Time again for Tim O’Reilly’s State of the Computer Book Market Q 3, and it looks like the early gains this year have leveled off. Perhaps worse than that, Tim says –
We suspect that the combination of increasingly sophisticated online information, easier to use Web 2.0 applications, and customer fatigue with new features of overly complex applications, combined with the consolidation of the retail book market, mean that the market will never return to its pre-2000 highs, despite new enthusiasm for Web 2.0 and the technology market in general. In addition, new distribution channels (including downloadable PDFs) are growing up as retailers allocate less space to computer books.
“Will never return?” Pre-2000 numbers were huge compared to today’s market, so I’m sure he’s right, which of course leaves me in a pickle since about half of my business is related to tech titles.
The bottom line for agents as well as authors is that you’ve gotta do more than books, or do more than books in one niche.
As for me, I’m still repping plenty of tech titles but I’m also working on more non-book projects, including documentation deals, white papers, programming gigs, DVDs and more.
I’m also signing a steady stream of general non-fiction. I’m not looking for the long tail but I’m looking for the long score, books that will sell consistently for five or ten years, and books that need to be revised less often.
There are still bestsellers to be had in this tech market, but they’re fewer and farther between.
What will publishers do? Beyond scrabbling for the shelf space that remains, tech publishers are moving online with some alacrity and we’ll see more ebooks from them as well as perhaps more initiatives around online education (note that Hungry Minds pre Wiley acquisition failed at this spectacularly but Thomson picked up Ed2Go.com and that’s a successful business today).
I also expect that publishers will move sideways and try to extend successful tech brands into other niches, ala the “for Dummies” and the “Complete Idiots” series.
Education, anyone? Test prep? Personal finance? Business? How about health and wellness? There’s a lot of room out there for a motivated publisher.
Congrats to Fresh Books client Lee Varis and Sybex acquisitions editor Pete Gaughan: Skin: The Complete Guide to Digitally Lighting, Photographing, and Retouching Faces and Bodies has popped up almost immediately on the computer and internet bestseller list at Amazon. It’s at #10 today and in the 200s on the overall Amazon list. Heck, those are almost Scott Kelby numbers.
Amazon numbers are fickle and they don’t mean the world, but this book is a great concept beautifully executed and I’m pleased to see it pop like this.
Harold Davis posts awesome images on his Photoblog 2.0 on a daily basis, but this butterfly is truly special. Here’s the original post, Is it Photography?
I asked Harold’s permission to post this photo here. The copyright is all his. (edited after first post)
Congratulations to David Boles and Janna Sweenie on the publication of HandJive: American Sign Language for Real Life, from Barnes and Noble’s Metro imprint. This is not your momma’s ASL book! Look for it at B&Ns everywhere.
Congratulations to Lee Varis on the publication of Skin: The Complete Guide to Digitally Lighting, Photographing, and Retouching Faces and Bodies, from Sybex.
I’m happy to announce that Christipher Matthew Spencer has started a new blog in support of The eBay Entrepreneur. Check it out!
Avoid fee-charging agents!
Plenty of sites warn writers against fee-charging agents, it turns out that pet owners are furious about an alleged fee-charging pet talent agency, Hollywood Paws.
I love their mangled advertising copy: call for your free copy of “How to train your pet act like a movie star!” (yeah, drink this, take that, let me tell you this about the cat conspiracy.)
Apparently the firm delivered on the training but few of the pets were ever booked for actual shows. I’m not sure if the pet owners are in the right here but if they believed this was their doggie’s ticket to fame they should have thought a little harder.
You can find the article at the L.A. Times.
Per Fark, your dog is ready for his close-up.
Van Wolverton’s Running MS-DOS 6.22 is in the top 1000 at Amazon today, currently #22 on the Computer books list between Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence and David Busch’s Nikon D200 guide.
How the heck did that happen? The book is 12 years old, published in August 1994 and it’s not even available at Amazon.
Must be a ghost in the machine. Shows you how useful those Amazon rankings are…
Also not retiring, some indie booksellers who find that in the age of cut-rate online booksellers they need focus, creativity and community. At Wired News, via Boing Boing, Linked.
