70% of books published fail! However, the remaining 30% go on to become potential best sellers making so much profit that the sins of the failures are washed away.
The problem publishers face is that bestsellers are impossible to predict. So, in order to ensure they produce at least a couple of bestsellers, publishers publish many books, knowing most will fail but a few will succeed.
This business model is all based on a bookshop’s limited shelf space. Most books are sold through bookshops (though this is changing). These bookshops have a limited number of shelves and the shops tend to stock books that are most likely to sell in large numbers (they have to pay the rent, just like everyone else). This means that titles that don’t sell so well, who don’t earn their shelf space, are dropped and replaced with other, better selling, books. Only the bestsellers survive.
However, this model is changing and digitalisation is altering the marketplace.
Bookshops are still important but increasingly people are buying books online. Amazon is now becoming the first port of call for many readers, and the growing impact of ebook sales is accelerating this change.
But surely the decline of bookshops is bad for the writers and publishers?
It would be if readers were no longer buying books but they are, they never stopped, thay have just switched to online stores.
The key is that Amazon’s business model doesn’t depend on physical shelf space. Though they have to warehouse the books, this is not the limiting factor. In essence they have unlimited and virtual bookshelf space and this alters the book selling dynamic. Yes, Amazon love the bestsellers, but they don’t need them.
Online bookshops are able to depend on niche books to pay the bills. These niche books may only sell a couple of hundred copies a year, and this would have meant they could not be stocked by physical bookshelves. The book shops would have not had the luxury of stocking their shelves with titles that blocked essential retail space. Yet, Amazon don’t care, they have unlimited bookshelves. In fact, the opposite is now the case. Amazon want niche book titles, as many as possible. If they stock 10,000 niche titles, each selling just 100 copies per year, sales and profit soon add up!
This is excellent news for writers. You see, the main reason writers need publishers is for the publisher to pay for printing and to subsequent distribution of the book to bookshops. But what happens if we remove book shops from the equation, and the price of printing 100 titles per year drops to a level manageable by writers?
The answer is that the writer becomes the publisher. This new publishing model allows writers to write, print and distribute their own books. Add to this the fact that, with the publisher removed, writers can take a much bigger cut of the profit and suddenly we can shake of the depression off yesterday’s post and instead celebrate a recipe for success.
