Thad McIlroy's Take On Book Publishing Trends And Outlook

This article is just right on the spot with regards to outlining book publishing its trends and what it is projected to be in the next few years.

What is it about books that make them the sine qua non of publishing? I think it's very simple. Great books have changed lives, have changed history. While there have been innumerable articles of great importance in magazines and newspapers, let's face it - they don't have the force of the classics of literature and non-fiction. Just about any reader can point to a book that has changed his or her life. Most of us can point to many different books that have had an equally strong impact.

We encounter these books at different ages. I know that many of the books I read when I was only 10- or 12-years-old made a huge impact then and still influence me today. The whole context of reading as a child was a unique emotional experience. As I grew older, I found books that suited my age, and continued to grow and mature with the extraordinary literature at my disposal.

Further, since Andrew Carnegie's philanthropic efforts, there has always been a great infrastructure for enjoying books. Most cities in North America have many fine libraries and bookstores. Books are everywhere! Supporting them also was a robust film industry that interpreted books in unexpected ways; as often as not driving us back to the original written version.

I fully entered the world of books in the early 1970s via book publishing, first as a bookseller, then as a traveling book sales rep, and then as a publisher. I still have very strong feelings about book publishing: most of the people I know who work in the book publishing industry feel as strongly. It's hard to get publishing out of your blood.

Book publishing is not the first form of publishing by any means - think cave drawings, scrolls and those dedicated monks with their beautiful manuscripts. But somehow book publishing has come to embody the idea of publishing more than any other form - when I say "publishing" you probably think books (perhaps even if you happen to be a newspaper publisher).

Yes, for most of us, books hold a unique emotional place in our hearts and minds. When it comes to imagine the so-called "death of print," we react in unison: Perhaps some kinds of print, but not books!

So then how to interpret the changes in the book publishing industry? We've still got Harry Potter, don't we? (With the last volume the greatest success of the series.)

What about all of the books for children, those marvelous classics. Surely they won't disappear? The bestsellers we read in hardcover and paperback; the fine non-fiction biographies and histories. These can't disappear, can they?

The Traditional Context of Book Publishing

Nearly all of us who are close to printing and publishing romanticize Gutenberg's invention of movable type (circa 1450) and cheerfully ignore the context that surrounded it. We cheerfully ignore the fact that printing was invented in China long before Gutenberg got near his printing press, and that in Korea a system of printing from movable metal type was developed around 1041.

We ignore that Gutenberg was a businessman as much as he was an "artist" - and possibly much more interested in business than art. (Unfortunately he was not a stellar businessman - by 1455 Gutenberg was effectively bankrupt.)

Not surprisingly, the history of publishing is well-documented in books. One such, a fine work, The Nature of the Book by Adrian Johns (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998), illustrates in 753 pages the very commercial nature of the book trade from its earliest days. Book publishing today is very much a descendant of those early efforts. It remains inescapably a commercial enterprise.

Certainly some not-for-profit groups, associations and government-subsidized efforts reduce the commercial pressure on their publication efforts as money-making ventures. But the vast majority of book publishers worldwide undertake their tasks with at least one eye on the bottom line, and this necessarily has a great impact on how the business of book publishing is conducted.

As someone who operated three different trade publishing companies in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, I began to see the modern challenge of book publishing as two-fold. The first was to get anyone to notice that a new book had even been published - as we've seen, hundreds of thousands of books are published each year, and it is expensive to get noticed with that much competition. Also (and particularly in the pre-Internet era), the sale of trade books relied on the distribution of those books to bookstores across America, or across Canada, or across...you name the country, and the cost of this broad geographic distribution was prohibitive except for the most high-profile titles. (Which tended to push publishers toward paying large advances for the few titles that were hoped to carry the many.)

I'll examine shortly the statistics that bear on these challenges. Some of them have changed in the last decades; many still apply.

Much more interesting to consider is the impact of the Internet on the creation, marketing, distribution and sale of books. The Internet is having an enormous impact on the future of book publishing - both in positive and negative ways. I'll examine this trend also.

At the same time there are other forces at work: eBooks, print-on-demand, the digital scanning of vast libraries and the conversion of certain books into other electronic formats. Each of these is playing a part in securing a fascinating future for my beloved The Wind in the Willows. Technology need not be destructive for book publishers; it can be a very positive force for change.

Types of Book Publishing

There are many kinds of book publishing. Most listings differ, but here is a representative sample of publishing types.

