Nice analysis, Steve.
You write:
E-book sales will increase
regularly from here on out, but nothing predicts for them any
different pattern than the lightning strikes success of most things
that go viral on the net.
That pattern seems a likely scenario, from the way big successes - the
outliers - generate their own buzz and followups. The rest of the field
doesn't fare nearly so well. But there might be a difference in the way
the lower-level buzz can work, and that could be Web-related: the
incredible speed with which buzz propagates within smaller communities
online.
The following is all speculative, but that's what you get from a
speculative mind like mine. Compare the way communities form and
operate online with the way they work in the print and body world. When
a book that appears to a narrower range of tastes appears, its buzz
propagates in a wide range of online groups with those tastes very
quickly, and disappears almost as quickly, overwhelmed by the torrent of
new e-books following it. When the same book appears in print form, and
is discovered by a real-life group that meets in person, its propagation
is much slower, but in the slower world of print, it might seem to
generate longer-lasting visibility and appeal. The printed book has the
advantage of the vetting and support provided by the publisher.
The interaction between the online and print markets makes things
interesting for me. Do the online communities circulate buzz about
printed books the same way they do for e-books? Do the real-world
groups do the same in reverse? I think both are true. The only thing
that seems to emerge from this chaos, for me, is that the midlist writer
is getting exposure like never before, online, but it's all a lot
quicker to evaporate. Instead of Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame,
it's more like Roadrunner's fifteen microseconds.
If any of this makes sense, it's not great news for e-book fiction
authors in general. But one thing that helps them is a kind of "soft"
screening service that refers readers to classes of works driven not by
shelf labels and placement but instead by highly-flexible search
criteria. Amazon gives some of this with reviews and keywords, and I
think that's why e-books will see the steady growth Steve predicts.
Such screening will at least differentiate the acceptable works from the
awfuls, and it will also reach those small cadres of readers with
specialized and combination tastes. Heaven knows, there are a boatload
of awfuls that see print.
Those "specialized and combination tastes" remind me that world music
and other music categories proliferated and subdivided increasingly as
music became more widely available online, almost to the point of
identifying each band or musician with a completely unique set of
descriptive keywords. The same lesson, whatever it may mean, may well
apply to books of fiction and their authors. What does it means for
sales? I don't know - I suppose it depends on who reads what, and who
writes it. Same old song - but played to a faster beat.
Dana
On 3/1/2011 4:43 PM, SteveC wrote:
No doubt that she is successful and has had a strong response. More
power to her.
However, I always distrust number claims. So I did some
investigating.
She has eleven titles now up at Amazon. One four-title series has all
four books in the top 50 of Kindle books, though none is in the top
ten.
Is 100,000 copies a month a reasonable number? Maybe. Maybe not. The
linked article (which appears to have been stolen from The Huffington
Post) doesn't give a source for its numbers. But there is a better
article at USA Today, from February.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2011-02-09-ebooks09_ST_N.htm
"By May she was selling hundreds; by June, thousands. She sold 164,000
books in 2010. Most were low-priced (99 cents to $2.99) digital
downloads.
"More astounding: This January she sold more than 450,000 copies of
her nine titles. More than 99% were e-books. ...
"For every $2.99 book she sells, she keeps 70%, with the rest going to
the online bookseller. For every 99-cent book she sells, she keeps
30%."
That is astounding. It's unlikely to be sustainable, but it's
astounding. None of it adds up to millions of dollars, since some of
her sales were at the 30% rate, but that's a hefty chunk of change.
The real question is what this implies. I'm not sure it implies much.
Every indicator shows that e-books are taking off and that
statistically meant that the top outlier would be to the rest of the
pack with Rowling is to the rest of print book sales. Rowling brought
forth a small number of young adult success stories in her wake and
Docking appears to appeal to the same readership. But Rowling's
success meant only a mild increase for young adult as a whole and
nothing outside that. I think it's probably unlikely that Docking is a
leading indicator. More likely she's the same statistical fluke that
the print book market has seen for years. E-book sales will increase
regularly from here on out, but nothing predicts for them any
different pattern than the lightning strikes success of most things
that go viral on the net.
As every tv reporter signs off, "what will happen in the future
remains to be seen."
Steve
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