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May 24, 2006
The life-expectancy of the bestseller is shrinking
Here's an interesting study: Apparently the life-expectancy of a bestselling fiction book has been steadily shrinking. Or to put it another way, more and more books are becoming bestsellers -- but for shorter and shorter periods.
This data comes from a study conducted by Lulu.com, the online self-publishing company. It found that back in the 1960s, the average bestselling novel remained on the New York Times' fiction list for 21.7 weeks -- and only about three novels a year made it to that exalted status. But in the 2000s so far, the average bestselling novel stays on the Times' list for a mere 3.3 weeks -- but over 18 books each year do this.
In essence, the very concept of a bestseller is changing. A bestseller is no longer big, huge, rare book that dominates the national discourse for months. Instead, it's a quick hit, a temporary talking point that flares up and then vanishes. As the CEO of Lulu.com puts it ...
"The blockbuster novel is heading the way of the mayfly," says Bob Young, CEO of Lulu.com, referring to the famously short-lived insect.
The culprit here? The 500-channel universe, and its ferocious stepchild, the Internet. The sheer volume and variety of media has so exploded in the last twenty years that it's easier to make a quick profit aiming for a niche than aiming for the mass public: All those super-short-lived bestsellers were, I'd wager, latching their wagons either to a) some highly quotidian topic -- i.e. some trend destined to vanish in a few months, taking the book with it -- or b) some specialized audience that will rear up, buy the book en masse, but, being a niche, be unable to infect the broader public with their enthusiasm, thus again producing a narcotically intense but narcotically brief popularity-span for a book.
The wild card here is how the Internet, and social technologies like blogging and Google, affect popularity. As Clay Shirky puts it, the old adage in the cultural industries was "filter, then publish": I.e. the publishers would sift through 10,000 manuscripts, pick their favorite 10, and publish those books. Ideas, in that world, come along only rarely and are thus mulled over by the public for a good long while. But in the Internet age, the paradigm is inverted: We publish, then we filter.
These days, everyone and their dog sets up a blog and expounds upon cool stuff, and the 10,000-fold torrent of ideas hits the public directly like an avalanche. Ideas aren't rare any more. To keep from being deluged, we, the audience, do our own filtering, our own editing. We pick from amongst the online offerings by finding stuff on blogs we trust, or emails from friends, or "you may also like this" recommendations on e-commerce sites. In a publish-then-filter environment, we rely less on editors and more on tools that help us filter the opinions of our trusted friends and communities.
That's the paradigm that's emerging, anyway. So how is that going to affect what books become popular -- and stay that way?
Posted by Clive Thompson at May 24, 2006 04:49 PM
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Hm. I'd have to see the numbers to know what's really going on, but I'm deeply suspicious of anything that compares averages. Clearly, there are a lot more books that peak at # 1, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there are fewer books that are spending six months in the top ten. If the difference between Dan Brown and James Michener is that Dan Brown's book jumped around a lot in the top three over a hundred weeks, where James Michener's stayed number one for fifty weeks and then dropped like a rock, I'm not sure we've learned that there's a big shift in the staying power of blockbusters.
Also, they have changed the way they gather the numbers for that list over the decades, and the changes may well make it easier to peak at #1, rather than to spread the peak over three weeks at #3 (wouldn't pre-sales and improved distribution also have this effect?).
Essentially, I'm guessing that in any period of, say, three years, over the last forty, there have been four or five long-lasting blockbuster books that stayed on the chart, and near the top of the chart, for a year or so. What has more likely changed is that of the other very popular books, they are squeezing their popularity into higher, shorter peaks. That is a difference, but I'm not sure the difference is in the blockbusters.
Thanks,
-Vardibidian.
Posted by: Vardibidian at May 24, 2006 7:01 PM
Good point -- an increase in one-week wonders would drag the overall average time-spent-on-the-hit-list downwards, even if the total number of "huge" books that stay at #1 for months has remained the same! Also very true that the way lists are collected changes all the time. I wrote about this a few years ago, though these days we now have Bookscan, an agency that meters the sale of books at the cash register -- far more objective a way to divine bestsellers than the traditional newspaper version, which basically still just involves calling around a cherry-picked subset of bookstores they think are influential or cool to find out what's selling.
Posted by: Clive at May 24, 2006 9:48 PM
I'm going to second Vardibidian's comment about needing better statistics, but I don't think it is contradicts your point, Clive. Your scenario 'b' - rabid audience who all rush out and buy the book the first week - is exactly what happened with Neil Gaiman's novel, Anansi Boys last fall. It debuted at number one on the NYT bestseller list on October 9th, on the strength of all the neilgaiman.com readers who pre-ordered it. It was #8 the following week, presumably because of the people who bought it after its release, in bookstores or online. And then it disappeared. (well, not really - I'm sure that it has been selling steadily since, just not at bestseller list levels). I'm sure similar events have occurred for other highly-anticipated books, and that would certainly skew the stats. And that kind of peak is predicated on widespread knowledge of the book's imminent arrival - until the last couple of years, with the rise of Amazon and blogs, how often did anyone know about a book before its release?
