Monday, August 1, 2016

The Anatomy of a Best-Selling Book

A friend sent me this info graphic a week ago. It was prepared by an organisation called "Expert Editor" based in the UK and by all accounts is relatively current.

It lists its various sources at the bottom of the graphic. Certainly, I can't validate the accuracy of the results nor the core data it was derived from, however, some of the information appears intuitively correct, e.g., dominance of USA, Amazon in e-books, romance as the biggest selling genre.

I particularly appreciated the four comments under "Content" at the top. It's fair to say the one about the female protagonist applies to the Christian fiction market and I'd hazard a guess the one about men preferring to read novels with male protagonists would mostly apply in our market. In saying that I'm very content reading either.

During the first decade of this century I had seen stats that revealed the religious/Inspirational market was the second largest genre after romance. So it was interesting to me that our market has slipped to third. Not by much mind you. And no surprise that it was Crime/Mystery that replaced it.

Also, interesting that more people have claimed to have read a mystery/crime book in the last year ( "Books People Have Claimed to Have Read …") and I take it that romance readers (27%) are a dedicated lot and mostly only read in that genre. What do you think?



What of the above stats did you find interesting or what surprised you? I'd love your thoughts.





Ian Acheson is an author and strategy consultant based in Sydney, Australia. Ian's first novel of speculative fiction, Angelguard, is available in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Angelguard was the recipient of the 2014 Selah Award for Best Speculative Fiction. You can find more about Angelguard at Ian's website, on his author Facebook page and Twitter

10 comments:

  1. Nice to see that my books cross the first three genres. I suspect the reason the female protagonist is true is because of the dominance of romance in sales. I've seen numerous articles by best-selling female authors in crime-mystery and general fiction disgruntled by lower advances and sales support than their male counterparts. Crime/mystery books that translate into blockbuster movies (and presumably sell better because of them) usually have male protagonists.

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    1. Hi Sandra - yes, you've covered the top 3. Well done! It's interesting the male/female debate as I presume far more women read fiction than blokes but as you intimate women will more likely read romance.

      I trust your writing is going well. Are you heading down to ACFW in August?

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  2. Given all the hype about e-books, I was interested to see that print book sales still far outnumber e-book sales.

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    1. Yes interesting Karen. I'm presuming (?) it's as a percentage of revenue as paper books are typically significantly more costly than ebooks. Rare to buy an ebook that costs more than $10 and vice versa with paper books, rare to buy one that costs less than $10.

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  3. Fascinating breakdown. Here's to Romance! :)

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    1. Rita, I had a hunch there'd be many in the ICFW community pleased with those stats.

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  4. Ian, great post! Thanks for sharing the stats with us. It's interesting to see romance is continuing to surge in popularity.

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    1. Thanks, Narelle. Stats sure bring out my nerdy side.

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  5. I wonder what China is reading? Top 6 market? Interesting. This is good. Thanks, Ian! See you soon :)

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    1. Well spotted, Patricia. Yes, what is China reading. And Japan?

      See you in 3 weeks.

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