Ponderings on the state of publishing March 2020

March 18, 2020

A few days ago I sat down to blog about romance fiction industry stats and ended up on a rant. Today I will stay on topic. 

The romance fiction industry is worth over $1B a year. Yes, one billion dollars. That's about the size of the mystery and science fiction markets combined. I look at the number of mystery and adventure books that regularly place on the bestseller lists and I question this, but it's the sheer volume of romance fiction readers with multiple "must-read authors" that boosts the number. There was only one of the late Clive Cussler so of course, he would always make the lists. 

The majority of romance fiction readers are women. As a woman, I want my romance to be a character-driven love story and I'm not alone in that. I like a little sub-plot or two, but the story must be about the main couple. That couple can be any combination of genders. I like the endings to be upbeat and personally, I want it to be realistic to the couple the author just spent a good chunk of their life creating. 

So this is all well and good, interesting up to a point, but there is some bad news brewing. The American Booksellers Association reported, on Valentine's Day no less, that book sales are down. Glancing over its industry-statistics webpage, the reports of dropping sales go back over a year. Its report on March 2019 says that month was down about seven percent over sales in March 2018. 

As a writer, it's my job to figure out if the romance readers of the world have gotten jaded on what's available, or if the time available to relax and read a book has gone the way of the Dodo bird. Or is it something more insidious? 

I've long pondered the impact the ease of Amazon's self-publishing model has had on readership across the board. I've read some really poorly constructed and written stories lately. 

Have we, and by this I mean published authors, turned off our readership? It's a question worth considering. Has the market been flooded? Is it better for us to produce quality or quantity? What's the next big sub-genre we should be writing? Has our readership's age demographic changed? Did the ebook publisher model work better, after all? Are there any good epublishers still out there? 

It's a lot to consider as we continue to write the story we want to read. 

KC Kendricks
www.kckendricks.com