Music Downloads Pass Retail Book Sales

Two news items featuring Nielsen data caught my eye today. The first was a report in the PW Newsletter saying that Nielsen BookScan put retail book sales for 2009 at 751.7 million units. Since Nielsen estimates that BookScan accounts for 75% of retail book sales, that would put 2009 retail book sales in the U.S. at 1 billion units.

An article in the WSJ today quoted the Nielsen SoundScan numbers for the music recorded 1.16 billion individual paid downloads of songs, the majority probably coming from iTunes. In addition, they reported some 373.9 million albums sold in 2009, both as CDs and as downloads. Some of these "songs" are no doubt audiobooks, but I have no idea if anybody tracks those percentages.

What struck me, if you trust Nielsen data and their error band, is that in 2009 the number of paid downloads of music singles was greater than the number of books sold at retailers. That's a pretty stupendous social statistic, especially if you make the assumption that most singles are purchased by younger people and most books are purchased by older people.

I couldn't find the Nielsen VideoScan numbers for 2009 anywhere, it would have been interesting to see how DVD sales stack up against books and music.

If you want another context for these numbers, on their busiest day this year, Amazon shipped over 7 million items, worldwide. Amazon actually sells more books overseas these days than in the U.S., but just for fun, let’s say that half of all Amazon item shipments that day were in the U.S., totaling 3.5 million. Now let’s assume Amazon could get that many items packaged for shipping 365 days a year. That would mean that Amazon alone has an operation capable of shipping over a billion books a year, equal to the entire retail book market in the U.S. as estimated by Nielsen.

It's something to wonder at:-)

What Is Book Marketing, Anyway?

Sometimes authors write me asking for advice about book marketing, but it turns out they want advice on tricking somebody (a store, a publisher, an individual reader) into buying their book. Other authors confuse book marketing with advertising, or with soliciting praise and reviews. For me, book marketing is a process encompassing many activities, from publicizing your book and making sure it's available for purchase to tracking the efficacy of your sales efforts and experimenting with alternative approaches. It's not enough to advertise, to obtain a measure of personal fame, to draw the praise from "thought leaders" or to obtain bookstore stocking. The goal of book marketing is closing sales.

Some guy e-mailed me a week or two ago to let me know that he had harpooned my web design in a design discussion group. I receive unsolicited aesthetic advice on a regular basis from web designers who couldn't attract a dozen adolescent visitors a day if they owned the domain "sex.com," but this individual took the time to add that my site owes its apparent success to (paraphrase) "secret practices yet to be revealed." Anybody who spends time on this site knows that the only secrets I keep are my politics and my bathroom habits, and if you're that interested in the latter you can read all about bowel movements on IFITJAMS.

Yesterday, the FonerBooks website drew just over 10,000 unique visitors, with over 8,000 of those arriving through search. That translated into a few hundred dollars of sales, including eight eBooks to customers in a half dozen countries and some Amazon Associate sales of paper books. Over the course of a year, the website will directly generate tens of thousands of dollars of eBook and paper book sales, and indirectly generate tens of thousands of dollars in paper book sales that I can't directly track. That's my idea of a successful book marketing website for a self publisher with a handful of titles, and the only "secret" is that I put visitors first and sales second.



The content based book marketing strategy only works if you give away some of your best work in order to draw visitors. In my case, I literally give away much more than I ever get around to publishing in books, because I enjoy creating content (writing and illustrating) and find it easier to publish online than to publish books. Every morning, I check the website visitor statistics BEFORE I check on book sales. As long as the site traffic is healthy, I know that the business will be healthy. No amount of diddling about with website design, balancing text and white space or tweaking order pages will draw visitors to your website. Other than writing and posting content, the only activity you absolutely have to spend time on for a new website is soliciting some quality incoming links. Since the only way to get quality incoming links from sites in your field is to publish quality content, publication has to come first.