1. Trade publishing

(i) Hardcover
(ii) Trade paperback
(iii) Mass-market paperback
(iv) Children's books
(v) Religious books

2. Textbook publishing

(i) Textbooks in hardcover or paperback
(a) K-12 textbooks
(b) Secondary school textbooks
(c) Higher education: college and university textbooks
(d) Post formal institutional education (adult learning) textbooks

(ii) Ancillary texts, such as teacher or student guides

3. Reference publishing

(i) Encyclopedias
(ii) Directories
(iii) And numerous others

4. Reports, studies, etc. by not-for-profit publishers, government agencies, etc.

I'll stick with this short list of the types of book publishing for the time being, having it serve principally as a reminder that no discussion of book publishing can be authoritative without recognizing its varied species.

Hoovers, referenced below, reports that trade books account for 30 percent of the market, textbooks 25 percent, and professional books 15 percent. Those figures seem reasonable.

The Book Industry Study Group offers the following breakdown of small publishers:


The Scope of the Book Publishing Business in North America

According to Hoovers "The US book publishing industry consists of about 2,600 companies with combined annual revenue of $30 billion. Large US publishers include McGraw-Hill, Pearson PLC, John Wiley & Sons, and Scholastic. Some of the biggest publishers are units of large media companies, including HarperCollins (NewsCorp), Random House (Bertelsmann AG of Germany), and Simon & Schuster (CBS Corp). The industry is highly concentrated; the top 50 companies hold 80 percent of the market." This book industry report points to two different aspects of the industry: first, that there is a high degree of concentration at the top of the pyramid, and two, that most book publishing analysts grossly underestimate the size of the industry in the U.S. As pointed out above the Book Industry Study Group claims that in 2006 there were in fact 88,528 "active" publishers in the U.S., and nearly 68,000 had sales under $50,000 per year.

The same group estimates 2006 U.S. book sales at $35.7 billion, up 3.2 percent over 2005's total.

R.R. Bowker projects that U.S. title output in 2006 increased by more than 3% to 291,920 new titles and editions, up from the 282,500 published in 2005.

The Canadian Government's Statistics Canada agency counted 1,324 publishing companies in 2005, representing total sales of (CDN) $2.4 billion. It cautioned however that "the number of establishments is comprised mainly of small companies. Of the 1324 establishments for the industry only 444 were in the survey portion. This means that most of the movement in number of establishments from year to year comes from 884 companies that had under $50,000 in revenue."

Based on the U.S. figure of over 62,000 active publishers, one wonders if the Canadian figure should not be closer to 6,000 than 1,000, judging by the standard 10 to 1 ratio that holds for most industrial comparisons between the two countries. Canadian Books in Print listed 4,300 book publishers in the year 2000.

A unique aspect of the Canadian book publishing market is that 19 foreign-controlled publishers, which represented less than 6% of all companies surveyed, accounted for 59% of domestic book sales in 2004 (the percentage has increased). The Canadian book publishing industry is foreign-dominated.

Hoovers also remind us that "demand for books...is largely resistant to economic cycles." As I discuss in my blog entry "Economics and the Future of Publishing," this recession is thus far proving different, and the eventual outcome for book publishers remains to be seen.

The Practice of Book Publishing

Several unique practices have definitively characterized book publishing in the modern era:

1. Individual editors and/or publishers make individual decisions about what will or won't be published by their firm (at larger companies, a larger group may be involved in the decision).

This, as much as anything I believe is the cause of the transformation and decline of book publishing in the modern era. Who are these editors and publishers who have so much power to make life-and-death decisions on what books will or won't be published each year? They may have some kind of education associated with the history and/or practice of writing and literature. This ostensibly makes them "expert" in what constitutes "quality" in writing. But of course they are as susceptible as the rest of us to individual matters of taste, to bias and to lapses in judgment. Still their role within their respective companies is god-like - they make judgments of life or death, except in this case upon what will be published, rather than who will be sent to hell.

Furthermore, at the largest book publishers the decision is no longer generally about quality but more often about salability. Is that taught at Swarthmore?

Publishing courses are now abundant. Who really believes that you can take English majors in their twenties and "teach" them how to intuit what will be this year's bestseller? Twaddle.

2. At the same time, I consider it inarguable that most writers need good editors. William Zinsser, author of the classic text On Writing Well, wrote "The essence of writing is rewriting."

Ernest Hemingway is reputed to have told George Plimpton during an interview that he rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms 39 times before he was satisfied.

"Why so many rewrites?" Plimpton asked.

"Because," Hemingway responded, "I wanted to get the words right."

