Sign of the times? Yikes!

Ehh, somebody's been tolling the death knell for books for one reason or another for decades. Yet in the post-Harry Potter world, children's books have been the fastest growing area of publishing for years. Kids today read SO much more than kids thirty years ago, when I was the FREAK for carrying a book in my backpack. My junior-high son actually talks about books with his FRIENDS and no one thinks he's a weirdo.

So I'm not worrying about it just yet.

I don't think there is anything to worry about. Books have survived radios and televisions. I can't imagine the economy will have that much of an effect. If a book is good... people will buy it.

I agree. They could also be speaking about the economy as it pertains to their house--it may not be selling books as well as anticipated in a certain area. This could be for lots of reasons, including tighter promotion budgets, etc.

As much as I would like to believe that the state of our economy will not effect book sales, I find that hard to rationalize. When people are losing jobs, when there's less income being generated, when prices for everything has gone through the roof, when the cost for "entertainment" of all sorts has nearly tripled in the last eight years, when people are being laid off, when corporate budgets have tightened, etc., etc., it only stands to reason that less books will be sold. Of course I hope I'm dead wrong, but given what many of us do for a living--writing--and others do part time as a source of income or intended income, I think it's something that each of us has to consider.

Please let me be wrong!

scope said:

As much as I would like to believe that the state of our economy will not effect book sales, I find that hard to rationalize. When people are losing jobs, when there's less income being generated, when prices for everything has gone through the roof, when the cost for "entertainment" of all sorts has nearly tripled in the last eight years, when people are being laid off, when corporate budgets have tightened, etc., etc., it only stands to reason that less books will be sold. Of course I hope I'm dead wrong, but given what many of us do for a living--writing--and others do part time as a source of income or intended income, I think it's something that each of us has to consider.

Please let me be wrong!

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Well, yes, but on the other hand people are still driving their SUVs, even at $4.00 a gallon gas. A huge percentage of us still have lots of disposable income. And when it comes to entertainment, hard times have strange effects. Think about Hollywood during the Great Depression. The longer the soup lines got, the more people turned to the movies to take their minds off their problems. Books, especially kids' books, may well survive the economic turmoil because of the escapism they offer.

I think adults will still buy books for children because they want them to develop a love of reading and perform well in school. They may well cut back on spending on themselves but spending on their children comes a lot further down the line.

Did anyone happen to see Bowkers statistics for new books published in 2007, a year when our economy was bad, but no where as bad as in 2008?

Total new books published in 2007 by TRADITIONAL houses rose a mere 1%, although children's books rose about 12% (something like that). With all objectivity, how can we expect total new books published in 2008 to be anything but worse--as much as it pains me to say so? Of course some genres will do better than others, but if publishers are suffering it has to effect every genre.

Self-published titles rose from about 20,000 in 2006 to about 135,000 in 2008. Obviously dramatic, but in my humble opinion not a healthy indicator. If we want to go crazy I guess we could say that 10% of these self published books -- 13,500 books -- turned a profit of some sort. If you agree with the 10%, which I think is high, that means that about about 121,500 self published books lost money for their authors in 2007. So I think we really have to scrutinize this huge increase in self-publishing. The large number doesn't surprise me since it appears that many writers, especially first time writers, pursue this route rather than suffer all of the the pains and time involved with submitting to traditional houses, or conscientiously seeking an agent to help them get published.

Okay, on the slightly sad news side, I have a friend who gets paired with writers to illustrate PBs. She's done a lot of work for S&S, HoughtonMifflin, etc. Her agent said there's not a lot of work out there, and said that last year too, for the first time. Soo.... I do believe, though, if you have a good PB, it will get published.

Now the good news. I've read (and heard from an agent) that MGs and YAs are doing just fine.

ETA: I believe All About Kids hasn't been accepting mss. since last year, from what I remember.