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HC Christmas Day downloads top 100,000
03.01.12 | Benedicte Page
Over 100,000 HarperCollins UK e-books were downloaded on Christmas Day, the publisher has announced.
HarperCollins said the figure, which covers UK and international territories including Australia and New Zealand, but not the US, was a record high and an increase of over 600% on the daily average title download during the previous month.
The most popular titles downloaded were George R R Martin's Game of Thrones, Confessions of a GP by Dr Benjamin Daniels and Twelve Days of Christmas by romantic comedy novelist Trisha Ashley. Sanctus by Simon Toyne and Midnight by Josephine Cox were also among the strong sellers.
HarperCollins Group digital director David Roth-Ey said put the rise down to e-readers and tablets becoming a "must-have gift" this Christmas. The publisher brought several new e-books out in the run-up to December 25th, including a series of digital-only short stories, 12 Days of Winter by the Stuart MacBride, which were released individually between the 1st and 12th December.
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Does anybody still think that general books have any future in retail ? I guess Harper Collins don't or they wouldn't be bragging about launching digital only short stories would they ? When will it all be digital only , just a couple of years for popular fiction I'm guessing? Then the digital market share will make a step change from 14% through 25%[2014 ?] to 40% and beyond.
London readers dont really see this yet, because of the large book buying concentration in the centre still being served by bookshops. Look outside of the M25 , mega populations of the East Midlands served by a Waterstones in Milton Keynes and currently another in Northampton .That's virtually it .
The conventional trade it appears has a small but ever widening hole below the waterline,.......... like the Titanic.
It's not really a case of bragging about selling some books in ebook form only. It's impossible to get bookshops to stock some types of book - specifically poetry and short stories. Ebooks allow publishers to sign some authors as ebook only, when we would have to turn them away if we could only publish them in print.
Ebooks also let us publish some of the authors who contact us from overseas as they are also hard to promote in printed form as it's very hard to get them into bookshops.
So it really works both ways. If bookshops stocked more short story collections then you could say ebooks were taking this part of the market from them. But that really isn't the case. Ebooks are letting publishers expand, and I believe publishers really need ebooks to take off if they are to survive. I'm not saying bookshops should stock more short stories and poetry - I know you find it hard to sell. So it's important to understand each other and be mutually supportive about all of this.
There is certainly a place for printed books and bookshops. Ebooks are part of a publisher's whole product range and I don't for one minute think publishers want it to be either/or with printed books or ebooks.
In the US they are further ahead than us on how ebooks have taken off. There are publishers who run good businesses producing ebooks only. This is excellent, it allows publishing outlets to continue, and provides those outlets for authors. On the other hand, authors prefer a publisher who produces printed books and ebooks as this is seen as better. So I do think we all need to get behind ebooks and help them take off.
The future for publishers depends on it, and the future for bookshops does depend on publishers surviving. There are ways bookshops can get involved in selling ebooks.
@Adele "If bookshops stocked more short story collections then you could say ebooks were taking this part of the market from them"
I have worked in many bookstores over the past 15 years and have countless friends and families who work in others with pretty much eaxctly the same tales to tell. It is virtually impossible to get customers to buy short stories !!
An example. A few customers complain about the lack of short stories, yet 4 years ago in the waterstones I worked in at the time, we had 6 large shelves for short stories. It was a good range and that wasn't including all the author short story collections which we also had shelved with the authors in fiction. We made £410.00 in 2007 from short stories in a city centre bookshop. IN A WHOLE YEAR !!
Can't say fairer than that.
Can't keep all those short stories on the shelf rendering it virtually dead stock, especially as publishers are reluctant to do returns.
So yes I agree with you. Digital short stotries are the way to go. Authors will still be able to write them as publishers won't have to take a risk over printing qty's and those die hards who still like their short stories (I am one of them) still have some place to go to get their fix.