So while I argue above that editors can offer blocks to the publication of worthwhile books, in their key role, that of helping authors improve their texts, they are invaluable. That has been my consistent experience. The tales of great editors are legion, such as Maxwell Perkins and his role in shaping F. Scott Fitzgerald's prose. But a merely good editor can work magic also.

While many very poorly-written and poorly-edited books have become bestsellers, this doesn't obviate the general rule: a book written (and/or edited) with clarity in mind will succeed beyond a similar text that lacks such clarity.

3. The book industry has traditionally been a retail-based industry. Books are mostly bought in bookstores. The explosive growth of the major chain booksellers in the 1970s and onwards was continually lamented as representing some sort of "death of publishing." That dire prediction on the future of book publishing proved untrue. The major complaint was that the book chains would force publishers to take a pass on publishing important books in favor of "mindless" bestsellers. But with 350,000 books published in English last year that prediction has also proved false. Furthermore the numerous book superstores ordinarily feature a far broader inventory that the average independent bookseller.

Online bookselling by Amazon.com and its competitors has had an enormous impact on bookselling. Now anyone can quite easily obtain any of the 300,000+ new books that can't be found in the retail channel. The result is that never have so many different books been so easily, readily and inexpensively available.

Print-on-Demand Changes the Equation

This section links very clearly into the next. The premise is one that I often observe: a technology develops or evolves and a new industry (or sub-industry) is born. The improvement in print-on-demand (using a generic name for this type of print manufacturing) over the last decade has been astounding. As discussed elsewhere, most book publishers grew up in an industry where the consideration was between printing 3,000 copies or 5,000, hoping to shave perhaps 10-15% off the manufactured cost. What happens when you can print one book for 120%/per unit of the price of 3,000 books? An industry changes. The book publishing industry has changed because this is the new reality.

Vanity Publishing Becomes Self-Publishing

Vanity publishing always had a bad name. The concept was that some sucker would pay some huckster to print several thousand copies of their "terrifically important" manuscript that somehow had been cruelly overlooked by 300 New York agents and publishers, and turn that into the bestseller it had always deserved to be. Of course there were a few success stories to fuel the flames, but in many cases naïve authors found themselves with a large invoice and 2,999 copies of their book in the bedroom cupboard.

The big difference is distribution. In the old days of vanity publishing, those publishers had few mechanisms for book distribution, and even fewer chances of having their vanity publications taken seriously by any of the mainstream reviewers.

In the age of the Internet, distribution issues are significantly muted, and the reading public has discovered that they don't necessarily care what The New York Times says about an inexpensive book covering a topic in which they're interested.

This has led to the blossoming of Lulu.com and its brethren (see References for more information on Lulu.com), and I for one, will not lament the end of New York's hegemony on deciding what should be purchased and read.

Book Readership

Probably the most important document revealing key aspects of the future of book publishing is a 60-page report published by in June 2004 by the National Endowment for the Arts. Called Reading at Risk, the report presents the results from a 2002 survey (conducted by the Census Bureau) of 17,000 people aged 18 or older, who attended artistic performances, visited museums, watched broadcasts of arts programs, or read literature. The results are compared to similar surveys carried out in 1982 and 1992. The first sentence of the preface to the report notes that "Reading at Risk is not a report that the National Endowment for the Arts is happy to issue."

The survey asked respondents if during the previous twelve months they had read any novels, short stories, plays, or poetry in their leisure time (not for work or school). As the report notes, included were "popular genres such as mysteries, as well as contemporary and classic literary fiction. No distinctions were drawn on the quality of literary works." Literary non-fiction was apparently not included.

The results paint a grim picture for the future of the book. The charts (all taken directly from the report, and copyright of the National Endowment for the Arts) best reveal the tale:



What is most notable in this first chart is an important anomaly between the number of literary readers and the percentage. Because of population increases, the total number of readers is constant over a 20-year period, while the percentage decline, as illustrated in the next figure is 7.3%, and by 2002, the rate of decline had increased to 14%!



It's somewhat cold comfort that the rate of decline in the reading of "any book" decreased by half of the percentage of the decline in the reading of literature.



Not many will be surprised, though most of us will remain concerned, that the decline in reading is most pronounced in the young, although the following chart encompasses those up to the age of 44! Even the "elderly" are partaking of the slaughter, but in far more modest numbers.



Looking at similar results from a slightly different statistical perspective, while the U.S. population increased by nearly 40% between 1982 and 2002, the percentage reading literature dropped by just over 10%.



