Why Burn Books When Nobody Reads? (Stats on Reading)

In this eye-opening episode, Malcolm and Simone dive deep into the current state of the publishing industry, revealing shocking statistics about book sales, author earnings, and the strategies employed by major publishing houses. The couple discusses the alarming decline in reading habits among Americans and the dominance of a select few authors in the bestseller lists. Malcolm shares startling figures from the antitrust case between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, exposing the industry's reliance on celebrity books and backlist titles. The couple also examines the disappointing sales of books by well-known figures with substantial social media followings. Throughout the conversation, they offer valuable advice for aspiring authors, emphasizing the importance of exploring alternative platforms like YouTube, podcasts, and Substack to reach and engage audiences effectively.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] That means authors are earning roughly between 18, 000 and 180, 000 on a New York Times bestseller.

Keep in mind now, these are being split with the publishing houses,

If you write a book and you get accepted and you get paid by penguin random house, you have a 96 percent chance of selling less than a thousand copies. Okay Ilyan Omar from the squad,

She has a significant social media presence with 3 million Twitter followers. And another 1. 3 million on Instagram, yet her book, has sold only

Simone Collins: 26,

Malcolm Collins: 000 copies.

Piers Morgan.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: 8 million on followers on Twitter. In the U. S. it sold just 5, 650 copies. how are these big publishing houses staying in business? And it is Bibles celebrity books like Britney Spears books and their backlist. It is not on things that are intellectually enriching the population.

These two market categories, celebrity books and repeated bestsellers from the backlist, make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund [00:01:00] their project, publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing.

That is basically a vanity project. How do they approach people? What they are thinking about when they go out and approach people is how can I turn their preexisting follower base into money.

Simone Collins: Yeah. They're looking for a platform. They only care about your platform. And I think they're starting to

Malcolm Collins: realize though, that even the platform doesn't sell

Simone Collins: This conversation is really relevant to people who are thinking about writing a book,

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! We are gonna do a stats heavy episode today, which I am excited about, and I hope I ordered these stats well to make a narrative. But it is on reading in America, the state of reading, and what the publishing industry is turning into. And how it's transforming the way books are being published, the type of books that are being published, and the type of books that are being read.

[00:02:00] So first, let's just, I'm going to do a lot of quoting here in this episode. This is from Pew. Almost a third of Americans don't read books at all, and according to the U. S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the ones that do spend only 16 minutes per day reading. Compare that to the average Netflix watcher who spends close to 3 hours per day consuming video content.

At that pace, a watcher might get through 681 movies in a year, while a reader gets through only 16 books. And that's presuming those 15 minutes are spent reading books. And keep in mind, it was just reading, so that could be newspaper, that could be online content, and goodness knows I'd fudge those numbers.

. Even this year when leisure time increased as a result of the pandemic, novels saw only a subtle increase in sales over last year by 2. 8%. News consumption, however, saw an increase of 215%. Most of that time taking place on Facebook, 23 minutes per day, [00:03:00] Google, 14 minutes per day, and MSN, five minutes per day.

So when people say news consumption, they mean Facebook and Google. So this is highly targeted news, not even just like I'm picking a conservative versus progressive news show to be my bubble of information I'm getting. It's the news stories that are specifically tailored to my interests. Okay, so now we're going to talk a little bit about how few authors are actually writing the books that people are reading. So they had created a list of the top selling books in the U. S. And of the 2, 468 fiction books that made the list they were written by only 854 authors.

It's worth mentioning that 51 of those books were written by James Peterson, 31 were written by Clive Kussler, and 25 were written by Daniel Steele. A huge chunk is written by very few people.

Simone Collins: [00:04:00] And this, we've seen this in other stats in terms of how much authors sell, like a very few.

Very small number of books, ultimately. Oh, we're

Malcolm Collins: about to get into that.

Simone Collins: Okay. This is bad.

Malcolm Collins: This is bad. According to the EPJ data, 96 percent of a fiction book sales take place in the first year, and the majority of the New York Times bestselling books sell between 10, 000 and 100, 000 copies in their first year.

Presuming the average royalty check is 12 percent and the average hardcover fiction book retails at 15, that means authors are earning roughly between 18, 000 and 180, 000 on a bestseller. This is a New York Times bestseller. 18, 000 to 180, 000.

Simone Collins: Also, writers are not being paid anything, so why would they

Malcolm Collins: bother?

Keep in mind now, these are being split with the publishing houses, and this is only for New York Times bestselling authors. As a New York Times bestselling author, you might be earning 18, 000 off of that book.

Simone Collins: Wow. You're way better paid being a public school teacher. People argue that like teachers are not [00:05:00] paid anything.

Malcolm Collins: And you're splitting that with the publishers.

Simone Collins: Yeah. When you're like a bestselling author. It's so funny. I remember the first time I met someone who completely didn't understand How much people actually made. And he was telling someone who's probably making less than he was. He's Oh wow. Like I bet you have a yacht or something.

And he just had no idea that people in the writing world don't make money.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. When it's also true with our books, people are always like why don't you publish more books and stuff like that? You guys must be, why don't you use some of like your books money? Like you guys taught the wall street journal, nonfiction bestseller list.

And I was like yeah, we did. We did. We did talk to the wall street journal, nonfiction bestseller list. And they're like what did you do? I'm one of my favorite things. They go, what did you do different with that book? Just do that again. And I was like, that was our least selling book by like one fourth of the sales of our just make money again.

And they're like wait. Why did your least selling book? top the Wall Street Journal nonfiction bestseller list, but none of your others did. And the answer is simple. [00:06:00] All of our other books were Amazon exclusives, which do not qualify for that list or the New York times bestseller list. The way we got on the list was intentionally hampering the launch of one of our books, putting it in Barn