Thursday 6 January 2011

Drowning in Numbers 06th January 2011.

Happy New Year everyone – been busy through the holiday season so haven’t had chance to post anything. Real life intrudes and all that, and it was of course Quarter End as well.

We had an excellent sales month in December, knocking all previous records into the proverbial cocked hat and finished 2010 on a real high. This was in part due to the introduction of a new retailer, but was also down to the number of people getting e-book readers for Christmas! We shipped an astonishing number of books in the three days prior to Xmas and then on Xmas day itself.

I have to say though, we are drowning in numbers. Quite literally – so let me explain.
Several of our retailers and wholesalers provide us with summary reports on the trends during the year, showing which genres are doing well, and which have fallen off in popularity, as well as which formats. It looks like the death knell for the venerable Microsoft Reader format is fast approaching – with a number of retailers considering dropping it, and a number of publishers already have! Given the problems involved in the conversion process (have to use 7 year old software on a 9 year old operating system) I think we’ll be dropping it going forward too.
The more interesting information relates to the numbers we’re drowning in.

One of our retailers has been adding new publishers at a rate of 8 a day during 2010 – and they have a minimum number of books requirement.

We were really ecstatic when we were signed up to provide e-books to the largest virtual library supplier in the world – who supply e-books to over 13,000 libraries worldwide for lending. Obviously our books have to compete with others on the system. The system grew by a staggering 185,000 books through 2010. Makes our 103 e-book total look a little paltry.

The situation on Amazon is similar – they have over 2 million print books listed and something over 580,000 e-books. Our 103 e-books (16 of them in print) are just a tiny drop in this ocean. How on Earth do you get people to notice your books in such a sea of choices?

Our sales figures per author split neatly into four bands. At the top of the list is one author who had an established reputation before signing with us, who also has a large number (31) of books.

The second band contains those authors who push their books and have several releases out (one of them has 35!) and you get repeat sales when people buy one book and then others by the same author.

The third band is those authors with single books out (although one of them has just released her second, who will shortly be moving up a band) who also promote their work. We have one guy of 89 who really works at it, e-mailing friends and family and anyone else he can contact on a regular basis, and his sales reflect this. Other authors (three in total) have been interviewd on thier local TV stations, let alone the myriad of press releases, newspaper articles and promotional items, book fairs attended.

Finally we have a small group of authors, who do no promotional work at all, sit back and expect us as the publisher to do everything. The truth is, if the author doesn’t work at the sales, it doesn't matter what we do, they aren’t going to see many sales.

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