Facts About the Fiction Market

There are have been a couple of recent articles on the market for fiction that I have found quite interesting. The first, entitled Tyler is top-selling Man Booker longlisted title, by Kiera O'Brien and Sarah Shaffi, looks at literary fiction and in particular the sales figures of the 13 titles longlisted for the Man Booker Prize this year. The story is interesting both for informing us of the relatively low sales figures for literature, as well as giving us a sense of how much an appearance on the longlist is worth in terms of sales.

The key points by title (all sales were as of 10th September):

1. Anne Tyler A Spool of Blue Thread (Chatto & Windus) is the bestselling of the 13 longlist titles selling 20,102 copies in total across all editions through Nielsen BookScan. It sold 7,680 copies since the longlist was announced.
2. Anne Enright The Green Road (Jonathan Cape) sold 2,355 extra copies since being longlisted, for a total of 8,938. 
3. Hanya Yanigahara A Little Life (Picador), which was published three weeks after the longlist announcement, has sold 7,542 copies
4. Marlon James A Brief History of Seven Killings (Oneworld Publications) has sold 6,694 copies, which is 3,471 more than before the announcement. 
5. Andrew O’Hagan’s The Illuminations (Faber & Faber) sold 457 copies since the longlist was announced, for a total of 3,273 copies. 
6. Marilynne Robinson Lila (Virago) has sold 12,184 copies, but only 625 copies since the longlist. 
7. Tom McCarthy Satin Island (Jonathan Cape) went from 922 to 1,511 after the announcement. 
8. Sunjeev Sahota The Year of the Runaways (Picador) went from 413 copies to 1,302.
9. Anna Smaill The Chimes (Sceptre) went from 411 to 1,008. 
10. Laila Lalami The Moor’s Account released on 27th August, has sold 1,783 copies. 
11. Bill Clegg Did You Ever Have a Family (Jonathan Cape) released 1st September, has sold 885 copies. 
12. Chigozie Obioma The Fishermen (One, Pushkin Press) had not charted when the longlist was announced and has now sold 1,252 copies.
13. Anuradha Roy Sleeping on Jupiter (MacLehose Press, Quercus) had not charted and has now sold 604 copies.

These are startlingly small numbers for the best books written in English last year. And while sales will continue to grow, particularly as some of the books are released in paperback, it underlines the fact that most literature (which does not receive this sport of acclaim) does not sell very well. This is true even when the book is by a previously acclaimed writer, such as Anne Enright (a previous winner of the Mann Booker Prize).

The second derives from an NPR report that also looked at literary fiction. In When It Comes To Book Sales, What Counts As Success Might Surprise You, Lynn Neary. According to this report, success can be defined as follows:

So what is a good sales figure for any book?

"A sensational sale would be about 25,000 copies," says literary agent Jane Dystel. "Even 15,000 would be a strong enough sale to get the publisher's attention for the author for a second book."

But if that second book doesn't sell, says Dystel, odds are you won't get another chance.

The third report is by SFF writer Kameron Hurley who discusses her own book sales in The Cold Publishing Equations: Books Sold + Marketability + Love (which follows up on a previous report 2014: Some (Honest) Publishing Numbers, and (Almost) Throwing in the Towel) as well as some average figures for publishing as a whole:

The average book sells 3000 copies in its lifetime (Publishers Weekly, 2006).

Yes. It’s not missing a zero.

Take a breath and read that again.

But wait, there’s more!

The average traditionally published book which sells 3,000 in its entire lifetime in print only sells about 250-300 copies its first year.

But I’m going indie! you say. My odds are better!

No, grasshopper. Your odds are worse.

The average digital only author-published book sells 250 copies in its lifetime.

Regarding her own publishing success, Hurley writes:

my first book, GOD’S WAR, which I was paid $6,500 for and which earned out its advance and started making money in its first 6 months – after selling only its first 5500 copies. It has since gone on to sell over 20,000.

And

MIRROR EMPIRE did even better, with a $7,000 advance and sales in excess of 13,000 copies already. It’s in its second printing and now has a mass market version as well. It’s also sold audio rights and foreign rights to Germany and the Czech Republic. It’s not making me or my publisher millions, but it’s keeping the lights on.

 Hurley also reports on some more unfortunate outcomes for authors she knows:

So while all this sounds mid-list rosy, I want to talk about the not-so-rosy stuff, because I have seen sales numbers that would leave you sobbing your guts out on the sidewalk (ha ha if you’re already sobbing at the ones I’ve shared YOU ARE IN FOR A SURPRISE). There are authors – authors you may have heard of – who have sold a couple hundred copies of a title in its lifetime. I’ve seen publisher spreadsheets that show some authors selling just a dozen copies over eight months. I remember one author had sold four copies in twelve months and I thought for sure it was a typo but it wasn’t.

These things happen. They happen to great writers, and exceptional books.

And they fuck up people’s careers. Many of us don’t come back from it.

I nearly didn’t.

In the case of numbers this bad, there are usually a lot of things that go wrong all at once – publisher fuck-ups, poor timing, bad pitching to bookstores, no author-driven marketing, bigger books moving to the top of reviewers’ piles, big news events that drown out signal, and yes, sometimes it’s just not a great book either, etc.

These are striking facts. I am very grateful to Hurley for sharing them publicly. While I did not love her book The Mirror Empire (see my review here), I will read the next in the series and wish her nothing but the best in her career.

