Quote:
Originally Posted by pidgeon92
I would like to offer up another hypothesis as to what is depleting authors' income streams:
• too many authors
• too many books
I don't have ten authors that I like. I don't have a hundred. I have hundreds. I can't buy everybody's books, and even if I did I wouldn't have enough time in my life to read them all before I die.
The market is over saturated with reading material.
If there were fewer authors, and fewer books available, those authors would likely be able to make a decent living just by writing. Now that hundreds of thousands of people in this country fancy themselves an author, the book pool just keeps growing; but the pile of discretionary income people have to purchase those books isn't getting any bigger.
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The single biggest source of author income depletion are the publisher contracts and the creative accounting that leaves many with essentially zero ebook royalties.
As to the amount of content, from 2003 to 2011 the number of titles published in the US went from around 300k to 3M. That includes a lot of backlist.
A similar explosion in the 50s, due to the emergence of paperback originals, raised the number from 10000 to 100k per year. Lost in the handwringing is that content explosions have historically expanded the market by increasing the number of readers and the number of total books sold.
Turow is mostly whining because the aggregate share of new titles from the BPHs is declining with merger consolidation and backlist expansion.