BookExpo America pushes forward amid slumping book sales

I’ll admit that I wasn’t very surprsied when I read Declining Sales Cast Gloom at an Expo on the New York Times website yesterday. Unless you’ve been living in a cave, cut off from all civilization and news, then it’s hard to ignore the news about how this deep recession we are in is hurting a lot of industries – publishing included.

This weekend BookExpo America, the book industry’s annual convention, is taking place in New York City. Also not surprising is that attendance at the convention is down as well.

Normally I’m not a numbers guy. I don’t like math and I failed remedial math in college (embarrassing, I know). But sometimes you have to let the numbers speak for themselves.

If you look at regular print book sales, there is a big drop compared to previous years:

Publishers sold 3.08 billion copies in 2008, down 1.5 percent from the 3.13 billion copies sold the previous year, according to Book Industry Trends 2009, an annual report that analyzes sales in the United States. Higher retail prices helped to lift net revenue just 1 percent, to $40.3 billion from $39.9 billion.

Ouch! A drop like 1.5 percent might not seem like much, but when you’re speaking in terms of billions of copies of books, that’s quite a large decline.

I’m sure the recession is playing a large part of this decline in book sales. But I always wonder if there are other factors at work. Could the quality of books being published have gone down as well? Or maybe people just don’t read like they used to?

Publishers placing all their eggs in one basket

The publishing industry as a whole has a nasty habit of depending on a few select authors and titles to really increase their bottom line. Here’s an example:

According to the report, sales of adult trade books (fiction and nonfiction for the general market) declined 2.3 percent to 1.35 billion copies from 1.38 billion in 2007. Net revenue in the segment also slid 2.3 percent to $11.13 billion from $11.39 billion. Publishers expressed hope that “The Lost Symbol,” a novel by Dan Brown, might increase book sales when it is released in September.

What if “The Lost Symbol” turns out to be a flop? I hope Dan Brown’s new novel does good because I did really enjoy reading Angels & Demons (which was a very good book before the movie came out, I might add).

They have also done the same thing with J.K. Rowling and her popular Harry Potter series, and with Stephenie Meyer and her Twilight series. That’s fine and dandy while those books are flying off the shelves. But once the hysteria dies down, there’s a huge gaping hole that somehow needs to be filled.

I’m no expert, but this is appears to be a very short-sighted business model. I’d like to be able to say that publishers should take more risks with newer and even unknown authors. However, that’s easier said than done in the current publishing environment.

A light at the end of a long, dark tunnel

One part of the NYT article that made me smile, was of course, the very last paragraph:

The data examined sales of electronic books for reading devices like Amazon.com’s Kindle or Sony’s Reader Digital Book. In the adult trade segment, for example, net revenues for e-books totaled $113 million, up nearly 7 percent from $105 million in 2007. Publishers have cited increases much higher than that.

You didn’t think I’d write a post about book sales without including a section on ebooks, did you? I’m a little disappointed that the this last paragraph was slapped onto the end of the article as if it were an afterthought.

Publishers and authors have a golden opportunity here. They can use ebooks, not to compete against print book sales, but to compliment them. What does that mean? Maybe giving away free ebooks of a particular author’s backlist of titles (some publishers are already doing this). Or, if they want to get more daring, release the ebook for free at the same time as the print book hits the shelves.

Truth is, there are endless ways that publishers and authors can leverage ebooks to help boost their bottom line. But doing so will involve re-thinking the traditional publishing model, re-thinking DRM, and generally doing things a lot differently.

I doubt such changes will happen overnight. But over time I know that ebooks will take on much more importance at conventions like BookExpo America.

What do you think the publishing industry can do to increase sales and get books moving again? Leave your answer in the comments below – I look forward to hearing your ideas.

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