From Slate:
Last week the article “No One Buys Books,” by Elle Griffin, went viral, topping Substack categories and being shared widely on social media. It’s easy to understand why. Publishing is an opaque industry, and Griffin’s piece—which collects quotes and statistics from the 2022 Justice Department suit against Penguin Random House, in which the government successfully blocked PRH’s $2.2 billion purchase of Simon & Schuster—is filled with shocking claims. Over 90 percent of books sell fewer than 1,000 copies; 50 percent of books sell fewer than 12 copies. The article paints a nearly apocalyptic portrait of traditional publishing, in which nothing works, few make money, nobody reads, and the whole industry might go poof at any moment. This vision is appealing to many people, including writers who (fairly or unfairly) feel stymied by the industry, popularists who think reading itself is a snobby hobby, and tech types who mock “paywalled dead trees.” The only problem is, the picture isn’t true.
Let me say first that Griffin does an admirable job collecting these quotes, and much of the overall thrust is correct: Most people don’t buy books, sales for most titles are lower than many think, and big publishing works on a blockbuster model where a few hits—plus perennial backlist sellers—comprise the bulk of sales. It’s also true that books don’t occupy as central a place in the culture as they did before film, streaming TV, video games, and social media fragmented culture. (That ship sailed many decades ago, however.)
Still, many of the statistics here are wrong or misleading in part because they were intended to be. PRH’s legal strategy was to present publishing as an imperiled, dying industry beset on all sides by threats like Amazon—a characterization intended to convince the court that a merger was necessary for publishing’s survival. There may be truth to that idea, and I’m not saying any of the quotes are lies. I’m saying the quotes and statistics are tailored toward a specific narrative in the context of a legal battle. So, read them with a $2.2 billion–sized grain of salt.
Before we dive into numbers, though, let’s step back and look at the biggest question: Do people buy books?
Americans Buy Over 1 Billion Books a Year
How many books are sold in the United States? The only reliable tracker we have is Circana BookScan, which logs point of sale—i.e., customer purchases at stores, websites, etc.—for most of the print market. BookScan counted 767 million print sales in 2023. It collects this data directly from reporting bookstores, chains, and online retailers that combine for the majority of the market. BookScan claims to cover 85 percent of print sales, although many in publishing think the percentage is smaller. Many books sold at book festivals or in-person at readings are not reported to BookScan, for example, nor are library sales. (Almost every author will tell you that their royalty reports show notably more sales than BookScan captures, sometimes by orders of magnitude.)
Still, I’ll be conservative and assume that 85 percent is the correct figure. This means that close to 900 million print books are sold to customers each year. Add in e-books and the quickly growing audiobook market, and the total number of new books sold is over 1 billion. Again, this is a conservative estimate. And it does not include used book sales or library purchases. Americans do buy books.
Is 1-billion-plus a lot of books? This depends on your point of view. For comparison’s sake, there were 825 million movie tickets sold in the U.S. and Canada in 2023. So, more books are purchased than movie tickets, two comparable entertainment options in terms of price. On the other hand, that’s “new movies in theaters” vs. “all books available for sale from throughout history.” Movies are vastly more expensive to make, so far fewer movies are released each year than books are published. Individual movies are watched far more than most individual books are read.
. . . .
Understanding How Books Earn Money
There’s also a lot of confusion in book publishing because the economics are both complicated and obscured. Confusion is common. I’ll look at just one example from the original article, because it illustrates two common misunderstandings:
Books don’t make money
If I look at the top 10 percent of books … that 10 percent level gets you to about 300,000 copies sold in that year. And if you told me I’m definitely going to sell 300,000 copies in a year, I would spend many millions of dollars to get that book.
—Madeline McIntosh, CEO, Penguin Random House US
Publishing houses pay millions of dollars for a book that sells only 300,000 copies??? Well, because books don’t sell a lot of copies, they don’t make a lot of money. …
According to [consultant Nicholas] Hill, 85 percent of the books with advances of $250,000 and up never earn out their advance.
McIntosh said 300,000 copies “in a year” rather than in lifetime sales, so we are talking calendar-year sales, not lifetime sales. A book that sold “only” 300,000 in one year is going to sell many more copies in other years. It has a good chance of being a perennial backlist seller, even. That is the goal of any publisher, since they sell with almost no overhead or marketing costs. Such a book would certainly make many, many millions for a publisher. What company wouldn’t pay millions if they were “definitely going” to make even more millions back?
Link to the rest at Slate
