Bookstore Sales Plummet and E-Books Are Saving Authors

While looking around the internet news sites this morning, two articles that seem to be flip sides of the same coin, caught my attention. The first piece is titled "Bookstore Sales Plummeted 5.7% in 2019" and the second "The Invisible Army: How E-Books are Saving Authors."

The gist of the first article is that brick and mortar bookstores in the United States fell almost six percent from 2018 levels, meaning that total bookstore sales were down about $600 million in the year-to-year comparison. The article says that the numbers were compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau. Interestingly, the article says that the only "huge" bestseller during all of 2019 was Where the Crawdads Sing, a book that continues to rank high on the bestseller lists well into 2020. (And now American Dirt may not be the bookstore savior that it was destined to be before the P.C. cops started squawking about it.)

Keeping in mind that these numbers do not reflect hardcover sales via Amazon or even the Barnes & Noble website, I'm not sure that this tells us much of anything about the overall health of the publishing and bookselling industries. But what it does say is that fewer books are being purchased at the brick and mortar storefronts - and that's not a good thing because it means that those locations will likely be carrying smaller and smaller inventories while trying to make up for lost book sales by selling all the other junk that already clutters up the B&N stores. 

The Invisible Nicola May

The second article is a longer piece written by Nicola May, a romantic comedy author from the U.K. who regularly tops the Kindle bestseller list. According to May, she could "walk into a roomful of readers, booksellers and authors" without any of them having any idea who she was. She calls herself a "lone field marshal in the invisible army of e-book bestselling authors." 

May's main point is that without Amazon she could not afford to write at all because the books chains completely ignore authors like her. Her secondary point is that not only are the chains ignoring authors like her, they are ignoring readers who love the books being written by e-book-dependent authors like her. May has been practicing her craft for 23 years, but would still be unpublished (other than her own self-publishing efforts) were it not for e-books. 

May does lament the fact that e-book-only authors like her get very little love or recognition from the powers-that-be for the huge sales many of them are amassing. No big book awards come their way, and she doesn't expect that kind of thing to change, really, but as she puts it, "...I'm still smashing it with readers and paying more than just the rent."

So there you have it. It seems like there are two separate bookselling worlds out there, one that pushes print-books out the door as quickly as possible, and one that sells a huge number of e-books written by authors who remain relatively anonymous to the rest of the world. The good news is that, at least for now, there seems to be room for both worlds to simultaneously exist, a fact that readers and writers alike should celebrate.