I receive such wonderful short story submissions from time to time. It's harder to sell short stories than it is to sell poetry, because as least with poetry we have a thriving network of live events where poets sell a few books each time. This doesn't lead to massive sales, but it can pay for a print run. Short story writers are in terrible trouble and it breaks my heart to send them away.
Ebooks are an answer to this, and the authors would be happy if they could see this market as a viable one. It's great to see short stories mentioned in this article as being popular over Christmas in ebook form.
Just one point I'll have to disagree on. We have to supply books sale or return to bookshops. This is completely normal. Bookshops can get all of our books sale or return from our distributor Central Books for bookshops in the UK and Ireland.
The problem is that bookshops won't even take poetry and short stories sale or return. Even with no risk or expense to themselves, they are physically limited in terms of shelf space. So they don't want to clog up the shelves with poetry and short stories, even if we deliver them for free and pick them up again for free.
Ebooks are a real godsend in many ways and we do need to help this market take off.
The comment I replied to in my original post seems to have been removed so my comment has lost some of its sense. I was answering somebody who was asking if bookshops had a future if publishers were pushing ebooks more, and also bragging about short stories available only in ebook form.
Er my comment has been removed ?
Unsure why that happened Julian, but now reinstated.
Thank goodness for that. I thought Julian had left me looking like I was talking to myself! There have been a lot of spam messages removed from a lot of discussions so I imagine some valid messages got deleted by mistake along with them.
I wonder what the ASP was on those 100k ebooks? It's quite easy to achieve a short-term sales boost to ebooks by setting prices low enough.
We find it hard to set a price lower than £5 on ebooks because Amazon takes 30%, we share income 50/50 with the author, and the VAT on ebooks is way too high. I've taken a look at the cost of ebooks in the top 10 being displayed and there seems to be an average price of £3, so the pricing is low. I think you're right that this kind of price isn't sustainable long term by a publisher if we're to give authors a royalty on each book that makes sense. Even at a cost of £5-£6 this leaves an income of just over £1 each for the author and publisher. I suppose self published books could stay at a lower cost than £5 and get a little income for the author. Or publishers could pay an incredibly low royalty. But really we need realistic prices for ebooks to be a valid part of a publisher's list and to reward that authors fairly.
Julian, I suspect HC is 'bragging' because, like many publishers, it wants to increase its leverage with apple and amazon, attractiveness to authors, recognition with readers and 'numbers' news stories are one part of the PR armoury. It is great that they are selling more short stories in digital. However, absolutely no-one is looking beyond the headline numbers - how many e books were bundled, what was the average selling price, what is the average number of copies purchased by each customer, how many do they actually read, are they heavy book buyers or 'new' customers.....We really need some solid analysis that goes beyond the hype. The trade press should be doing it. Why isn't it?
We are outside the M25 and our two shops experienced an overall 7.5% sales increase in the last quarter - 9% in December - so it is not all doom and gloom. But the point about great swathes of the country being without bookshops is well made. It is not due to ebooks - it is preferential deals for Amazon and WH Smith, high rents, lower disposable income. The conventional trade has to offer more - I wouldn't contemplate opening a new shop without also having a cafe (75% plus gross margin, little working capital) or stocking children's books without extensive associated non-book stock - making these unusual and destination stores......and healthy wholesalers where next day supply is essential for optimising use of expensive space.
@Corey, it would be possible to have 'bargain' days to boost sales. I notice a lot of self published authors do this with 'free book days'. I wonder if these count towards making a book a bestseller if the book is for sale some of the time, and free for sales boosting periods.
Yes, download is the same as sell. I'm not sure if the free and bargain books count in this. Usually they separate the books that were free from those that were sold and there are two separate charts. However, books can be on sale very cheaply. I'm also curious to know if the books given away on special 'free day' promotions can count in the sales for a book that normally has a cost. I think there might be all sorts of ways of boulstering up the 'sales' for a book by having bargain days and weeks.
I really wanted to have my own e-reader. I like reading but I cannot afford to buy lots of physical books.
I do understand that it can be a benefit of all the free and bargain books that people on a very tight budget can afford to read as much as they like.
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