Pulp fiction

Dalya Alberge writes in The Daily Mail about How 77million books a year are turned into pulp fiction.

She says: "Publishers are quietly disposing of around 77million unsold books a year." And this is only in the UK. These unsold books returned by the bookshops "are being shredded, pulped or sold on market stalls at a fraction of their original price." (That would include BookXcess, I guess.)

Some interesting numbers:

Bookshops returned 61 million books to publishers in the UK, with another 16 million coming from overseas retailers.

Out of 86,000 new titles published in the UK in 2009, 59,000 sold an average of 18 copies (not sure how they get that number), less than the average of 41 copies for POD books.

Cherie Blair who received a GBP 1 million advance for her autobiography, has sold only 23,412 hardbacks and 10,240 paperbacks since 2008. (Wonder if they used the photo above for publicity.)

Electronic books outsold physical books for the first time on Amazon on Christmas Day.

Julian Barnes's Nothing To Be Frightened Of, published in March 2008 has sold only 8,849 copies. (His earlier book Arthur and George sold 500,000 copies.) Martin Amis's The Second Plane sold 4,493 paperbacks from January, and Will Self’s Butt sold 8,200 from May.

And other observations:

The whole industry is a lottery, with publishers risking large sums, always hoping for a bestseller.

Dan Franklin, publisher of Jonathan Cape, says the system is 'raving mad'.

The Daily Mail