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Originally Posted by darryl
What I found quite interesting was John Grisham's statement that he is selling about half the books he was years ago, yet his books are still at or near the top of the charts. KKR believes this is a good result amongst best sellers. If best sellers are turning over far less books than they would have done in the past, what is the explanation? KKR talks about Grisham being cut back to only his core readers, missing out on those non hard core readers who bought because of convenience and high availability everywhere, at airports for instance. This probably does play a role, but I'm sure there are other reasons.
Are there less readers? Are people reading less? Perhaps, though I rather doubt it. Certainly many of us on Mobileread are reading even more, though we are not of course typical. I suspect the main reason is that there are more readers reading more books, but this increase in demand is far exceeded by the exponential increase in supply. I also think best sellers such as Grisham also suffer from the high ebook prices set by their publishers. Ebooks are discoverable everywhere and immediately available. When you take your ereader to the airport you don't need to buy from a bookshop and their carefully curated selection of paperback blockbusters. There is an Amazon store right there with you. This of course fits in quite well with KKR's reasoning referred to above. Many travellers who just wanted something not terrible to read on the plane who would have visited the airport shop and bought John Grisham's latest on the front table at $15.99 are no longer doing so.
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I think that there are a number of factors. First, there are best sellers and there are best sellers. Big names such as Grisham and King have enough of a fanbase that their newest will almost always show up on the best seller list. That doesn't mean that the latest and greatest is selling as much as their earlier mega hit. That's the difference between popping up on the best seller list for a week or two when the book comes out, and staying on the list for week after week after week, like their earlier books did. That's very normal. Do you think that Dan Brown's Inferno sold anything remotely like The Da Vinci Code did?
Second, I do think there is a big drop in impulse buys for the big name authors. 10 years ago, you had a lot of book stores and news stands selling books and the big name authors had their books placed front and center. As much as some dismiss publisher marketing, I would suggest that book placement had a very big impact with regards to major sells for such authors. They still haven't figured out on line discoverability. Anyone who is in business knows how important discoverability is.
Third, I think that there is a lot more entertainment options to compete with. Books have to compete with video games, binge netflix watching, and a host of other things.