. Tolkien had articulated the same sentiment, with more politeness and academic rigor, in his terrific essay on why there is no such thing as writing "for children." But one of the finest, most charming and most convincing renunciations of the myths about writing for children comes from E.B. White, nearly two decades after he sneezed Charlotte's Web.
When the interviewer asks whether there is "any shifting of gears" in writing children's books, as opposed to the grownup nonfiction for which he is best known, White responds with the rare combination of conviction and nuance:
Anybody who shifts gears when he writes for children is likely to wind up stripping his gears. But I don't want to evade your question. There is a difference between writing for children and for adults. I am lucky, though, as I seldom seem to have my audience in mind when I am at work. It is as though they didn't exist.
Last year, some of the best-selling books in the world were poetry books, created by Instagram Poets like Rupi Kaur, Atticus, Nayyirah Waheed, and Nikita Gill. These poets, whose work appears in visual form all over social media and garners hundreds of thousands of followers, often found success in choosing to self-publish poetry. This way, they controlled the look and feel of the finished product, and they were able to get their book into the hands of their followers faster than with traditional publishing.
Some of the most famous poetry books of all time were originally self-published and self-marketed, like Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. There's a long tradition of success with self-published poets, and this new generation is finding an audience dedicated to buying print. Success as a poet doesn't depend on traditional publishing - now, less than ever. Have your own collection of poems? Here's how to put your work in print, so it's ready for the delight of your friends, fans, and followers:
Twenty-eight million American adults read poetry this year - the highest percentage of poetry readership in more than 15 years, according to a survey of arts participation conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the U.S. Census Bureau.
"We've never seen an increase in poetry reading. If anything there had been a decline - a pretty sharp decline - since about 2002 at least," said Sunil Iyengar, NEA director of research and analysis.
Young adults and certain racial ethnic groups account for a large portion of the increase. U.S. poetry readers aged 18 to 24 more than doubled, jumping from 8 percent in 2012 to 17 percent in 2017. Among people of color, African Americans and Asian Americans are reading poetry at the highest rates - which more than doubled in the last five years - up 15 and 12 percent, respectively. Other notable increased readership groups include women, rural Americans and those with only some college education.
The world of scholarly communication is broken. Giant, corporate publishers with racketeering business practices and profit margins that exceed Apple's treat life-saving research as a private commodity to be sold at exorbitant profits. Only around 25% of the global corpus of research knowledge is open access, or accessible to the public for free and without subscription, which is a real impediment to resolving major problems, such as the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.
Recently, Springer Nature, one of the largest academic publishers in the world, had to withdraw its European stock market floatation due to a lack of interest. This announcement came just days after Couperin, a French consortium, cancelled its subscriptions to Springer Nature journals, after Swedish and German universities cancelled their Elsevier subscriptions to no ill effect, besides replenished library budgets. At the same time, Elsevier has sued Sci-Hub, a website that provides free, easy access to 67 million research articles. All evidence of a broken system.
A record-breaking year for publishers has been greeted with renewed demands for authors to receive a bigger slice of income and investment, as sales of books passed the £5.7bn mark in 2017.
Book sales income was up 5% on the previous year, according to annual figures released by the Publishers Association. In sharp contrast, a recent survey of authors' earnings revealed a 42% drop over the last decade, with the median annual income now below £10,500.
However, authors contrasted the figures with a long-term decline in pay and investment in writers, particularly those yet to have a breakout bestseller. The author of Girl With a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier, said: "Authors have seen their earnings chipped away at while publishers thrive.
"Most writers cobble together a living from several sources: teaching, journalism, and odd jobs. Writing is just one shrinking source of income. Shrink it enough and people will stop writing altogether. It literally won't be worth it."