A client called my attention to well-respected copywriter and advertising author Bob Bly’s Finis, his post about retiring from writing books.
Bob’s writing about exactly my market: the non-fiction book caught in the headlights of Google. I feel his pain and I share many of his concerns, and I’m sorry that he has decided to retire from the business, but I’m not retiring from the book business just yet.
Alas, publishing is dead again. Really, it keeps dying over and over. This time it’s the Internet.
And boy, the children’s book market was in the doldrums before J.K. Rowling and Daniel Handler showed up.
Uh oh, flat is the new up in the computer book market. And what happened to home and garden books and all those “nesters?” They too have hit the skids.
And why doesn’t anyone talk about how high gas prices have also affected the book market?
Year to year sales at B&N and Borders, honestly, aren’t that great. It’s true. And I agree with Bob that the decline in the importance of books in our culture is a huge problem for the industry. We need to encourage our kids to read and we need to create books that rival or complement other experiences.
I also agree that there are lots of crap books published. Who cares about a novel “written” by the “famous for being famous though not as famous as Paris,” Nicole Richie? Well, sadly, more than 100,000 buyers did.
But, is the Internet killing the non-fiction book?
Well, some kinds of non-fiction books, sure. Encyclopedias have had a heck of a time. Straight-ahead references, well I can find pretty much any answer I need at Google or Wikipedia. Still, somehow, the “for Dummies” and the “Missing Manual” series continue to grow.
And the internet seems to be actually helping the writers at Boing Boing, who turned a cool but obscure zine into one of the top blogs in the world.
Plus, it looks like new franchises such as O’Reilly’s Head First series, which does books that are immersive and can’t be easily duplicated by online Q&A, are doing just fine. Not to mention MAKE or CRAFT, which aren’t just books but are also marketed as magazines.
And Rachel Ray is doing very well in all media everywhere, thank you very much. Tell me, was she even a blip on anyone’s consciousness five years ago?
In the sales and marketing arena I guarantee you that Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell are seeing great advances and selling lots of books, and they’ve built incredible unique selling propositions, some may even call it a platform: namely, hundreds of thousands of people care what they have to say.
And about those crowded shelves? Not to be arch, but Bob Bly himself told his readers to write books so that they could become known as experts in their field and generate multiple streams of income. It’s still good advice, but it sure has a way of crowding those shelves!
Honestly, publisher obsession about “platform” is okay. Publisher curiosity about the sales on your previous books is fair. Lower advances in a time of diminished expectations, that’s a drag and I know that from personal experience, but over time new books and authors will enter the market and some authors will write meaningful and useful books that sell well regardless of the advance.
Fundamentally, it’s hard to be relevant and new every year. What’s increasingly difficult about publishing is simply competition and the authors and publishers who are suffering are either not publishing books that readers want or need, or need to re-assess their own priorities and goals. Much as Bob has.
I know that with our new baby we spent at least as much time at BabyCenter.com as we did reading What to Expect or Ina May. Publishing has to change, but it has always had to change, and it will continue to change.
The “new new thing” eventually gets out front. The problem is that no one is in charge but the marketplace, which is always disconcerting to the establishment!
New writers will emerge that will topple old sales records. New series will emerge too.
And George W. Bush’s advance for his memoir will probably exceed Bill Clinton’s.
C’est la vie.
The king is dead, long live the king.
I’ve been busier with the baby than I’ve been with the blog over the last month but it’s been an increasing headache to deal with blog spam in the comments, so I’m turning off the comments for now until I upgrade and/or add (hopefully non-buggy) captcha to the blog. If there’s anything you’d like to comment on or ask, I’m happy to post a response, so please feel free to email me at matt at fresh-books.com. Thanks.
Congratulations to Edward Baig on the publication of Macs for Dummies, Ninth Edition.
“Ninth edition” is a bit of a misnomer as this edition is an entirely new book, re-written from the ground up — the first edition of Macs for Dummies to cover the new generation Intel Macs.
Congrats, Ed, and thanks for working with me!