What conclusions to draw from this arguably grim data? I think that the pessimist's viewpoint is well-represented by these charts (and more so in the original report - recommended reading). But it is worth focusing on the brighter side of the picture. Two data points stand out: while there is a clear shift away from literary reading, the reading of the broad range of books published does not show as steep a decline. Also, the North American population will continue to increase, and this will to some extent ameliorate the trend from the publishers' perspective - although the nature of what they publish will have to change if they wish to hold their own against the trends so clearly illustrated here.

The other question remains as to what percentage of all books sold annually could be classified as "literary." I suspect the percentage is modest. (I'm still looking for a data source to illuminate this question.)

A few key data points:

• Nearly half of all Americans ages 18 to 24 read no books for pleasure.
• The percentage of 18- to 44-year-olds who read a book fell 7 points from 1992 to 2002.
• The percentage of 17-year-olds who read nothing at all for pleasure has doubled over a 20-year period.
• Although nominal spending on books grew from 1985 to 2005, average annual household spending on books dropped 14% when adjusted for inflation.

What makes this report both more important and more unsettling than its predecessor is that it is of course more timely, but also that it moves beyond the single category of "literary reading," taking a broader view of publishing. And that broader view is a bleaker view.

Future of Book Publishing -- Trends & Outlook

While the book publishing industry has begun to come to terms with some of the opportunities afforded by the Internet, I fear that this is thus far a case of too little, too late. Of course it's not merely missed opportunities on the Internet and the Web. More fundamentally, it appears that competing media are slowly eroding the economic base of publishing. Twenty years ago television and music were distracting for the young. In combination with chat, social networking sites, mobile phones and more, the book has certainly met its match.

Book Publishing the Traditional Way -- The Role of A Literary Agent

For those interested in publishing your book through traditional means, by "traditional" I mean quite the opposite of "self publishing." While in self publishing, it is the author that pays for the publishing service, in traditional publishing - the publishing house purchases the rights to print and publish the author's book.

I'm going to post a couple of entries that are directly related to helping to get your work out. This will involve people you should know, steps you may want to take as well as important information that could help you get your book published or steer you away from fraudulent personalitties only looking to take advantage of writers and authors.

Let's start with the roles of a Literary Agent. To become a traditionally published author, you may have to establish contact with one of these. From Get Published! by Susan Driscoll, here are some of their functions as gatekeepers for most traditional publishing houses:

1. They have close working relationships with many editors and are careful to send them only quality works that they believe in as well as those they know suit a particular editor’s taste or a publisher’s range of categories


2. They assess the quality and marketability of an author’s proposal or manuscripts to determine whether they think it’s salable to a publisher.


3. They negotiate in behalf of the author to get the most money and best terms.


4. They are responsible for ensuring that the author agreement is in line with industry standards


5. They often become the points of contact for authors throughout their writing careers


6. Reputable ones don’t take a penny until the ink has dried on your contract


7. They are selective in accepting clients.

Be wary when choosing a literary agent. This person will be your guide into the world of publishing.

Conventional Publishing Challenged - The Tucker Max Dare

I found an article on Comment Is free entitled "Publisher Brought to Book: Unadventurous publishers and booksellers are facing a challenge from new writers who find an audience on the internet." This article basically outlines how Tucker Max, a writer originally rejected by many publishing houses he tried to contact because his book was not saleable. He went online to self-publish 2 books through online publishing houses - Lulu.com & iUniverse.com.

He authored a new type of book that has begun to challenge the publishers and bookstores that leave small independent authors without a voice.

Tucker Max was a "belligerent and debauched" ex-law student who started by establishing a following on the internet and eventually joined the New York Times bestseller list with his book, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.

According to sources, the publishers' real problem was they had no idea how to market the book.
This, Max realised, is where conventional marketing techniques have failed to capitalise - not only on his own work but on internet literature in general. What the publishing houses had not fully realised was that Max's site had a monthly hit-rate of more than two million unique visits, and a fan base that was actively teeming with support on the website's message board. After months of constant rejections, the book was finally picked up by Kensington Books, the last independent publishing house in the US. His idiosyncratic self-belief eventually paid off in 2006. The UK edition has since been picked up by Penguin, and he has reportedly been offered a $300,000 advance on his next book.

Because of the subject matter, the book's scope for literary acclaim is limited, but the wonder is that it has seen the shelves at all, and it is the power of the internet that has given Max and authors like him a voice.

Max's success did not go unnoticed in the publishing industry, and a number of other writers have since landed book deals on the strength of their online following. Their subjects are various, but New York Times bestseller successes have been enjoyed by books spun off from websites such as Thebestpageintheuniverse.net, a long-running catalogue of satire, criticism and vitriol that has become one of the most popular non-commercial sites on the web. The subversive cartoon site ColoringBookLand.com and satirical news site Thephatphree.com are other such examples. In the UK, the most recognised of these is probably the anyonymous blogger Belle De Jour, who is also a best-selling author and subject of ITV2's new flagship drama The Secret Diary of a Call Girl.

