Feb 03 2009
Book industry statistics: A very thorough study
Bookstatistics.com coordinated the efforts of a heck of a lot of statisticians and resources within the industry to come up with some really useful numbers about the many things you might want to learn about the book industry, including the number of publishers, number of books in print, revenue, genres and how much they sell, audience for specific genres, and more. It’s a document that will continue to grow as more information becomes available. See the link above for the site that contains all the findings from this research.
Did you know that in 2007, 27% of Americans did not read a single book that year. Scary stuff.
8,000-11,000 new publishing companies are established each year. That’s a little more encouraging.
2006: The Top 12 Publishers by revenue were:
Reed Elsevier, Pearson, Thomson, Bertelsmann, Wolters Kluer, McGraw-Hill Education, Reader’s Digest, Scholastic, De Agostini Editore, Holtzbrinck, Gr. Planeta.
The big six (conglomerates) are:
1. Random House, Inc.
2. Penguin Putnam Inc.
3. HarperCollins
4. Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings
5. Time Warner
6. Simon & Schuster, Inc.
(All have corporate office in New York.)
And how about this info about small publishers (from a 1998 study… hence the large number of people using WordPerfect, and some other odd stats):
1. 54% of small independent publishers are male, 42% are female (3% won’t say).
2. California has 6X the number of small publishers than any other state. This finding is consistent with surveys of other creative professions, including desktop publishers, web publishers and multimedia designers.
3. The most popular business structure is the sole proprietorship—52% of male publishers and 56% of female publishers selected this legal formation.
4. Over 60% operate out of home offices (65% of males, 76% of females)
5. They’ve published an average of 7 titles each.
6. In 1997, they earned an average of $420,000.
7. Half of the high income small publishers earned over $1 million in 1997 working out of home offices.
8. The typical independent publisher (indie) works 50 hours a week. [Many work “half days”: 8 am to 8 pm.?]
9. More than 68% do not provide paid vacations.
10. Of the 30% that provide paid holidays, most give six days a year holiday benefit.
11. Over 80% have no pension or retirement program.
12. They produce 4X as many nonfiction titles as fiction titles. Juvenile and poetry are the most popular fiction genres. Self-help, how-to and business lead in the nonfiction categories.
13. Over 60% use Microsoft Word—23% use Word Perfect.
14. Most (47%) use Adobe PageMaker—24% use QuarkXpress.
15. QuickBooks is their most popular accounting software program.
16. Their most popular publishing publications are the PMA Newsletter, Publishers Weekly and the SPAN newsletter.
17. They pay an average of $276.25 for illustration on each book.
18. On average, they pay $465.17 for a simple cover design to as much as $3,533.26 for a complex cover design. Typical cover costs range $450 to $3,000.
19. Book design costs between $10 and $150 an hour.
20. They pay between $5 and $18 per page for interior page layout.
21. The average revenue per employee is $97,713.
22. On average it takes 475 hours to write a fiction title and 725 hours to write a nonfiction title.
22. It takes an average of 531 hours to produce a book—422 hours for fiction, 550 hours for nonfiction.
24. An average of 10 to 15 hours are spent designing a book cover.
25. On average, 61 hours are spent in the editing process.
26. On average, 29 hours are spent producing a news release for a new book.
27. Self publishers spend 52.4% of their book development budget writing a book (23.3% for fiction, 55.5% for nonfiction).
28. Graphic design consumes 13.5% of the budget for fiction titles and 3.7% of the budget for nonfiction titles.
29. Other than writing costs, small publishers spend most of their fiction title development budget in graphic design and illustration (13.5% and 20% respectively).
30. Other than writing costs, small publishers spend most of their nonfiction title development budget on illustration and page layout (7.5% and 8% respectively).
31. Advertising consumes most of the small publisher’s marketing costs (36.5% for fiction titles, 29.8% for nonfiction titles).
There is so much more to learn by clicking the link, again here: http://bookstatistics.com
I’ll include a permanent link on my sidebar under resources–it certainly qualifies!
