Myth of Print Sales Comeback

[darryl]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

There is a tendency to look at the overall publishing disruption and cast it as Indies vs tradpub but it isn't. It is about the BPHs vs everybody else. Plenty of smaller tradpubs have adopted Indie economics and workflows and are surviving and prospering. The same reports that show the BPHs shedding market share left and right show smaller tradpub market share growing, especially lately when, unnoticed, many broke ranks with the big boys on pricing.

Many smaller tradpubs are indeed adapting to the changing market, but in doing so are abandoning the BPH business model which has characterised tradpub. I tend to include these publishers with Indies rather than tradpub. I don't really regard Amazon imprints, for instance, as tradpubs. It all turns on definitions and is not particularly important except for avoiding ambiguity. The real distinction is between those who cling to the old business model and those who have been flexible enough to innovate and adapt to the new. Author Earnings seem to view the significant divide as being Online Sales v. Brick and Mortar sales.

One such more innovative business which could be regarded as Tradpub but is more akin to Indie in a lot of ways was Bookouture. It seems to have succeeded by pricing its books reasonably, carefully selecting its authors and offering them much better terms than the BPH, including a 50% royalty rate. Unfortunately that particular publisher has been too successful, as they were acquired by Hachette UK earlier this year. I'm watching with great interest to see what is going to happen to them as part of Hachette. Unfortunately I suspect that i know.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

Well, if it was true that they were shooting themselves in the foot, that wouldn't be the only thing they were doing. It would also mean they were leaving more consumer money on the table to be spent on products of small and self publishers. Are you against that?

Publishers pay people to pour over statistics to see what would be optimum prices. It slightly mystifies me why people here would think they know better.


Why do you want them to make money? I just want them to do well enough to stay in the business of improving manuscripts I will want to read.

But for your benefit:

Citing continued benefits from the integration of Penguin and Random House, Pearson said its 47% stake in the world’s largest trade publisher earned 129 million pounds ($136 million) in operating profits for the company in 2016. The sum marks a 43% increase over 2015.

As I said, I don't see this as positive or negative. Losing lots of money year after year -- as in the newspaper industry -- now that is negative, since it results in less good reading material, especially regarding current affairs.

The thing is though that statistics can be worked to say what you want them to say. For example I imagine if income was down for a publisher they could point to ebooks as the reason, but it could just as easily be that the economy is down (so people buy less books) or that the publisher misjudged the market and published books that the public wasn't as interested in. Or even that the cover design of (author x's) new novel didn't go over as well with the reading public. It could even be that big name author x was ill and so got their new book to the publisher late and that is why income is down. Statistics can guide but they can also mislead as well.