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News
HarperCollins reported $490 million in sales for the last quarter on Thursday, up $83 million from the same quarter in 2017, partially due to rising digital audiobook and ebook sales. It's just the latest confirmation that traditional book publishers are doing well for themselves: The Publishers Association recently found the UK publishing industry's £5.7 billion in book sales income to be up 5% over the year prior.
That's in contrast to a June 2018 report out from the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society that holds author earnings have dipped by 42% over the last ten years, and that median annual income for professional authors is now below £10,500. How can author earnings slip so far even as book publishers' incomes continue to rise? There's no simple answer, but plenty of factors contribute to the seeming disparity.
The UK publishing industry is now worth £5.7bn after an uptick of income from book sales of 5% across 2017. In the PA’s 2017 yearbook this week, it was revealed that total book sales income rose 4% to 3.7bn last year across both physical and digital formats.
However, amid the overall uptick digital book sales declined by 2% – indicating a move back to physical books within the market.
PA chief executive Stephen Lotinga said: “As a general rule, we’re seeing those parts of publishing which moved to digital first levelling off and print performance returning, whereas sectors which were slower to move to digital are seeing surges in digital growth now.
American publishers’ total industry sales dipped slightly in 2017, but audio downloads continued to boom, rising by 28.8% year-on-year.
The Association of American Publishers' (AAP) annual StatShot puts 2017’s industry sales at $26.23bn, showing a slight decline from $26.27bn the year before.
The figures contain publishers’ net revenues from trade, higher education, course materials, school instructional materials, professional books and university press, across all formats from all distribution channels and do not represent retailer or consumer sales figures.
How long does it take to create a book from start to finish? For 44 authors, 33 illustrators and 29 editors, publishers and marketers gathering in Jerusalem Thursday night, they’re hoping the answer is eight hours.
The project, being hosted at the JVP Media Quarter, is the brainchild of tech entrepreneur Uriel Shuraki.
“Writing a book usually takes months or years,” Shuraki told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday. “And I decided to do it in one day – in eight hours, the length of a normal working day.”
Articles
In April 2011, Marion Grace Woolley found her first publisher through firstwriter.com's database of publishers. A year later, she has published three books with two different publishers, both from our listings.
Several years ago, as an aspiring novelist with stardust in my eyes, I used to spend most of my waking hours in Yahoo’s Books and Literature chatroom in the company of fellow aspiring writers. I clearly remember how one of the main topics of conversations used to be the number of rejection slips one had received on that particular day (or the previous week), agents/publishers who had requested a synopsis or proposal, and those who had just not bothered to respond. All of us were united by the looming sense of uncertainty, suspense, and the palpable realisation that the odds were firmly stacked against us.
Today, having spent more than seven years on the other side, first as a consultant and then an agent, I think many writers have wrong notions about rejections. While most books are rejected because of poor quality and incompetence (as they should be), there are several other factors that play a role in publishing decisions. And these affect “good” books too.
Emmanuel Nataf has a simple mission: “I want more people to share their ideas with the world.”
That’s why three years ago, the Frenchman moved to London and co-founded Reedsy, a curated marketplace for authors to find publishing professionals to help bring their book to life. While Paris may have Station F now, Nataf saw opportunity in the British capital thanks to the concentration of publishers, writers, and investors.
Never judge a book by its cover. So the saying goes, yet consumers do it all the time. Every publisher and bookseller knows that covers sell books. But do consumers also form expectations from looking at the cover? Well, based on the results of some of the initial reader analytics data at Jellybooks, we think they do.
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