"On the Media" On the Book Business

If you write books, or want to, then you should read the transcript of a May On the Media broadcast. The NPR show about the media business spent some long minutes discussing the dynamics of the book industry, starting with where the books sell. For example, did you know that traditional book stores, whether chains or independents, only account for 40 percent of book sales? Online is important, absolutely - Amazon represents 11 percent of all book sales - but so are airports and Wal-Mart and toy stores and craft stores and Williams Sonoma. If your publisher only goes after bookstores, then it is not doing its job of getting copies out there.

As you likely know, there are fewer and fewer traditional outlets for book reviews and news. Newspapers have cut back terribly. So you need to find the gowing alternate routes: online reviewers and book clubs (And Oprah if you have any chance, because who else could cause about a million copies of Anna Karenina to fly off the shelves?). The probelm is the volume of books coming out each year is staggering: between 200,000 and 300,000 if you include self-published titles. Twenty or thirty years ago, that number was more like 50,000. It's like being in a room of screaming people. Who will catch your attention?

Jonathan Band, an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, had the single-best explanation of what Google Book Search could do for the publishing companies and authors:

It will make books more relevant than they are today. Because right now, a lot of students, when they are given a research assignment, they just go to Google or another search engine. They don't see books, because books are invisible on the Internet.

I had never considered that, but that point alone could change my attitude toward books on Google.

The entire dynamic of how people consider books is changing. The show brought up the example of Touching the Void, which had sat around doing nothing for many years until Into Thin Air became hot and Amazon's automated suggested selling promoted the former during sales of the latter. Bang: best seller.

Back to the beginning: if you want to write books, then you need to read this transcript, because you have to get a sense of how far the reality of the book business might be from your preconceptions. That is, unless you have a trust fund or have no life and can afford to write books during all your "free" hours.