Posted by: debcha at May 24, 2006 11:14 PM
Hi Clive, What puzzles me about the whole "death of the novel" panic these days is the constant preoccupation with "bestsellers" and "blockbusters" as thought they are the only books worth considering when assessing the depth of breadth of contemporary readership. Given that most publishing houses throw their financial clout behind only a few titles, what the success of blockbusters measures is the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns,not the public's interest in books.
Posted by Susan at May 24, 2006 11:23 P
Posted by: Susan at May 24, 2006 11:26 PM
Clive,
I've been thinking about this for even longer than the internet has been a factor… Part of what plays a role is that the creative population has gotten much larger than it used to be because A) there are just more people, and B) it is more possible to eke out a midrange living in the arts than it once was.
This is in part why we don't have all-consuming art movements that take over the market the way Impressionism, Cubism or Pop Art did. What we have instead are tons of micro movements that have the same population or intellectual capacity as past movements, but aren't able to monopolize the attention market due to the fact that there are just too many of them for any one to achieve dominance. Same with art communities, styles or schools— It took me most of the five years I lived in Pilsen to realize that the art community there was incredibly similar in lifestyle or flavor to any of the great art communities of the past… paris in the 20's, NYC in the 50's or 80s, etc. We had everything they had in terms of vibrant community, collaboration, competition etc. but we never had the *fame.* And although some of the artists from that scene are or will be very well known, it's unlikely they'll ever achieve the staus of Picasso or Henry Miller. Why? Just because there are too many people in the field for any one to get all the headlines all the time.
It's like Warhol's 15 minutes of fame carried to it's logical absurdity. Now everyone can have 15 minutes of fame, but no one can actually hold on to fame as readily as in the past. You get famous, you get press, you disappear to make room for the next one. On the other hand, you can get famous faster, and more often. I keep amusing my friends by saying "I'm famous this week." But then it passes, and I end up having to get famous again, elsewhere, for something else. Bit by bit, I think it accumulates, but overall the spotlight becomes ever more like a strobe light.
Posted by: johntunger at May 25, 2006 12:30 PM
It is interesting that I just got the Anansi Boys for $9 remaindered already at a shop off Yonge St. in Toronto.
But I am wondering how much of this is a self fulfulling prophecy by conventional wisdom in the publishing industry and how much is due to the multimedia world? Let's not blame the net for everything.
It has been the conventional wisdom now for several years that any book has a shelf life of three months, period. As a news producer, my colleagues and I know that dealing with the publishing publicist on a breaking news and trying to book for a TV interview, an author who has not published in the past 3 months is almost worse than dealing with the government PR flacks in the days of Harper and Bush. These "book" (?) people have no idea of news pegs and reject any idea that some new event could suddenly make a book relevant to the buying public. (The buying public of course is busy clicking on Amazon in those cases).
It is largely because these days publishers do not sell the to the public, they sell to the buyers in the chains, who work from those computer models. And if the computer says it won't sell, it won't because it won't be published. One of the problems is that the US publishing industry got caught in a stupid tax law change in the 90s that made it more expensive to warehouse books, destroying the back list which was steady long tail income for the publishers up until then. What made them stupid was adopting the quick remainder policy in countries that did not have the same US tax implications.
Dune is a franchise, been successful for about 40 years. Yet it was originally turned down by every major publisher, until it was picked up by a company that normally produced auto manuals because the editor in chief liked the serial in Analog magazine.
The real test might be is the numnber of steady sales a book has once it drops off the list after 3.5 weeks.....the long tail again. And that is why Abebooks, which sells used books, is becoming a hot commodity in the e-commerce world, behind Amazon. The problem is that the author doesn't get any money for the used books sold on Abe.
Posted by: Robin Rowland at May 28, 2006 12:39 AM
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Hm. I'd have to see the numbers to know what's really going on, but I'm deeply suspicious of anything that compares averages. Clearly, there are a lot more books that peak at # 1, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there are fewer books that are spending six months in the top ten. If the difference between Dan Brown and James Michener is that Dan Brown's book jumped around a lot in the top three over a hundred weeks, where James Michener's stayed number one for fifty weeks and then dropped like a rock, I'm not sure we've learned that there's a big shift in the staying power of blockbusters.
Also, they have changed the way they gather the numbers for that list over the decades, and the changes may well make it easier to peak at #1, rather than to spread the peak over three weeks at #3 (wouldn't pre-sales and improved distribution also have this effect?).
Essentially, I'm guessing that in any period of, say, three years, over the last forty, there have been four or five long-lasting blockbuster books that stayed on the chart, and near the top of the chart, for a year or so. What has more likely changed is that of the other very popular books, they are squeezing their popularity into higher, shorter peaks. That is a difference, but I'm not sure the difference is in the blockbusters.
Thanks,
-Vardibidian.
