What are sales like?

[T'Girl]

I was in Barnes and Nobels the other day (buying magazines) and noticed that the once huge Star Trek section is down to only a single floor level shelf below the near overflowing Star Wars books. This got me wondering how the sales are doing?

I mean in comparison to the sales in say the eighties and nineties. I tried google and couldn't find exactly what I was looking for, yearly per unit sales figures, not dollar amounts, but number of books and E-books sold.

Anybody know?

 

[Lunarflower]

I've noticed the same thing at both Barnes and Noble, and Borders. A few years ago they had two or three shelves, now it is one shelf or less.

 

[Christopher]

What are sales like? Sales are like a little tweeting bird chirping in a meadow. Sales are like a wreath of pretty flowers which smell bad. Are you sure your circuits are registering correctly? Your ears are green.



Anyway, sales figures are confidential. For what it's worth, Trek books don't show up on the best-seller lists anywhere near as often as they did in the '80s. But the genre market is more fragmented now, with a lot more tie-ins to choose from, even within Trek fiction itself. So that would mean a smaller piece of the pie for each individual book, even if the overall line is still going strong.

 

[Therin of Andor]

I was in Barnes and Nobels the other day (buying magazines) and noticed that the once huge Star Trek section is down to only a single floor level shelf below the near overflowing Star Wars books.

Well, I took some pics for Scott Pearson that showed several Sydney bookshops where new ST books have encroached into the Star Wars section in recent weeks. During the publicity blitz for JJ Abrams' ST movie, many Aussie bookshops restored neglected ST sections - but "Doctor Who" and "Twilight" seem to have stolen shelf space formerly given over to "Star Wars".

This stuff is cyclic.

Many diehard ST readers "special order" their books - the books never actually go on the open shelves - or they order online.

 

[T'Girl]

sales figures are confidential

Really, is it okay if I ask why?

Car companies publish their sales figures, when I researched TV's recently (bought my parents one for Christmas), the electronics companies just about scream their sales figures. Outside my uncles factory, Boeing has a electronic billboard crowing every airplane contract.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Really, is it okay if I ask why?

Car companies publish their sales figures...

With MMPBs, what exactly do you measure? Most magazine publishers deliberately make five issues for a rack in order to sell one copy, and the remainder can get pulped or returned when the next issue arrives. MMPB books are similar, considered way more disposable than a car, TV or plane, so while one printer could produce precisely what they thought they needed, another could make up to four times as many copies for hardly any extra charge (except extra storage). Cars, TVs and planes don't get pulped if they don't sell.

"Real" sales figures might not be known by Simon & Schuster for months/years. I recall Marco saying the sales figures for the first DS9 reprint omnibus weren't available until after he approved the second DS9 omnibus - and then, when it was too late, they realised that the sales would not be what they needed to be.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Presumably the sales are good enough for them to still be churning out a mind boggling 12 or so novels per year, despite the shows they were based on having long ended.

Sales would probably have been better if Bad Robot hadn't axed the nuTrek line last year. We should be on the second wave by now.

 

[Scout101]

I was actually in my first book store last month (smallish one in a mall) that didn't have a single Trek book in it. Used to seeing the half a shelf or smaller setups even in big stores, but i was shocked that in this one, the number had dropped to zero. Checked the new release section, sci fi, nada. Honestly, almost HAVE to buy these things online these days, i have a hard time finding the new releases a lot of the time...

 

[Allyn Gibson]

sales figures are confidential

Really, is it okay if I ask why?

The only answer to that is, "Because it's always been done that way."

As you note, in many other entertainment industries, and some non-entertainment industries, sales numbers are readily thrown around. A lay person can easily get sales figures for comic books, magazines, DVDs. You can get a fairly good ballpark number of the number of people who went to see the latest theatrical blockbuster. Television ratings are widely known.

What sets these apart from books, in my view, is that there's a certain amount of competition. Companies want to shout their triumph over their competitors. And in comics and movies, the audience culture is such that hard numbers encourage fanboyism -- "My favorite comic sold better than yours," "My movie stomped your movie into the dirt!" -- with fanboyish trash-talk.

The book industry isn't like that. Ian points out that books, as a whole, are far more diffuse -- and more mainstream -- than, say, super-hero comics. The pond is bigger, basically. And book readers are a little more genteel. Not a lot of trash talking goes on in bookstores.

And it's not that hard numbers for books don't exist -- BookScan compiles book sales figures. But the BookScan numbers like Fight Club, no one talks about them. (Also, BookScan numbers reveal that what everyone reports as best-sellers actually aren't; classics like Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald sell, in aggregate over the year, more than the "official" best-sellers do.)

The code of silence in publishing is an ingrained, cultural thing. The New York publishing world would have to collapse and the ground salted so nothing would ever grow there again before it would change.