One Small Publisher on the “Death of a Reading Society” by MaryChris Bradley

Much has been said in the last five years about the rapid decline in the number of people—particularly those 24 and younger—who read books for pleasure. In 2007, the National Endowment for the Arts reported that nearly half of our 18 to 24 year-olds, read no books at all for pleasure. Scarier still is how little this seems to matter to anyone.

Other studies indicate that we are becoming a population focused on ‘bite-sized’ reading, getting our information in small chunks from Yahoo articles, Facebook  and blog posts, and tweets. It appears that we are seemingly unable or unwilling to devote the necessary time and focus to longer articles and books.

Linton Weeks of NPR in his recent piece, “We Are Just Not Digging The Whole Anymore,” is concerned about what the Net is doing to our brains. He says:

“We just don’t do whole things anymore. We don’t read complete books—just excerpts. We don’t listen to whole CDs—just samplings. We don’t sit through whole baseball games—just a few innings. Don’t even write whole sentences. Or read whole stories like this one. We care more about the parts and less about the entire. We are into snippets and smidgens and clips and tweets. We are not only a fragmented society, but a fragment society. And the result: What we gain is the knowledge—or the illusion of knowledge—of many new, different and variegated aspects of life. What we lose is still being understood.”

The question becomes, is this from a lack of attention span, or—as Adam Thierer, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, suggests—merely “a cost of life in an age of information abundance.”

Then there’s the general disagreement over how much longer print books can last. MIT futurist Nicholas Negroponte said last August that digital books would be the dominant form in five years. Still others give it another eight to ten years causing some to suggest that print books today are where Kodak film was in the mid-1980’s.

Data would suggest that the future of the print book is measured not in years, but months. A recent example is rescued kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard's book, "A Stolen Life," which sold 175,000 copies in its first day of release. That total included print books, audiobooks narrated by Dugard and nearly 100,000 ebooks which represented a new record for one-day ebook sales for publisher Simon and Schuster.

Are you still with me? Then how about some more statistics?

80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

57 percent of new books purchased are not read to completion.

70 percent of books published never earn back their advance.

70 percent of the books published never make a profit.

(Source: Jerold Jenkins, www.JenkinsGroupInc.com)

 

About 120,000 books are published each year in the U.S.

(Source: www.bookwire.com)

 

A successful fiction book sells 5,000 copies.

A successful nonfiction book sells 7,500 copies.

(Source: Authors Guild, www.authorsguild.org)

 

Each day in the U.S., people spend 4 hours watching TV, 3 hours listening to the radio and 14 minutes reading magazines.

(Source: Veronis, Suhler & Associates investment banker)

So why would anyone in their right mind open a small publishing house these days?

The short answer: Because we believe in the reader.

The longer answer would have to include the belief that whatever format text is delivered in, it is the act of creating, writing, and sharing it that is of prime importance. How else can we share our experiences, histories, fantasies and events, as completely as we can in a book? Where else can anyone—from billionaire to library patron—learn, dream, or grow, more than from the simple act of reading a book?

Yes, the majority of books published never achieve bestseller status. Most books will lose money for their publishers. With the steep decline in hardcover sales, the already slim margins have become nearly invisible. Major publishers are increasingly unwilling to take on and grow new authors or keep mid-list authors (whose books sell between 5,000 and 15,000 copies annually) on their lists. But to be a publisher today, especially a small one, means having a firm belief that the act of sharing those words, those ideas, those books, is not fool-hardy or a bad business decision, but rather an act of bravery and faith in the future of that world which exists in our minds and thoughts.

The mid-list isn’t dead, it is simply moving to small publishers and into new formats. The same can be said about new authors. Small houses have to be nimble and lean. They have to move with the trends at lightning speed and they must do it all on a shoestring.

To rewrite a favorite Mark Twain quotation…the report of the death of the print book was an exaggeration. It hasn’t died, it has merely moved to a smaller house, and is now available as an ebook as well.

MaryChris Bradley is the founder and Publisher at Buddhapuss Ink LLC, a small house that proudly offers The Last Track, A Mike Brody novel by Sam Hilliard; Mystery Times Ten 2011, an anthology of Mystery Short Stories for the YA audience; and The Distant Shore, by Mariam Kobras scheduled for release on January 17, 2012.