Shocking article about sales...

The overwhelming majority of the those 59,000 would either be self-published themselves, or "assisted self-publishing" (like Lulu or CreateSpace) or vanity published, or such award winning titles as Getting Started with your Superdeluxe Laser 4002 XP--a copy of which is given away with every Superdeluxe Laser 4002 XP sold, and which is downloadable for free on the Superdeluxe website, but which you can in fact buy just in case your four-year old flushes the original and you don't want to be bothered printing one out.

They don't even attempt to break it all down, but I'm fairly sure Neilsen Bookscan would count anything with an ISBN.

Let's just say the DM aren't the Literary writer's best friend.

More interested in kiss n tells and Jordan et al than literary excellence.

If you had a breakdown of those numbers, I'd lay dollars to doughnuts that of the 59,000 that only sold an average of 18 copies - 58,900 of them were self/vanity published.

Uncle Jim has pointed out the average non-commercial book sells around 75 copies in its lifetime. However, we also know some PA books sell 0 copies.

Commerically published books generally sell at a much higher rate than that.

ChristineR said:

They don't even attempt to break it all down, but I'm fairly sure Neilsen Bookscan would count anything with an ISBN.

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I hope so. Because if those are not self published books, that's really bad.

Celia Cyanide said:

I hope so. Because if those are not self published books, that's really bad.

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Not necessarily--like I said, it almost certainly includes specialty books that are not intended to sell at all, or sell in bookstores at all. From what I can tell, Bookscan monitors sales at select bookstores, which means that they aren't looking at many books at all--government reports, technical manuals, almost all self/subsidy/vanity pubbed. But I doubt if Bookscan makes a distinction between Lulu sold in a bookstore, Lulu sold online, Lulu sold at a specialty store, and Lulu novels.

All sorts of things get counted as books because they have an ISBN, calendars for example.

'Nielsen Bookscan has found that of 86,000 new titles published in the UK in 2009, 59,000 sold an average of 18 copies.'

Nielsen Bookscan is not intended to be used this way, and makes no sense whatsoever when used by those who simply take raw numbers and post them as if they have any meaning at all. They do not.

The numbers are not only meaningless, they make no more sense than saying 'Nielsen Bookscan has found that of 86,000 new titles published in the UK in 2009, 59,000 sold as ducks that became rabbits.

I hate it when my ducks turn into rabbits. If I wanted a rabbit, I would have BOUGHT a rabbit.

Indeed, they are self-published by people who don't even put them on a market stall. They just put them up on some unvisited website and wonder why nobody buys their deathless, and value-less, prose.

Ah yes, the Flaily Wail. If they're not attacking pinko liberals, then it's all the fault of immigrants.

There is some truth buried within the hyperbole of that article.

Daily Mail Article:
Cherie Blair who is said to have received a £1million advance for her autobiography. But the book has sold only 23,412 hardbacks and 10,240 paperbacks since 2008.

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Celebrity autobiographies have been a massive disappointment on the sales front this year with Cherie Blair being one of the biggest flops (although personally, I doubt she got a million quid advance) but Peter Kaye, who had a massive hit with an autobiography a couple of years ago, has seen sales fall way below expectations this year.

Some publishers were banking on the trend and did pay obscene amounts of money for autobiographies from celebs they thought the public was interested in.

Daily Mail Article:
Julian Barnes’s Nothing To Be Frightened Of was published in March 2008 but has sold only 8,849.

By contrast and showing the power of some well-placed endorsement Barnes' earlier novel Arthur & George, boosted by Richard and Judy, has sold 500,000 in four years.

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This though was a bit misleading. Arthur & George was a work of fiction shortlisted for a number of awards, including The Booker. Nothing To Be Frightened Of is non-fiction and about Barnes' preoccupation with death. They were never going to have comparable sales figures, which was reflected in the campaign for it.

MM

gothicangel said:

Let's just say the DM aren't the Literary writer's best friend.

More interested in kiss n tells and Jordan et al than literary excellence.

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Ha ha, i can't imagine the DM even using the phrase 'et al' in an article.

All these sales figures make no sense. In times of recession, people are looking for cheap entertainment, and books are one! Book sales should be up, not down.

Or maybe people are starting to get picky and research more what they want to read.

The numbers have looked like that for a long time. There simply aren't enough people out there to make every book a best-seller.