The facts are also more than a little depressing. As a consumer of SFF (and fiction more generally) I am concerned whenever I hear that the economics of publishing may be discouraging potentially good writers to write. I can't help but wonder if we are moving towards a system of micro Patronage through sites such as Patreon?

More Pratchett Commentary in The Guardian

A few weeks ago, we joined in the internet outrage over an article in The Guardian by Jonathan Jones who disparaged the work of Terry Pratchett despite admitting he had never read any.

A week ago, Jones wrote another essay, this time after having read one of Pratchett's earlier novels, Small Gods. His opinion of Pratchett has not improved dramatically, although he at least acknowledges that he had "snorted contempt" for Pratchett in his earlier article, and he is able to identify some aspects of Pratchett's writing that he admires:

This is Pratchett at his best: expansive and lucid, taking one of the greatest ideas in western thought ... and having a bit of fun with it. ...

You can praise Pratchett for his witty exposition of big ideas, his creation of a fantasy world that gives readers an alternative home (and will surely one day become as seductive on screen as Martin’s Westeros has in Game of Thrones).

Perhaps most importantly, Jones now articulates clearly what he doesn't like about Pratchett relative to some of his own literary favorites: the quality of the prose. In Jones opinion:

[F]or some reason, the fantasy genre is a graveyard for the English language.

and

Pratchett’s deflationary jokes, like his Plato parody, are often funny in isolation, but taken together, they result in a determinedly unambitious, unexciting style. He seems to love handling clichés as if they were shiny pebbles:

“The sky was blue.”

“It was a million-to-one chance, with any luck.”

“Simony laughed bitterly.”

There’s nothing wrong with these sentences from Small Gods – the book is full of such expressions – but there is nothing special about them either.

That’s what I’ve felt previously when I looked at Pratchett’s prose, and following it for 397 pages has not suddenly transformed it into Henry James. The ordinariness of this writing is surely deliberate: it makes the book warm and friendly, like a normal chat with a normal bloke.

Why would anyone confuse this with the kind of literary prose it so emphatically does not want to be?

This is the difference between entertainment and literature – the novel as distraction and the novel as art. You cannot divorce a literary novel from the way it is written. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, literature is the words and nothing but.

Plenty of novels get published and loved that are not literature in this sense, but all I am saying, and all I was saying, is that I prefer the literary kind. I prefer it by a billion Ephebian miles.

You can praise Pratchett for his witty exposition of big ideas, his creation of a fantasy world that gives readers an alternative home (and will surely one day become as seductive on screen as Martin’s Westeros has in Game of Thrones). But you cannot say: “Pratchett writes really ordinary prose yet is a literary genius.” 

We can argue about what constitutes a literary genius, but I do not dispute Jones's right to value the quality of prose in a novel above other aspects of the writing. If that is what floats his boat, more power to him.

Indeed, I also take a great amount of enjoyment from the quality of an author's prose. One of my favorite authors is Peter Carey, one of only three two-time winners of the Man Booker Prize: in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and in 2001 for the True History of the Kelly Gang. Carey possesses a stunning command of the English language. At times his prose is so beautiful that I have to put his books down to savor for a moment the power of his words. Other times, his prose is (deliberately) extremely difficult, as with the aforementioned True History of the Kelly Gang, a historical novel written in a 19th century vernacular with little concern for punctuation or grammar. It is hard to read a Carey novel and not be impressed. But for both of these reasons, Carey's books are not immersive; the prose is simply far too visible. This is fine if you---like Jones and me---find enjoyment in the art of writing exceptional prose.

But there are times when I want to be immersed in a story. And for these times, invisible prose is what is needed. This also requires great skill even if, because it is invisible, it doesn't attract the attention of critics.

Kate Paulk makes many of the same points in a more strongly worded fashion over at the Mad Genius Club:

This, dear Mr Literary Columnist, is an example of making the prose invisible. Yes, it’s deliberate. Pratchett doesn’t want excess fancy getting in the way of the reader. If I stop to admire pretty words, you’ve lost me. I don’t remember Pratchett’s phrasing, I remember his characters. His situations. The subtle parallels he draws that show disturbingly plausible ways to go from civilized to barbaric. Dear lord, I can remember and talk about this and give bloody examples when it’s been something in the order of seven years since I last read the book.

Fuck prose. If I can remember the meaning of a book that long after I last read it when I’ve read – quite literally – hundreds of other books since then, that author is doing it right.

Paulk has a point. She is more interested in debating the meaning of the term "literary" than I am:

Ah. No. Literary prose does not mean the contents contain literature. Usually the opposite is the case. Unless, of course, you happen to be a pretentious wanker who wants to impress people with how much he knows about Arte. ... 

And as for Jones's claim that:

Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, literature is the words and nothing but.

I concur with Paulk's view is that this is

Bullshit. The stuff that’s the words and nothing but? That’s the stuff that will be forgotten in a generation, if it lasts that long. The things people remember and love? That’s literature. ...

Oh, yes, you can, sir. Real literature, the kind of thing that lasts past the flash-in-the-pan praise of the pretentious fashion-slaves who call themselves literary? That has meaning. Meaning that percolates and matures and emerges sometimes years later in the realization that there was a lot more to that fun romp than you’d have thought at first.

Well said!