“Ten years ago in 2001, 162m books were sold in Britain. Ten years later –
a decade in which the internet bloomed, online gaming exploded, television
channels proliferated, digital piracy rampaged and, latterly, recession gloomed
– 229m books sold. So, a 42% increase in the number of books sold over the last
10 years.
The standard discount on the recommended retail price of a book in 2001
stood at 17.6%. In 2010 it was 26.7%.
Last year UK consumer publishing drew in sales of £1.7bn, up 36% on 2001.
Adult fiction saw an increase of 44%, to £476m; and young adult and children's
fiction, realm of all those pesky copiers and pirateers and downloaders, saw
sales more than double to £325m.
Up to the week ending 13 August (2011), overall sales were down almost 6% on
2010 in volume terms, and just over 4% in value." (He says these figures
don't include e-books)
authors are not seeing a sudden collapse in their incomes. The Society of
Authors did a survey in 2000 that showed the average annual figure was £16,600;
only 5% of authors earned over £75,000; 75% earned less than £20,000. A more
recent survey, done by the Authors Licensing
and Collecting Society, came up with very similar figures.
Membership of the Society of Authors passed 9,000 people for the first time
since the Society was formed in 1884." (This confirms what I've thought
for a while now - that a lot more people are trying to get published. It's a
depressing thought. I wonder what the figures were when Heyer and Plaidy ruled
the book world?)
"There has been a steady increase in the number of book titles
published in the UK, from almost 110,000 in 2001 to just over 150,000 in
2010." (I wonder how many of those are self-published, and how many are
e-books?)
1 comment:
I too read the piece, Jen, and after reading so many negative stories about the state of publishing it was refreshing to learn that, yet again, the doom and gloom is more to do with mass media than anything factual. Maybe we're not all redundant after all...
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