Fifty Shades of Grey & The Hunger Games Blamed for Sales Decrease at Penguin
From Pearson’s 2012 half-year results press release:
Penguin’s worldwide profits totaled £441 million for the first half of 2012, dipping by £16 million (-4%) compared to the same period last year.
Penguin ebook revenues up 33% and now almost 20% of Penguin’s revenues.
. . . .
Penguin’s first half trading was affected by three factors: a lighter publishing schedule, the exceptional performance of competitor bestsellers The Hunger Games and Fifty Shades of Grey and continued pressure on physical book publishing and retailing. We expect Penguin’s publishing and its competitive performance to be stronger in the second half of the year, and we expect the structural change to continue. In the second half, Penguin will continue to take action to adapt to the rapidly-changing industry environment and will be expensing integration costs associated with its acquisition of Author Solutions.
Link to the rest at Pearson
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Did I read this right? They’re blaming other publishers for being more clever and publishing books they probably turned down?
Should we play Taps or Amazing Grace on the bagpipes? Raise your hands for a vote.
How about ‘Yakety Sax’? I’ve never heard that on the bagpipes. Should be good for a laugh.
Someone send for the Wah!mbulance. The patience is critical.
Really? “They sold more books than us” is their excuse? Really?
haha, well, when you put it that way…
I went looking to see if I could find any internet video of someone playing Yakity Sax on the bag pipes, and though I found others who wanted to hear it, alas, I found no tape of anyone playing it.
However, I think that my favorite video of Darth Vader in a kilt playing the Imperial March while riding a unicycle is probably quite suitable.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdjY6oy4Y2c
That’s close enough — and uniquely horrible because of the frequent key changes. I award you two Internets, Ma’am.
O_O
ROFLMAO Thanks, Camille! I so needed that!
I enjoy the comments on PG’s blog.
New adventures in responsibility avoidance! Zynga should have tried this! It’s not that Draw Something didn’t perform as well as we expected, it’s that Angry Birds Space had exceptional performance.
Of course, reduced sales could have nothing to do with Penguin pricing their e-books at $10+ and inconsistently applying grammar (and the wrong dash mark) throughout their books…
I’ve bought a few e-books from them in the past year, and the dash particularly bothers me. (There is no reason whatsoever for that one series to use en dashes. Author, setting, publisher, and series narrator all = US native, so why are they using non-US grammar for that?)
Honestly, I think the first factor (producing fewer books) is the only one that genuinely contributed to them not selling so much. Just my 2¢.
Allow me to throw out some twisted, roundabout logic:
1) Books are more competitive in the consumers’ eyes when the price is higher.
2) Agency pricing led to higher pricing.
3) Random House, the publisher of Fifty Shades, did not go with agency pricing until after it was pressured by the other five larger publishers, especially Penguin, whose CEO, David Shanks, wrote Barnes & Noble and asked them to also contribute pressure.
4) Random House went to agency pricing.
5) Fifty Shades is priced higher, thus more competitive in the consumers’ eyes.
6) Penguin suffers because the competition felt by the success of Fifty Shades.
7) Penguin has no one to blame but themselves.
***I feel dirty for writing this.***
Hoist by their own petard, anyone? But really, “Two really popular books killed all our sales” Is it just me or does this sound like the D student blaming the B student for getting better grades just because they studied instead of going to the party?
Hey, they threw off the curve. It IS their fault.
I laughed until I choked. It is the fault of people who publish books that readers actually want to buy. Why for SHAME for doing that to Penguin.
True story.
There used to be a little coffeshop near my house. Great location, nice decor, friendly owners, delicious cookies….terrible coffee. Practically undrinkable. It tasted like the water left after you rinsed your socks.
The first time I went in, there were very few customers. I felt sorry for the owner and asked him, “How’s business?”
He said, “Oh, it’s summer. Nobody wants hot coffee in the summer. Things will get better when the weather turns colder.”
Several months passed. I visited again. He was still serving sock water instead of coffee. “How’s business?”
