On one of the discussion lists I frequent, we have been talking about book sales, and conversation migrated to who (large publishing houses or smaller publishing houses) sold the most books in aggregate. Now I KNOW that Simon & Schuster sell more books than my two imprints, so that's not the point. It's about whether or not the small and independent presses are encroaching on the money that the large presses make, which in turn makes the Six Sisters nervous.
To avoid rewriting a long post, I'm going to post (almost!) the exact same information here that I put on that discussion list.
Why do I think that the midsize, small and independent publishers are producing the largest part of book sales in the U.S.?
First, a huge part of book sales are “flying under the radar” according to the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) in 2008:
The Book Industry Study Group has issued a report that says book sales have been seriously underreported. The study, “Under the Radar,” says that approximately 63,000 publishers with annual sales of less than $50 million generate aggregate sales of $14.2 billion.
Jeff Abraham, executive director of BISG, says that while some of that revenue is represented in current industry sales estimates—which puts revenue at between $23.7 billion and $28.5 billion—a significant portion of the revenue is not. Abraham says the discrepancy between the findings of “Under the Radar” and historical industry measurements is that the study tracked sales from companies whose main business is outside of book publishing. The study also found that the majority of sales made by midsized and smaller publishers are made outside of traditional bookselling channels such as non-book wholesalers who serve outlets such as sporting goods stores.
Abraham says he plans to put together an industry task force that will work to find a process that can combine the findings of “Under the Radar” with traditional industry measurements.
-- By Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly. http://www.PublishersWeekly.com
Now, if anyone has their collective finger on the pulse of book sales in the U.S., I would say it is the BISG. They are devoted to studying the industry and reporting the facts, no matter how distasteful those facts may be to some members of the industry.
Secondly, the number of small and independent publishers in the U.S. is increasing astronomically, thus further diluting the market share of the Six Sisters (Bertelsmann, CBS Corporation, Hachette, News Corporation, Pearson and Verlagsgruppe.) According to www.ISBN.org, between 8,000 and 11,000 new publishers are now being established each year. That includes self-publishing authors who purchase their own ISBNs and create new imprints, as well as small presses.
By the way, regarding the "big houses" in NYC: who exactly gets listed depends on how you view that. Do you want to list managing groups, i.e. the big companies that own the presses and who own other presses in other countries too, or do you want to list presses by the names we see on the spines of books? The way I have it listed above is by owner groups. The top six publisher imprints you see are Random House, Inc., Penguin Putnam Inc., HarperCollins, Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings, Time Warner, and Simon & Schuster, Inc.
In 2002, the (then five) dominant publishing houses in NYC made up 45% of the sales revenue in books. In 2002, there were only about 68,000 small press and independent publishers, yet they still accounted for 55% of the sales revenue. By 2004 those small and independent presses had increased to 86,000. Using ISBN.org as a reference, there are now roughly 116,000 small and independent presses. There are still the Six Sisters in NYC, but their smaller competitors have increased substantially in number.
In 2008, there were 560,626 titles produced overall in the U.S., with over half of those titles being produced by POD and short-run printers. According to Publishers Weekly of May 19, 2009, “Since 2002, production of on-demand titles has soared 774% compared to a 126% increase in traditional titles.” Most small presses and independents cannot afford to do large print runs as a matter of economics, so they use short run (less than 1,000 copies printed) and print-on-demand (POD). While larger houses do use POD to keep midlist titles in stock, POD is primarily the domain of small press and independents. So those small press and independents have really kicked their production of books into gear.
Taking all those figures into account, here are my conclusions:
1. Even as long ago as 2002, independent and small presses were outselling their Goliath competitors, in aggregate.
2. In the last few years, the major houses have seen drastically increasing numbers of competing independent and small presses, on the order of about 8,000 to 11,000 new presses per year.
3. Those new presses sell a lot of books, and according to the BISG’s report in 2008, their sales have been greatly under-reported because they are perceived to be so small as to be insignificant, as well as the fact that they often sell through unconventional channels. But in aggregate they produced about $14.2 BILLION more than it was thought. That unreported amount would add at least fifty percent more to what was previously reported as total sales. Seen from the viewpoint of the big publishing houses, it is like the Death of a Thousand Cuts--they're bleeding sales from a multitude of very small locations.
4. A great deal of this can probably be accounted for by the small and independent presses' willingness to use short-run and POD printing techniques.
All of these statistics and facts, taken together, convince me that the mid-size, small and independent presses are taking the largest part of the book sales, when taken in aggregate. The problem is, the the money is divided up into so many small shares that it seems not to be true.
DISCLAIMER: The figures I have in this post are as accurate as I could find based on currently available data. Exact book sales data are notoriously hard to come by, and even the use of such statistics as I have here is akin to an educated guess.
(Some of this information comes from a central clearinghouse, www.bookstatistics.com. Other sources are Publishers Weekly, the Book Industries Study Group, www.ISBN.org, and the Independent Book Publishers’ Association.)
