Wednesday, February 3, 2010

What’s Selling, What’s Not?: Susan Raab

Notes from "What’s Selling, What’s Not?: Susan Raab"



School and library markets are having difficult times.
Although the book business if having a difficult time, book sales have been up 11% in 2009.

Digital e-book sales are increasing.

Die-cut and pop-ups are expensive to produce, thus publishers are making less of these types of books.

Fantasy books are softening.

Vampire books seem like they won’t be lasting for a long time.

Mystery and ghost story books are growing.

“Gossip Girl” types of books are flipped easily since they are easily replaced by other similar books.

Classics are timeless and nostalgic allowing them to last and survive in the book business. Consumers want staying power and value.  Classics provide these.

Inspirational and hopeful book sales are up.

Transitional readers are underserved. For example, transitional books such as phonics and chapter books.

People in general want funny books.

What Authors Need to Know

It’s important to have websites. Authors need to help bring in traffic to stores to sell their books.
It’s important for authors to get involved in the blog community and in community events.

Authors need to advocate for themselves. They need to look and plan strategically. They must look at the whole picture.

Marketing efforts should include media outreach. Authors need to understand that exposure takes time.

Publishing a book takes at the least one year.

Look at trends in the book industry to see what hasn’t been done, what hasn’t been written about.

Look at other industries, news, pop-culture and society to know what the next trend may be.

Things are changing extremely rapidly and there is no assurance to how the publishing market is going to turn out. People don’t know, they only have a notion. So just write from the bottom of your heart!

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