In continuation of my comments about the media hype of a small bunch of successful authors, the USA Top 100 annual list came out today and there wasn't one self-published book on the list. USA Today gets data from Kindle and most other retailers.
I am absolutely not belittling self-published authors because I feel that if you have a story to be told you should do whatever it takes to publish it. My blog article a couple of months ago was to just state that in my opinion the media hypes the success of a few select self-published authors without mentioning the tens of thousands that sell hardly anything.
In addition at Digital Book World the other day, Writer's Digest stated that almost 80% of self-published authors made less than $1000 annually. The results weren't very good for traditionally published authors either but they were substantially better than that.
Steven,
ReplyDeleteI have to agree with your point. Even the best self-published book has little chance of reaching "bestseller" status because a)they don't have distribution with salesmen out there convincing book sellers to take copies and b) The big name reviewers to can get your book serious buzz generally focus on offerings from big-name publishers.
BTW, I'm sure you have a better feel for how the industry works than most of us so maybe you can answer a long-held question of mine. Are these "best seller" sales figures based on actual consumer sales, or book seller orders? And if the latter, do they take into account bookstore returns?
As a very small player we get few returns (because we get small orders) but I could see how one of the big four's imprints could afford to press book sellers to take a big order to propel a book onto that bestseller list, even if half the books get returned.
Hope I'm wrong but always wondered...
Great question you asked. The bestseller lists are indeed supposed to represent point of sales information gathered from "secret" people reporting to the different lists. For example, there are stores that report to the NYT list and nobody is supposed to know whom they are, but in fact a lot of them are well known and include the biggest retailers. The NYT also includes a lot of indie bookstores as well. They are based on sales at the register so returns don't influence the listing position.
ReplyDeletePeople have different opinions as to which list is really more accurate and which aren't influenced by bias.
I remember when Howard Stern's book Private Parts came out he had a public commentary that lasted for weeks about how biased the NYT list was at the time. I don't remember the book that pushed him out of the #1 spot but he went on the air and blasted the paper. He listed sales of his book and the other book at the largest retailers and he was outselling the other book by wide margins.
The advent of Bookscan and their reporting gives a much more accurate idea of sales. It's consistent from week to week and you can break the list up into genre and format.
In regards to influencing booksellers to take your book and promote it….this is even true with ebooks now. The very largest publishers even get to meet with editorial people at Amazon to pitch their books for promotions; that's something that a smaller publisher could never afford to do.
It is harder and harder to press a bookseller into taking big quantities. It's a known fact that the more books that are out there in the store; the more you're going to sell; although your sell thru rate might drop significantly. Nowadays though the accounts don't want to handle high returns because it's all manual labor. But you can influence them up to a certain point to increase their buys, but it's not easy. You can't tell an account if they would have normally taken 10,000 copies based on prior sales to all of a sudden go to 50,000. I wish :)