The sites and their cross-over books have attracted reverence and revilement in equal degree, and because of their content, they are always likely to be sniffed at by literary critics. Regardless of merit, though, their niche appeal poses a unique challenge to the publishing and bookselling industry.

With the conventional bounds imposed by marketing strategies removed, authors can write about what interests them, no matter how niche it seems. Publishers have the choice to publish, regardless of whether it seems saleable (because an unvisited site is much less of a financial headache than a warehouse full of unsold books). Ultimately, readers have the choice of what to read, far more so than they do in conventional bookshops, where deals have been struck to ensure that big books make big profits, while the weak - meaning the original, the untested - fall by the wayside.

This is by no means the end of the predictable McNovels that dominate our bookstores, but with online publishing opportunities increasing, and online booksellers like Amazon, (whose stock is dictated by demand,) becoming ever more dominant, bookstores might finally have cause to rethink the way they fill their shelves.

The 8th Harry Potter Book - NOT Published?

For all book-lovers out there, J.K. Rowling added one more book to her Harry Potter series.
According to Publsher's Weekly, "The Tales of Beedle the Bard is the real-life incarnation of a collection of wizarding fairytales mentioned in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as a gift left to Hermione by Professor Dumbledore."

Apparently the book is handwritten and contains illustrations by Rowling. This has to be one of the most personal books ever written as according to J.K. Rowling - writing the book “has been the most wonderful way to say goodbye to a world I have loved and lived in for 17 years,” she told the AP.

Only seven copies of the title were printed, with a brown leather binding and elaborate silver and gemstone decorative accents. Reuters reported that in a dedication to the book, Rowling states, “Six of these books have been given to those most closely connected to the Harry Potter books during the last 17 years. This seventh copy will be auctioned; the proceeds to help institutionalized children who are in desperate need of a voice. So to whoever owns this book, thank you—and fair fortune be yours.”

Sotheby’s will auction the book December 13 with an opening price of $62,000. The winning bid will be donated to Rowling’s charity The Children’s Voice.

I hope whoever gets the last of the 7 copies, will post the book online for the rest of us humble-folk who will probably never lay a hand on it.

I'm willing to bet though that time will come, this book will be published - especially with the growing demand and hype. Maybe that's the point of all this - to make some noise and establish the relative demand of the book - and then they can publish it full tilt, because right now I still see some copies of the Deathly Hallows already at something like 10% off in some bookstores. Guess that's how traditional publishing works.

Book Publishing Statistics

I just finished reading Susan Driscoll's book, Get Published. And here are some insights I got from that book about how traditional publishing works. But first to start with some statistics

• As of 2005, the book publishing industry in the US was worth $5.2 billion. And there was already a 10% decrease of titles published this year compared to 2004


• Five publishing conglomerates control 80% of books sales and together they have published 23 thousand titles. That's less than 5% of all books published


• 87% of retail bookstore sales in 2004 came from only 7% of the books published that year. Translated to units, that's less than 1,200 new titles selling 50,000 copies or more


• The rest of the books, the other 93% - sold less than 1,000 copies each

Based on that, if you manage to sell more than 10,000 copies of your book, you will be considered a success in the book publishing arena. Then you'll be a best-seller! At least you'll be in the 90% percentile and better than 22 thousand other titles.

No wonder traditional book publishers are very picky about who they want to publish and how careful they are about accepting manuscripts. Major book publishers must lose a lot of money on a majority of the books they publish.

If you take it from this perspective, it will be easier to understand that they must acquire and promote titles that have high probability of selling. In any case, book publishing is still a business regardless of how passionate writers are about their manuscripts. Publishing companies need to make the money.

If a 13-year old can do it, why can't I?

At 13, he became a published author
'DRAGON'S TALE': His mom made him an offer: If you finish it, we'll get it in print. Story from Anchorage Daily News by Becky Stoppa



A 13-year old got published just recently with Xlibris. Not published in the traditional sense where his manuscript is picked up by one of those big shot publishers and then commercialized. Not published in the sense that he gets paid in advance for royalties. It's the opposite kind where he paid his publisher $1200 to get published. I think that's what they call self publishing. It's not so bad I guess considering that he's 13 years old and now has a book to his name - plus a newspaper article too. Not a bad deal I guess