“Oh, it’s too cold,” the owner said. “Everyone wants to stay home. Nobody wants to come to the coffee shop in the winter.”
A few weeks later, the coffeeshop closed for good.
I don’t know what that former coffeeshop owner is doing now, but I bet he’s not successful.
And I bet it’s always someone else’s fault.
Didn’t anyone tell him his coffee tasted like sock water?
He’s running the business. It’s nobody else’s responsibility to keep him in business.
*stares* Soo… you like the ambience of the place, and the cookies, but you couldn’t be bothered to at least tell him the coffee sucked, because what, he should have known? I mean, he obviously didn’t know that his coffee was lousy. Instead of telling him — instead of treating him like a human being whose coffee place you otherwise seemed to like and feel sad that it wasn’t doing good — you just sat and watched while he made a fool of himself. The fuck. I do not understand you. I don’t understand you at all.
Whoops, excuse me, my bad, you were not the original commenter. Which actually makes it worse, because I didn’t ask you, I asked Margaret Y. Your opinion doesn’t matter unless you were sitting right next to her sipping on the sock water and not saying anything.
I doubt that anything I said would have made any difference.
Andrea, you get the award for the weirdest comment.
Andrea, you implied it was Margaret’s responsibility to keep the guy in business, which, as a human being I feel is an extremely unfair thing to do.
It’s no more her job to keep that cafe in business than it is the job of readers to keep Penguin in business.
If you want to find out why people weren’t patronizing your business, it’s not that hard to find out, especially when it’s something so obvious, so essential, and so easy. Ask and you’ll get responses. Get help from experts. Never stop learning about your products.
Usually, if you make any proactive effort at all, customers will help. But it’s not their responsibility. Especially since they don’t know if you even want the advice.
Oh, and I meant to point out: you weren’t there sipping the coffee with her either. So maybe she’s the best judge of whether she should or should not have done anything.
If I like the “great location, nice decor, friendly owners and delicious cookies”, I lose out of the place closes. If the coffee is bad, I win if gets better coffee. It’s not my responsibility to complain about the coffee, but it is in my self-interest.
Once again, I learn so much from the wisdom of publishers. Oh, how I wish they were in charge of MY career, because they do so well with their own.
Here is what I’ve learned:
a. Readers will buy only two books over a six month period of time. This last 6 months, it was 50 Shades and Hunger Games.
b. Even though the Hunger Games was published in 2008, it is still monopolizing the market so much other books have no chance of being bought.
c. If we have a ‘lighter publishing schedule’, which means we published less books, we are still surprised and dismayed by a 4% decrease.
d. Even though the Hunger Games and 50 Shades are still very popular, they will not be the two books people buy over the next 6 months. People will buy one of our books, whatever they are, so we predict that our competitive performance will be higher.
And here’s a bonus one:
e. Even though the Hunger Games sold like hotcakes last year, as well as this other book called Twilight (also a competitor’s book), our profits were up then, as compared to now.
This information interferes with our ‘spin’ to our shareholders, so we will rightfully ignore it.
I have to say, there’s a special place in my heart for the wisdom of publishers.
Bah! Just wait, naysayers. The Pippa Middleton party planning book is going to crush.
http://www.amazon.com/Celebrate-Year-Festivities-Families-Friends/dp/0670026352
Brace Yourselves. The festivities are coming.
B.
List price of $50? I presume that includes some one-on-one sessions (wait, that sounds wrong. Honestly! I prefer blondes!).
OK this stinks…they’re one of the publishers I plan to approach for my psychological thriller! lol They publish authors like Harlan Coben, Sue Grafton, Nora Roberts, etc. Their readers might be interested in my kind of writing. Hmmm, is this a bad sign for me?
Maybe, if the publishers competed for authors, they would not have to compete so much for readers…
It’s like football (the kind with the oblong ball and pads): the teams make money off fans. How to get more fans? Win more games. How to win more games? Develop and/or sign the better players.
Find authors that people want to read and watch the market share grow.
Splitter