Daunting Report
I just read a synopsis of the Book Retail Sector in Canada Report about the book market in Canada. It contains some depressing news for an aspiring writer like me. Specifically this line caught my attention:
- Of the 675,000 titles available in Canada in 2006, 45% did not sell a single copy.
And this one:
- 10,000 titles (2.7%) accounted for 64% of the unit sales.
And this one:
- 500 titles (2.7%) accounted for 22% of unit sales.
Although these numbers are for the Canadian market, they reflect the American trend of heavily marketing fewer and fewer titles in larger and larger stores. Hence the advent of book selling megastore/coffee houses such as Barnes and Noble. Small specialty book stores that catered to a specific genre have been replaced by a shelf or two in a store at the mall. Sure the megastore/coffee house has more titles over all, but the selection within each genre is limited compared to what the small stores carried. Because of this trend the variety of books being published has dwindled, along with the number of new authors being sold. This vicious cycle is leading to the death of the traditional publishing market.
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