Where Books Sell

Paul Levine tipped me off to this interesting blog post by James Grippando, who was on a panel with James Patterson at a marketing seminar. Some interesting facts came out at the seminar about where the most books are sold…

Can you name the two main outlets for hardcover bestsellers? Are you guessing Barnes and Noble and Borders? Wrong. It’s Costco and Walmart. The key to my question is the word bestsellers. Costco and Walmart sell fewer titles, but they sell more bestsellers. Their share of the book market overall, says Deighton, is 12%, but their share of the “bestseller” market is 34%. Here’s something else I found interesting: In 2004 Amazon.com had only a 2% share of the bestseller market—a number that Deighton regards as “relatively insignificant.”

Just goes to show that authors and self-promotion gurus who fixate on Amazon stats are wasting their time.

2 thoughts on “Where Books Sell”

  1. “Just goes to show that authors and self-promotion gurus who fixate on Amazon stats are wasting their time.”
    Yes, but unless your last name is King, Rowling, or Grisham, you just can’t resist looking. My book is out of print and I still look.
    I think it’s a vetigial instinct from when cave dwellers checked stats on the paintings they did on the wall. Back then, there were fewer people, so Amazon stats were more significant. Amazon stats began to lose their importance with the advent of hieroglyphics, but the instinct in writers remains to this day, suppressed only by seven-figure contracts.

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  2. I just wanted to ask-
    Being well-acquainted with your feelings on fanfiction, what do you think of original fiction that uses historical characters fictitiously? For example, Karen Harper’s series of books which cast Elizabeth I as an amateur detective in her early days as queen, or the Riverworld series where most of the characters are people from Earth’s past in a sci-fi setting?

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