From Forbes:
Book publishing follows a predictable pattern. Bookstore sales are strong in December and January, when books and bookstore gift cards are gifted for the holidays, and again in August, which brings back-to-school foot traffic. The industry counts on this, and plans around it. Buzzy books are launched in the fall, with publishers hoping to ride the media blitz through the gift-shopping season. This has been true for many years.
More recently, however, sales have started to dwindle. Holiday figures aren’t so strong, and sales as a whole have dipped. August, however, has remained a beacon of hope. Although the month’s bookstore sales have been slipping too, for the past several years they’ve been strongest when compared even to January and December.
. . . .
Between 2003 and 2011, August sales were above $2 billion. they’ve been slipping, mostly, since a peak in 2008. 2017’s August sales of $1.39 billion are a record-low for the month since 1999, when sales were also $1.39 billion.
Link to the rest at Forbes and thanks to Dave for the tip.
Did Amazon also report poor a/e/book sales? If not they ignored the biggest ‘bookseller’ …
Probably not.
Amazon is not terribly dependent on tradpub Front list these days.
The concern here is BPH front list sales more than anything since those are what bookstores feature front and center. And what underperformed so noticeably last year in the June July period.
http://www.thepassivevoice.com/2016/08/frontlist-fiction-hits-a-dry-spell/
Devoting all that visibility to “bad” books isn’t good for stores with limited shelf space.
When I patronized B & M stores, I didn’t even glance at what was in the front window, but headed straight for the remainders table. Then for the SF/F section to see what had finally come out in MMPB.
Of course, I’ve always been the guy that buys three or four bags of candy on the first of November – and Christmas cards / decorations on the twenty-sixth of December. I’m not considered such an odd duck anymore, these days.
My local Borders had two entrances: I would enter via the coffee shop which was next to the SF&F section, snake my way through the five islands of the section and exit through the front. If nothing caught my eye I could be in and out in five minutes with nary a glace anywhere else.
The whole mythical B&N “serendipitous discovery” thing wasn’t part of my experience after the first year or two of my education in SF.
It is no different than using the left hand category filters on Amazon but with minor cardio benefits. 🙂
August and Sept buzz books are what sells in the book gifting season. I would consider a dreadful August a leading indicator of a poor holiday season to come.
Of course they’ll blame it on bad books.And they might even be right…
Considering some of the tripe that’s been published in the last few years…’bad books’ are partly to blame. But that falls under the category of ‘poor decisions,’ for which there are many.
I don’t see how anyone can claim “bad books” across the board as a cause for anything. Lots of books that aren’t to a given individual’s taste are always and have always been published, but unless they have strangely specific tastes, so are lots of books that are — and the internet, Amazon, etc. make finding books that are to one’s tastes easier than ever. I think it’s more likely that a lot of things in the world suck right now, and people in general have less mental bandwidth for reading and less money to spare for luxuries like books.
For the purpose of this exercise a bad book is one that fails to raise enough buzz to outlast its launch window.
Literary merit or entertainment value doesn’t factor into holiday sales. It is strictly a matter of buzz among casual readers and non-readers.
Thanks, that makes your point clearer.
Considering how difficult “buzz” can be to predict or generate by intentional means, that seems to indicate the current slump is just an unfortunate coincidence.
Coincidence? Maybe.
But if you add in the muttered comments filtering through the publishing world over the past couple of years (roughly the time it takes tradpub to get a manuscript to market) about how the BPHs aren’t seeing as many “quality” manuscripts as they used to and it can be tempting to take them at their word:
Tradpub used to get first look at all manuscripts. That is no longer true.
After all, Traditional publishing has been in consolidation mode for decades, print unit sales have been declining all century, B&N shelf space has declined by roughly half this decade, and combined gross revenues from consumer books have been stagnant for over a decade.
This coincidence may not be a one-off. It may very well be the new normal if those missing “quality” manuscripts are the ones now coming to market via non-traditional channels.