http://www.stephanie-osborn.com
with Dr. James K. Woosley
There's been a lot of discussion lately
about the publishing industry as a whole and how it is or isn't
growing, and whether writers are or are not competing. I've shared
that discussion with friends and family, debating both sides of it.
In general, I think that, especially with small presses and indie
presses springing up, the growth is actually good and a positive
thing. In theory we have a tremendous growth capability. In the short
term, however, and in practical terms, I'm not so sure it isn't like
saying we're going to fly to the Alpha Centauri system next year
because some scientists have managed to develop a quantum-scale warp
bubble in the lab. Theoretically it's possible, but practically,
there's a few bugs yet to be worked out.
My friend Dr. James K. Woosley is a
physicist and a Heinlein essayist; you'll meet him in more detail
next week. But he's a hard-core, long-time science
fiction/fantasy/specfic fan, and one of the friends with whom I've
been discussing this issue. He's also skilled at modeling systems,
down to the quantum level. Leave it to him to come up with a way to
quantify this...
~~~
“It's partially an application of
what I call a Sturgeon filter (because if 90% of everything is crap,
then 10% of everything is worthwhile, and successive application can
get to fairly decent estimates of demographics, as in 10% of people
are readers, 10% of those are readers of SF/Fantasy literature, 10%
are readers of more successively refined tastes, etc.
“Still, your potential reader base is
X. Any individual author's actual reader base is a fraction f of
that, or total number fX. Your base X has a total amount of
disposable income C, and an average amount C/X, which is used to
purchase reading material. The number of authors competing for that
money is A, and the average number of works each author has for sale
is n (where n is some conglomerate of new press and backlog, which
complicates the analysis), such that the total competing number of
works is N=nA. The average price of any work is P.
“Total individual items sold is thus
C/P.
“Average sales per item is C/NP.
“Sales per item can be assumed (first
order) to be Maxwell-distributed [an asymmetrical bell curve with one
side steeper than the other --Steph] about that mean.
“The second constraint is time to
read each book, moderated by the number of people who will buy
attractive books that they want to read but lack the time to read,
but also controlled by the fraction of people who re-read books.
Assume an average reading speed (including breaks) of 15,000 words
per minute or 6 hours for a typical novel, and assume further that
the average reader will read one novel per week or roughly 50 novels
per year, if they have the resources, but that an adult steady state
reader will on average re-read 25 novels per year, so that new novels
account for half of their reading.
“Assume that the book stockpiling
factor is also 2. (Speaking for myself it's probably closer to 290,
but...)
“The bottom line is that the
non-cash-constrained market is about 50X novels per year, so that
average sales computed that way is 50X/nA (where, again, n is some
conglomerate of new press and backlog, which complicates the
analysis). Or more simply, Sales(Avg)=50X/N.
“We'll assume cash parity initially,
so that C = 50XP.
“I think a good working assumption is
that X=1 million for SF/fantasy, so that about 50 million genre books
are purchased each year. That is probably a maximum.
“At any time, A is about 500, with
n=10 books (current plus backlog) in active publication.
“That yields a Maxwell-distributed
average of 10,000 copies per book sold.
“At that level of the analysis the
game is zero sum. The situation changes when either the fan base is
increased, or disposable income increases so that people are more
willing to stockpile books.
“And that's about it; danged if I
know what if anything the analysis buys.”
~~~
Note that that's an initial analysis,
and that the AVERAGE number of copies per book is 10,000. That isn't
the best-seller numbers, and it isn't the bottom of the list numbers.
This is how many books the mid-listers should be selling a year.
Food for thought.
~Stephanie Osborn