C.M.C. said:

The numbers have looked like that for a long time. There simply aren't enough people out there to make every book a best-seller.

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Obviously. But OVERALL book sales should be up, and 59000 books selling 18 or less copies is something intriguing to say the least...

Vimes said:

Wow, I had no idea Nielsen counted self-pubbed books! In that case, the publishing industry is not in the meltdown I thought it was after reading that article! (Curse you, Daily Mail, for your inflammatory articles... I will have to go back to reading The Daily Star.)

Thanks guys, I was thinking this morning that even if I got traditionally published it wouldn't be the holy grail I thought it would be. Panic averted at my end!

Hope everyone has a great New Year... My resolution is to get published in 2010..!

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Wow, quite a swing in reading material. Tory to Socialist in one sentence!

Eddyz Aquila said:

Obviously. But OVERALL book sales should be up, and 59000 books selling 18 or less copies is something intriguing to say the least...

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It might be, if they were legitimately published books, or if Bookscan made any sense at all when used this way. The truth is that many of these "published books" probably didn't sell a single copy, and shouldn't have.

The only thing intriguing about such numbers is why so many dolts continue to use Bookscan in such an idiotic manner, and why people pay any attention at all to such meaningless drivel.

Nielsen Bookscan tracks sales via ISBNs. So anything with an ISBN slapped onto it will be counted: which means that all self-published books which have ISBNs on them will be included in this score, as will any promotional books designed to be given away with Happy Meals and so on. However, Bookscan only notices sales made through certain retailers--mostly bookshops--and can't keep track of sales made through other routes, or of copies "sold" via promotional routes. Consequently, it's accepted that Bookscan under-reports, and can only be relied upon for sales of the sort of books which sell in bookshops. And even for those books, the figures are likely to be under-reported by about a third.

Self-published books almost always score low on Bookscan reports because so few of them are sold through bookshops. Most are sold online, or hand-to-hand, which is why I prefer to use numbers printed as a more reliable indicator of the sales levels for POD self-published books. But the sheer number of books which are self-published, with ISBNs, and which fail to sell any copies at all via the bookstore route, means that averages like this one appear far lower than they really are.

(Let me know if that makes no sense: it's late here, and I'm tired. I'll try again in the morning if required.)

I think the difference is that a lot of things that used to be "published" without an ISBN will now have one. I'm thinking of things like course notes, which used to photocopied but which you can now easily offer bound on Lulu, complete with free ISBN, at essentially no cost to the professor/author. Since it has an ISBN, your students may order it from any bookstore. Therefore there are many more supposed books being published.

Old Hack, you did a much better job of explaining it than I could.

ChristineR said:

I'm thinking of things like course notes, which used to photocopied but which you can now easily offer bound on Lulu, complete with free ISBN, at essentially no cost to the professor/author.

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Lulu is now offering free ISBNs?

caw

Jamesaritchie said:

The only thing intriguing about such numbers is why so many dolts continue to use Bookscan in such an idiotic manner, and why people pay any attention at all to such meaningless drivel.

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Because some folks seem to delight in forecasting the imminent demise of publishing as we know it?

gothicangel said:

Let's just say the DM aren't the Literary writer's best friend.

More interested in kiss n tells and Jordan et al than literary excellence.

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I was thinking the same thing. Anything that comes from them should be taken with a grain of salt.

ChaosTitan said:

Because some folks seem to delight in forecasting the imminent demise of publishing as we know it?

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They're trying to instill fear in the audience to read more physical material via books but more importantly, their newspaper.

blacbird said:

Lulu is now offering free ISBNs?

caw

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Yes, but it might be one of those funky ISBN that is only good at Amazon and Lulu. The free ISBN book is only for sale at those places. I'm not sure how this would appear to Bookscan, but obviously if it shows up on somebody's list of published books all these books would have zero sales to Bookscan because they cannot be sold at outlets Bookscan tracks. Apparently the free ISBN books do get into Books In Print, which is probably what Bookscan is looking at. I believe what you pay for when you get the "real" ISBN is for Lulu to ship your books to Ingram and for Ingram to keep them in their databases.

In any case, you also have outfits like PublishAmerica which offer "real" ISBN for free. If you buy them a thousand at a time, they're only $1.75 each.