I spent quite a bit of time at O'Reilly's Tools of Change last year talking about Internet strategy. It may seem strange that a one-man publishing shop with a four title list would have the nerve to be preaching at trade publishing executives about their approach to online book marketing, especially when my flagship website draws the drive-by ire of professional designers. But it's a rare trade publisher who can boast several times the FonerBooks web traffic, and despite their hundreds of employees and thousands of titles, most draw fewer visitors. It's also important to note that most large publishers design their sites around community building, with forums and frequent updates that should inflate their numbers. The consequence is that many of them draw only single digit percentages of their traffic from search, compared with over 75% for a strong content website. And what this means is that more than a decade after the Internet went mainstream, it's not too late for you to compete with the biggest NY trades online. Just don't waste another year thinking about it, because a couple of them actually read this blog:-)

Copyright Process Infringes On Creator Of Work

If I ran the copyright office and we fell a month behind on processing copyright registrations, I’d be working sixteen hours a day and nursing an ulcer. If we fell two months behind, I’d be handing out pink slips to my Federal employees, long spoiled with 99% positive job approval ratings, and to hell with their unions. If we fell three months behind processing registrations, I’d be so deeply ashamed that I would commit Seppuku.

I realized a couple weeks ago that a copyright registration I submitted back in the summer of 2008 still hadn’t been processed, so I went to their website to look for an e-mail address to complain. What I found was a note stating that an electronic registration may take up to six months for processing and the paper form registration may take up to eighteen months to process. In other words, as far as the Copyright Office is concerned, my registration certificate wasn’t even overdue yet! When I decided to write a post today with a copyright process flowchart I had kicking around, I went back to the copyright website to get a screen shot of the current copyright processing times:



That’s right, they’ve fixed the problem by changing their expectations. The copyright office now considers it normal to take up to nine months to process electronic registrations, and up to twenty-two months to process paper registrations. By that standard, they may feel I have nothing to complain about until April or May 2010. Shame on them! Shame on the Library of Congress, on the Copyright Office, and shame on every manager and employee who is waiting out their time for a pension and moaning about their workload and budgets. If the fault lies in their own incompetence, they should be fired, and if the fault is truly beyond their control, they should resign en masse in protest.

Yes, I’m speaking to you directly, employees of the copyright office. Have you no shame? Have none of you ever worked in real jobs, such that you know the difference between accomplishing a task and punching a clock? Do any of you really believe that the blame for your inability to perform a simple job lies with the Congress, or with the American people? Whatever money you are paid, you are stealing from the fee-paying publishers and taxpayers. The copyright office is a scandal and you should all be fired with prejudice.

I have two suggestions for addressing the problem. First, the process of registering copyrights should be split off from the depository function of the Library of Congress for all publishers, authors, creative artists, etc, who are willing to submit an electronic copy of the work separately. As those of us who have filed electronic copyright registrations using the ECO (Electronic Copyright Office) website know, the process is a bad joke terminating in printing a form to be mailed in. There is no reason in heaven or on earth for copyright registration not to have a purely electronic option, where registration receipt is instantaneous with submission. The so-called review process the copyright clerks occasionally delve into is a pointless exercise at best. The copyright clerks cannot hope to do the research for every (or any) copyright that would determine whether material is truly 100% original and properly credited and whether parts are stolen or borrowed from other works, so why go through the charade?

My second suggestion is that the Copyright Office be outsourced to as many competing entities as can pay the price of entry, just like Internet domain registration, which is a more important registration service by far. As far as I’m concerned, Congress could kick the whole copyright registration process to Google Books, who could do it in their sleep and probably wouldn’t even see the need to charge a fee. In the end, the only value of copyright registration is having a legal, time stamped record of the creation of a work that will allow a lawsuit for copyright infringement to be filed on the best terms for the creator of the work. After that, it’s all up to the attorneys and courts, the Copyright Office serves no role as an advisor or a policing entity in infringement cases. As to the depository function of the Library of Congress, if they really want copies of all the books being published, they can ask publishers and authors to send them two copies, most will be more than happy.



The one thing I would warn against is simply privatizing the Copyright Office to establish a monopoly agency, like Bowker, the monopoly ISBN registrar for the United States. Having to deal with and pay incredibly inflated fees to another Bowker would just about kill most aspiring small publishers. Of course, the continued existence Bowker may give somewhere for all the Copyright Office employees to go when they get fired - they would fit right in there.