INTERESTING FACTS OF THE BOOK   INDUSTRY

PART TWO

There are about 1.5 million books in print at any one time in the United States.

Bookstore sales by month would surprise the average consumer. You probably think December is the high month. Yet the big bounce is in January and again in August and September when university sales are made. The lowest month is April with only $0.987 billion in sales.

Some 300 to 400 mid-sized publishers exist. 78 percent of titles brought out come from a small press or self-publisher. California is the stronghold of small presses with approximately six times the number located elsewhere. Colorado and Minnesota also have large independent and self-publishing communities.

On the average a bookstore browser will spend eight seconds looking at the front cover and 15 seconds scanning the back cover.

The size of the small press movement is estimated to be $13 billion to $17 billion a year, as opposed to traditional publishers who are responsible for bringing in $26 billion.

Nonfiction typically outsells fiction by two to one. However, at least 20 percent more fiction is being published these days via the Internet and (POD) Print on Demand.

Interest in poetry and drama has grown by more than 33 percent since 1992.

The average number of copies purchased by the author from one of the POD Company is 75 books.

One book per year is produced in America for every 2,336 people— in contrast to one for every 545 individuals in the U.K. Other countries ahead of the U.S. on a per capita basis are Canada (577), New Zealand (779), and Australia (2,041). A poll of 2,700 U.S. Internet users, representing about 100 million U.S. Internet users, indicates that about 8 million unpublished novels and 17 million unpublished how-to books have been written by that Internet-using population alone. Women buy 68 percent of all books sold. Most readers do not get past page 18 in a book they have purchased.

52 percent of all books are not sold in bookstores! They are merchandised via mail order, online, in discount or warehouse stores, through book clubs, in nontraditional retail outlets, etc. 64 percent of book buyers say a book’s being on a bestseller list is not important.

The #1 nonfiction bestseller for 2001 was the Prayer of Jabez, exceeding 8 million copies. Self-Matters were #1 on the 2002 list with mere 1,350,000 copies sold. John Grisham’s The Summons topped the fiction list with 2,625,000 copies. The best-selling trade paperback during 2002 was, of all things, a cookbook: Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook, and how to. How-to, memoirs, and religion were also strong sellers.

Parables, short tales of fiction that teach a life lesson, have many avid fans that drive them onto bestseller lists. One of the most recent is Who Moved My Cheese? By Spencer Johnson, MD. Dr. Johnson began his career as a self-published author

Bookstores are famous for returning books to publishers. The industry return rate is typically 36 percent for hardcovers and 25 percent for softcovers.

It takes an average of 475 hours to write a novel. Fiction is considered successful if it sells 5,000 copies. Writing a nonfiction book requires about 725 hours. A nonfiction book is deemed successful when it reaches 7,500 copies sold.

The largest advance ever paid for a self-published book is a whopping $4.125 million. Simon & Schuster paid that for Richard Paul Evans’s The Christmas Box.

We have researched a multitude of sites and publications to pull these facts together for you. They include the ISBN agency, R.R. Bowker; Harris Interactive poll; Book Industry Study Group; Bookwire.com; Seybold Conference; IBPA;The American Association of Publishers; Authors Guild; Lulu.com; Jupiter Media Matrix; parapublishing.com; Foreword Magazine; Department of Commerce; Publishers Weekly, various news releases; Books in Print;, Forrester Research; Morris Rosenthal; Romance Writers of America; Shelf Awareness; U.S. News & World Report; Poets and Writers; M. J. Rose; Borders; and SIMBA Information.

All information in this post was taken from Self-Publishing Resources by Marilyn and Tom Ross