quote:Originally posted by Sterling: I know Americans are said to be reading less, but... Good gravy.
Unless you have bast statistics to compare this to, these numbers are pretty much meaningless for drawing any sort of comparison.
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Yeah. I'm not seeing anything unusual or unexpected here. 100,000-sellers should be rare. If one were to try to draw any conclusion from this, it might be about the broadness of the market, though I agree that context is necessary. (Still, over 22% of books sold last year sold more than 99 copies and less than 100,000. That's a lotta books!)
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Not the point I was making, but if you want to read about decreasing reading rates, here's an article: Americans reading less
However, if these numbers are accurate, it also means that 77% of books are selling less than 100.
Also consider that the weight on those numbers suggests that 22% tends more towards the 100 end than the 100,000 end. Echoing this, a New York Times piece notes that :
quote:only 2 percent of the 1.2 million unique titles sold in 2004 had sales of more than 5,000 copies
If an author makes 10% on a book sale (pretty common) gives 10% to their agent (sometimes more), and a typical paperback costs, what, $8? That same author then needs to sell about 16,700 books to make $12,000 from their work- before taxes, and with many publishers and agents, before any sort of promotion for their work.
Now look at that 483. That's a very small number. That's the JK Rowlings, Tom Clancys, Michael Chrichtons, Stephen Kings, Danielle Steels, Mary Higgins Clarks. (And Orson Scott Cards. ) 483 means that that company remains very small, and very few of the 22% are passing over into that company.
There are aproximately 240 million people in the United States above the age of 14. ( CIA World Factbook ) Presuming that most of those people are literate, 483 books selling 100,000 or more is atrocious.
In short, it's not a good time to be a new writer. Not only is it going to be very difficult to make a living doing so, it's less likely that you will ever make a living doing so.
posted
Well, think about it. Not all those books are in their first year. Some of them are being bought 5, 10, more years after they came out. Without more detailed statistics, I hesitate to say anything about what's going on.
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quote:In short, it's not a good time to be a new writer. Not only is it going to be very difficult to make a living doing so, it's less likely that you will ever make a living doing so.
quote:Originally posted by ketchupqueen: Well, think about it. Not all those books are in their first year. Some of them are being bought 5, 10, more years after they came out. Without more detailed statistics, I hesitate to say anything about what's going on.
It's very difficult to locate hard information on what is considered a "typical print run" without getting very anecdotal; one small press estimates between 10,000-20,000, another 1500-2000; one source says 3,000-5,000 copies; a picture book writer estimates a first time writer would have a run of 7,500-12,000. Unless the book achieves remarkable sell through, that's likely to be all the copies of the title that are printed, whatever the time frame.
Just for a li'l reference, consider the movie "28 Weeks Later", which at a current gross of $28.5 million after 9 weeks is considered something of a flop. According to rottentomatoes.com, in its most recent week, it grossed $43,374. Assuming $8 a ticket, that's still over 5,400 people buying tickets in one week.
quote:Originally posted by Nighthawk: You mean people become writers for the money?
Nooooo... But it would be nice to believe someone who's already run the gauntlet of agents and editors could make a better living by writing books than by, say, working at Arby's.
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What makes you assume that more than 2% of published writers put out a better product than a worker at Arby's? Even JKRowling admits "I would never pick up one of my own books and read it." And she gets her copy for free!Posts: 8501 | Registered: Jul 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Sterling: There are aproximately 240 million people in the United States above the age of 14. ( CIA World Factbook ) Presuming that most of those people are literate, 483 books selling 100,000 or more is atrocious.
I don't see what's so atrocious about it. I mean, we are talking about a decline in reading novels, right? Not textbooks or scholarly works? Just fiction?
I find it interesting how people who read a lot of novels are viewed today. Before the invention of television and movies, people who spent a lot of time reading novels were the equivalent of modern couch potatoes. Now they're practically deified. What has changed? Is one form of entertainment really inherently superior to another?
I'm not saying that there aren't profound and worthwhile works of fiction. All I'm saying is that I don't see the difference in media. I'll give you an example.
Recently I was in a bookstore, and I found a novel that was written by Robert Lewellyn, the actor who played Kryten on Red Dwarf. I met Mr. Lewellyn a few years ago. Not only is he a good actor, but he's also smart, hilarious, and a heck of a nice guy. So when I saw that he'd written a book, I decided to pick up a copy.