Posted by: Vardibidian
at May 24, 2006 7:01 PM
Good point -- an increase in one-week wonders would drag the overall average time-spent-on-the-hit-list downwards, even if the total number of "huge" books that stay at #1 for months has remained the same! Also very true that the way lists are collected changes all the time. I wrote about this a few years ago, though these days we now have Bookscan, an agency that meters the sale of books at the cash register -- far more objective a way to divine bestsellers than the traditional newspaper version, which basically still just involves calling around a cherry-picked subset of bookstores they think are influential or cool to find out what's selling.
Posted by: Clive at May 24, 2006 9:48 PM
I'm going to second Vardibidian's comment about needing better statistics, but I don't think it is contradicts your point, Clive. Your scenario 'b' - rabid audience who all rush out and buy the book the first week - is exactly what happened with Neil Gaiman's novel, Anansi Boys last fall. It debuted at number one on the NYT bestseller list on October 9th, on the strength of all the neilgaiman.com readers who pre-ordered it. It was #8 the following week, presumably because of the people who bought it after its release, in bookstores or online. And then it disappeared. (well, not really - I'm sure that it has been selling steadily since, just not at bestseller list levels). I'm sure similar events have occurred for other highly-anticipated books, and that would certainly skew the stats. And that kind of peak is predicated on widespread knowledge of the book's imminent arrival - until the last couple of years, with the rise of Amazon and blogs, how often did anyone know about a book before its release?
Posted by: debcha
at May 24, 2006 11:14 PM
Hi Clive, What puzzles me about the whole "death of the novel" panic these days is the constant preoccupation with "bestsellers" and "blockbusters" as thought they are the only books worth considering when assessing the depth of breadth of contemporary readership. Given that most publishing houses throw their financial clout behind only a few titles, what the success of blockbusters measures is the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns,not the public's interest in books.
Posted by Susan at May 24, 2006 11:23 P
Posted by: Susan at May 24, 2006 11:26 PM
Clive,
I've been thinking about this for even longer than the internet has been a factor… Part of what plays a role is that the creative population has gotten much larger than it used to be because A) there are just more people, and B) it is more possible to eke out a midrange living in the arts than it once was.
This is in part why we don't have all-consuming art movements that take over the market the way Impressionism, Cubism or Pop Art did. What we have instead are tons of micro movements that have the same population or intellectual capacity as past movements, but aren't able to monopolize the attention market due to the fact that there are just too many of them for any one to achieve dominance. Same with art communities, styles or schools— It took me most of the five years I lived in Pilsen to realize that the art community there was incredibly similar in lifestyle or flavor to any of the great art communities of the past… paris in the 20's, NYC in the 50's or 80s, etc. We had everything they had in terms of vibrant community, collaboration, competition etc. but we never had the *fame.* And although some of the artists from that scene are or will be very well known, it's unlikely they'll ever achieve the staus of Picasso or Henry Miller. Why? Just because there are too many people in the field for any one to get all the headlines all the time.
It's like Warhol's 15 minutes of fame carried to it's logical absurdity. Now everyone can have 15 minutes of fame, but no one can actually hold on to fame as readily as in the past. You get famous, you get press, you disappear to make room for the next one. On the other hand, you can get famous faster, and more often. I keep amusing my friends by saying "I'm famous this week." But then it passes, and I end up having to get famous again, elsewhere, for something else. Bit by bit, I think it accumulates, but overall the spotlight becomes ever more like a strobe light.
Posted by: johntunger
at May 25, 2006 12:30 PM
It is interesting that I just got the Anansi Boys for $9 remaindered already at a shop off Yonge St. in Toronto.
But I am wondering how much of this is a self fulfulling prophecy by conventional wisdom in the publishing industry and how much is due to the multimedia world? Let's not blame the net for everything.
It has been the conventional wisdom now for several years that any book has a shelf life of three months, period. As a news producer, my colleagues and I know that dealing with the publishing publicist on a breaking news and trying to book for a TV interview, an author who has not published in the past 3 months is almost worse than dealing with the government PR flacks in the days of Harper and Bush. These "book" (?) people have no idea of news pegs and reject any idea that some new event could suddenly make a book relevant to the buying public. (The buying public of course is busy clicking on Amazon in those cases).
It is largely because these days publishers do not sell the to the public, they sell to the buyers in the chains, who work from those computer models. And if the computer says it won't sell, it won't because it won't be published. One of the problems is that the US publishing industry got caught in a stupid tax law change in the 90s that made it more expensive to warehouse books, destroying the back list which was steady long tail income for the publishers up until then. What made them stupid was adopting the quick remainder policy in countries that did not have the same US tax implications.
Dune is a franchise, been successful for about 40 years. Yet it was originally turned down by every major publisher, until it was picked up by a company that normally produced auto manuals because the editor in chief liked the serial in Analog magazine.
The real test might be is the numnber of steady sales a book has once it drops off the list after 3.5 weeks.....the long tail again. And that is why Abebooks, which sells used books, is becoming a hot commodity in the e-commerce world, behind Amazon. The problem is that the author doesn't get any money for the used books sold on Abe.
Posted by: Robin Rowland at May 28, 2006 12:39 AM