Independent bookshops, independent web, a tale of two cities

Showing all posts tagged: James Patterson

Independent bookshops, independent web, a tale of two cities

4 October 2024

Louis Menand, writing for The New Yorker. How familiar does this sound:

Between 1998 and 2020, more than half of the independent bookstores in the United States went out of business.

It was a similar story for personal websites and blogs, though definitely across different timeframes. Maybe from 2010 — later even — as social media began to dominate the web. Something else was dominating the book market though:

Even though books make up a relatively small fraction of Amazon’s sales, they constitute more than half of all book purchases in the United States. Amazon is responsible for more than half of all e-book sales, and it dominates self-publishing with its Kindle Direct platform.

After a time though, consumers began to yearn for the bookstore vibe again. A certain something was missing when buying literature online. Book buyers wanted a more personal experience, one that only brick and mortar bookshops could offer:

One is the obvious benefit of being able to fondle the product. Printed books have, inescapably, a tactile dimension. They want to be held. “Browsing” online is just not the same experience. For that, you need non-virtual books in a non-virtual space.

Then the movement started. Not IndieWeb though, rather IndieBookstores. The push was spearheaded by American author James Patterson:

When the pandemic started, Patterson launched a movement, #SaveIndieBookstores, to help such businesses survive. He pledged half a million dollars, and, with the support of the American Booksellers Association and the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, the campaign ended up raising $1,239,595 from more than eighteen hundred donors.

Maybe that’s where I’ll leave this independent bookshops to independent web analogy/allegory, and suggest you read (or listen to the audio of) Menand’s article in full. Save for this sobering sentence:

According to Kristen McLean, an industry analyst, two-thirds of the books released by the top-ten trade publishers sell fewer than a thousand copies, and less than four per cent sell more than twenty thousand.

It ain’t easy being a writer; making a living from writing. If independent bookshops can help authors realise a even few more sales of their work, then that can only be a good thing.

How to write 31 books at the same time by James Patterson

20 February 2023

American author James Patterson recently told GQ Magazine he is working on no fewer than thirty-one manuscripts simultaneously. That’s impressive. Patterson’s output comes down to two things, one being his daily routine:

“I do what I do seven days a week. I’ll usually get up at 5:30 and work for an hour. Then, frequently, I will go out and hit a golf ball. They let me onto most of the courses I belong to very early, which is nice. If I come at 6:00, they say, “Go ahead.” I’ll go around for an hour, an hour and a half. Then I’m back here by 8:00, and then I’ll work till 6:00. I’ll take a couple breaks if I need them, which I usually do. And obviously, what that [day] results in is more books than my publisher wants. That’s why I started doing non-fiction, because they said, “Okay, yeah, we can handle one or two non-fiction.”

The other is team work. Even though Patterson is directly involved with each work in progress, he has a bevy of writers assisting him. It seems like the more books you write, the more you sell. And the more books you sell, the more money you make. And the more money you make, the more assistants can you employ to help write even more books.