As a fan, I was fully ready to love this book. I did everything in my power to open my mind to the experience that he'd created and appreciate his craft. But when I finally slogged through the last page of that dreadful tome, it was clear to me that (IMHO) any episode of Red Dwarf he'd ever acted in was incalculably more stimulating and fulfilling than the book he'd written. And I count the time I've spent watching his TV show more worthwhile than the time I spent reading his book.
So if someone decides that they'd rather spend a few days watching a season of 24 or some Kubrick films than reading the latest book by Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton, I can't think of any negative effect this might have on the person or the society that they live in. And I don't see how a great author failing to find an audience is any more tragic than a great filmmaker suffering the same fate. In fact, I'm not going to lose too much sleep over either of them.
Reading a text to study is one thing, but if you're just killing some free time, entertainment is entertainment.
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quote:Is one form of entertainment really inherently superior to another?
Actually, yes.
quote:All I'm saying is that I don't see the difference in media. I'll give you an example.
Your example is a bit flawed. A book written by an actor is no more likely to be a good book than a movie starring a writer is likely to be a good movie. In order for your "hey, we go with what's good" argument to hold water, we have to accept that all but the very best books being written today are empirically of lower quality than the worst movies.
Entertainment is NOT entertainment, sadly. There've actually been more than a few studies done involving brain scans of people engaged in certain forms of entertainment -- and films and TV, hands-down, are the lowest form. In fact, people watching films and TV are practically comatose; they're almost in a zombified state. I'm convinced this is unhealthy.
(This is also the same reason why I'm strongly prejudiced against audio "books.")
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: In order for your "hey, we go with what's good" argument to hold water, we have to accept that all but the very best books being written today are empirically of lower quality than the worst movies.
Why would we have to accept that? There are good and bad movies and books. More bad than good in both categories.
I'd like to see the studies you reference, and perhaps learn the medical definition of "zombified." However, that's just for my own personal curiosity. This isn't about what happens to an individual subject's brain scans (whatever those prove) when they watch Judge Judy or read Goosebumps #212. It's about whether a social trend away from entertaining oneself with printed prose is "atrocious." And if anyone is saying that we've turned from a nation of intellectual giants to blithering idiots due to the invention of television and motion-picture technology, I'd really like to see some numbers.
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Well, for a start, one University of Washington study appears to find a link between television watching and decrease in attention span in children. source
But, more anecdotally, do I really need to explain the effect of tuning out ideas that can't be explained in two hours? (movie length?) Or half an hour (sitcom length?) Or five minutes (debate topic length?) Or thirty seconds (commercial length?)
Now, I like movies, and I happen to be enjoying television more now that I have a greater ability to a) avoid commercials and b) seek out shows that have been recommended to me, rather than passively accepting the line-up the networks want me to see. But the very fact that so many more people would sooner spend $8.00 on two hours entertainment than on ten says something in and of itself, especially given the latter forces one to engage ones' own imagination and interpretation and the former largely relies on the imagination and interpretation of others.
quote:Before the invention of television and movies, people who spent a lot of time reading novels were the equivalent of modern couch potatoes.
Between 1840 and 1900, there appears to have been a significant increase in literacy in Victorian England. (http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0018-2680(199421)34%3A1%3C89%3ATROPLI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A) The view of novel-readers of the time seems based on a number of factors: the cheapness of many of the publications; the sometimes lurid subject matter of the "penny dreadfuls" of the time; the view that the subject matter was immature and predictable; the notion that as literacy became less the province of the upper classes that those classes should distinguish themselves by the quality of the reading they consumed. None of this is quite the equivalent of the difference in consuming a movie and consuming a book.
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Whatever the difference in brain scans, a truly great movie is worth as much to me as a truly great book.
A Clockwork Orange, Apocalypse Now, Persona, The Place Promised In Our Early Days, Seven Samurai, Children of Men, the Lord of the Rings, etc. These movies are worth, in my opinion, as much as Speaker for the Dead, Dune, Asimov's works, Victor Hugo's works, the Odyssey, 1984 or Shakespeare.
A great movie has power to move a heart and mind as much as a great novel. That's what I've seen with my own two eyes, at least.
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) 483 means that that company remains very small, and very few of the 22% are passing over into that company.
