Quote:
Originally Posted by SensualPoet
I seriously doubt if any casual sci-fi ebook buyer has ever heard of Baen. They have heard of Amazon if they own a Kindle, and the bookstores of B&N, Sony or Kobo if they have those respective store devices, as well as Amazon which they know they cant buy from. But Baen? A non-starter in the mainstream.
This says nothing about Baen's quality ... but says volumes about "purchase intent" among eReader owners. And therefore low impact on a mainstream list like New York Times.
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If they are a casual SF buyer (ebook or otherwise), they probably don't notice which publisher the books come from in the first place. On the other hand, take a walk through the SF section of your local bookstore, and see what fraction of the books have a Baen logo on the spine. I think—although I may well be wrong—that you'll find that they are the 2nd biggest SF/Fantasy publisher (after Tor's various imprints). All of which means approximately nothing when compared with total eBook sales through Amazon.
As for the "mainstream" bestseller lists (like the NYT) -- remember that they are created via a "proprietary" survey of an undisclosed group of bookstores. There's long been reason to believe that the included bookstores sell, shall we say, a rather different mix of books than what you'd get from cash register data (from all the various bar-code scanners in stores). I've certainly heard some authors and publishers with books on the NYT extended list complain that the barcode-scan-based data showed their book selling more than 2x as many copies as the bottom couple of books on the NYT non-extended list. They just weren't making those sales in "the right bookstores."
This effect showed up quite a while ago in other markets. When the record business switched from survey-style data collection to barcode based data collection, they suddenly discovered that
country music
outsold good old rock and roll by a substantial margin. Even though the survey-based data had been saying otherwise for years. Seems likely that the same effect may be going on in the book bestseller lists too.
Xenophon