Longtime readers may remember when I posted this graph:
That image made the rounds and caused a bit of a stir in certain indie quarters a couple years back. Most of us sensed that the market for science fiction books had drastically shrunk since the good old days. A lot of us, including me, were shocked at just how much our genre had withered.
The prevailing wisdom was that post-1980 realism, romance packaged as SF, and SJW convergence had driven most of the traditionally male readership from the genre. This sobering realization filled many of us indie authors with grim resolution. We were determined to make SFF flourish again, but it wouldn’t be quick or easy. We had a long row to hoe.
Then Author Earnings gave a slideshow to the pink-haired mutants of SFWA at May’s Nebula Awards Conference. If you’re new here, Author Earnings is a data research operation run by a techie friend of author Hugh Howey. AE was the first outfit to cut through the anecdotal evidence and survivorship bias being flung around early in the tradpub v indie debate and look at the actual numbers from Amazon.
Sure, Howey’s politically deranged, but he had the chops to strike it rich back in Amazon’s Wild West days. His Data Guy knows his stuff, too. One way you can tell AE is reliable is their habit of unflinchingly confronting the data. They’ve got an open indie bias, but they don’t fudge the numbers or gloss over inconvenient facts if the data’s not in their favor. If one of their predictions fails, they stop, take a look at the data, and do their best to figure out why.
Another feather in AE’s cap is that they’re always digging for more and better information. They put a lot of effort into coming up with new ways to plumb the murky depths of KDP and shed light on the digital dark matter.
That brings us to Author Earnings’ report to the Nebula Conference. I won’t reproduce the whole spiel; just the slides that are of greatest interest to my readers, who tend to favor science fiction.
First up, a couple of charts that seem to confirm the old graph above:
I’m no data scientist, but my gut hunch on the cause of print SFF’s post-2009 nosedive has to do with the Kindle taking off. Yes, that sounds counterintuitive since we’re talking about print sales, but keep in mind that Amazon’s marketing relies on product recommendations targeted by users’ purchase histories. Consider also that Amazon is now the English-speaking world’s biggest print book retailer, as well.
Anyway, that’s the story on print SFF. Now take a look at what happened when AE factored in eBook sales.
Then they threw in audio as the cherry on top. Audio sales appear in yellow.
To my untrained eye, it looks like the big drop in tradpub’s print SFF sales coincided with the height of KDP’s Wild West period. The Kindle’s novelty was still a strong selling point, and indie authors with a little business know-how could pull down six figures without understanding Amazon’s algorithm. The eBook boom dominated the market and grew it. Then audio cut into eBook sales but also grew the genre around 2016, which is when the first chart in this post was compiled. That could be our explanation.
AE went on to break down trad SFF sales by publisher. Ready for a laugh?
Remember what I said about post-80s “realism” and romance disguised as science fiction? Turns out Houghton Mifflin has surpassed Tor as the biggest kid on the trad SFF block, and most of their unprecedented sales are due to The Handmaid’s Tale. That’s a pattern we’ll be seeing again.
AE’s presentation may have been comforting to the denizens of SFWA thus far, but it turns out that rosy picture of tradpub’s fortunes was just Lucy promising to hold the football so Charlie Wendig could kick it.
Legacy pub SFF is only surviving because of eBooks supplemented with audio, yet newpub represents a clear majority of SFF eBook sales.
It’s not hard to see why. Newpub authors are selling eBooks at reasonable prices while tradpub persists in gouging readers. Recall that the Big Five NY publishers’ rationale for charging outrageous eBook prices was to prop up their failing print sales while quashing the rise of eBooks. Now it looks like they partially succeeded at the former while utterly failing at the latter.
After that, AE decided to throw SFWA a bone. The following chart shows that while indies outnumber their tradpub counterparts two to one, Amazon top 100 selling trad authors outnumber indies in the top 100 by the same ratio.
Those figures would appear to reinforce the old canard casting indie pub as a crab basket where thousands of authors struggle in obscurity while tradpub gives its authors the visibility to break out from the pack. Once again, the data present a couple of inconvenient wrinkles.
First, tradpub is mainly selling backlisted SFF titles like The Handmaid’s Tale. Meanwhile, indies are mostly selling their newer releases. Those facts paint an ugly picture for new authors striving to break into tradpub.
Long story short, tradpub is good at exploiting the visibility of Boomer authors who built their brand recognition while the building was good. They’re not so hot at raising new authors’ profiles, as the total obscurity of this year’s Hugo nominees attests.
That was just the appetizer. Here’s the main course. Hint: it’s crow.
Patrick R. Tomlinson be like:
Jason Anspach, Nick Cole, and Chris Fox are always right. Find your market. Give them what they want at a reasonable price, and give it to them fast. Then the publishing world will be your oyster.
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