| Take the online courseWriter’s block
By insidebooks | March 2, 2010
Some advice from Ian Rankin - his 10 rules for writing fiction:
- Read lots
- Write lots
- Learn to be self-critical
- Learn what criticism to accept
- Be persistent
- Have a story worth telling
- Don’t give up
- Know the market
- Get lucky
- Stay lucky
You can read the full set of advice in the Guardian here
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Bacardi and World Book Day
By insidebooks | March 1, 2010
This week sees the annual World Book Day in the UK and Ireland - Thursday 4 March. (Curiously the rest of the world celebrates the day on 23 April.) There will be a range of events, from fancy dress to readings by famous authors, to encourage kids to read books, as well as the gift of a £1 book token to all schoolchildren. Visit the WBD website for full details of events.
Writing in the Guardian, Lucy Mangan reflected on the day and that it has a slightly worthy, top-down feel. She says: ‘[reading] is and always has been terminally uncool (even in Victorian times, the boy with the hoop and stick got more kudos than the one who got the third volume of Jane Eyre before anyone else). What it really needs to get kids reading en masse is a few initiatives to rupture that link. A free Bacardi Breezer with every book next year, perhaps. Or black T-shirts for everyone that say, “Fuck off, I’m reading.” Or borrow a trick from cigarette advertising and warn that this volume might give you cancer.’ See the full article here.
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Second-hand news
By insidebooks | February 12, 2010
Worthy of note is the burgeoning second-hand or used book market. In 2006 22 per cent of adults bought books from a charity shop or other second-hand outlet (Mintel, 2007). Oxfam has 130 specialist bookshops, alongside its sale of books in its other retail outlets, and is the largest retailer of second-hand books in Europe. The internet has revolutionized the search and sale of second-hand books: Amazon sells second-hand copies through its Marketplace scheme; and AbeBooks lists over 100 m new, used, rare, and out-of-print books from more than 13,500 booksellers.
The novelist Susan Hill has spoken out against the expansion of Oxfam’s book operation and its impact on small bookshops and other charity shops. She writes on her Spectator blog …
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iPadulation
By insidebooks | February 2, 2010
The launch of the tablet computer from Apple last week was a masterful demonstration of how to launch a product, with little advance information and great anticipation in the media.
The iPad has not changed the industry overnight but it does look like the cool object we have been waiting for in terms of ebook readers. The colour screen will move ebooks to the next level, and whilst there are undoubtedly flaws in the first version, Apple is used to fine tuning products once they have reached the early adopter market.
For publishers the iPad offers more choice – a new player with which to do deals alongside Sony, Google and Amazon. There are predictions circulating in the industry about 50 per cent of books being sold as ebooks within the next five years, and the interest from Apple certainly confirms the impetus behind such a trend.
The irony is that Steve Jobs had proclaimed the book as dead …
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Close of play in the book market for 2009
By insidebooks | January 13, 2010
For 2009 Nielsen BookScan, which tracks nearly all retail book sales, reported consumer sales in the UK market of £1.751bn and 235.7m books. This is an average selling price (not cover price) of £7.43 per copy. The figures show a small fall from the previous year of 0.5 per cent (by volume) and 1.2 per cent (by value). This represents a broadly flat market and the decline does not come anything near the precipitous fall in sales of some other industries, for example car manufacturing. The average selling price fell by 6p and is at its lowest since 2001.
Around 3 per cent of the total sales by volume belong to two authors, Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown. Between them they sold 7 million books and their books make up five out of the top 10 bestselling titles. The other titles were by Marian Keyes, Stieg Larsson, Kate Atkinson, and Jodi Picoult, alongside the Guinness World Records 2010.
You can hear an LBF podcast about book sales last year - Jonathan Nowell from Nielsen Book being interviewed - here. He says that sales were lower partly as a result of fewer people going abroad on holiday, and therefore not buying so many holiday reads. He also predicts fewer celebrity biographies in the future; and more experimentation coming from smaller, independent publishers. In international comparisons, the UK sells more books per head of population (4 per capita) than other countries covered by Nielsen - e.g. 3 in Australia and 2.5 in the USA.
In Inside Book Publishing we write about trade or consumer publishing …
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