UK Book Sales: Where Are We?

Some 8 months ago I was blogging about the competition between printed physical books and their electronic counterparts. When sales tracker Neilsen published figures for UK book sales at the end of 2012 we had a few surprises, but mostly pleasant ones. Best of all the figures provided the quantitative evidence that our gut feelings about the state of book selling in the UK were not too far from the truth.For anyone who assumed that book sales were in decline, think again. British publishers reported record sales of £3.3bn during 2012, a rise of 4% on the previous year. This total can be broken down into e-book sales of £411m and physical book sales of £2.9bn. Yes, the e-book sales grew by 66% but print book sales only fell by 1% on the previous year.The growth of digital sales is due to the rise of e-readers such as the Amazon Kindle series along with iPads and Smartphones. But any fears that they rang the death knell of the printed book seem to have been completely unfounded.Maybe it came as no surprise that E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy were the best sellers of 2012. They occupied the top 3 spots in the chart with combined sales of 10.5 million copies. As a writer of erotica it seems that I cannot mention what I do without the inevitable comparative questions or comments. Those who know me well also know my opinion of those books both from a literary point of view and the quality of the content. I do, however, believe that they hold a pivotal place in the development of the industry. All praise to ELJ for her success and her millions but aside from that, she has got millions of people TALKING about books. More importantly, she has people READING books. Of course, she has also helped authors like me in a big way by causing erotica to be more widely read and accepted. Currently a quarter of all fiction is read on e-readers and this has made it possible for readers to engage anonymously with any material even in public.The future of publishing is looking positive and I am pleased to think that the demise of the physical book is still a very long way off. Luckily my publisher, Dreamspinner Press, like to publish books in both physical and digital forms.Much still needs to be done to ensure the survival of good quality books and bookshops too. There is certainly work to be done around the pricing of digital books. It is worth taking a look at the best seller charts for their content and variety. What must now be done is to ensure that once readers are drawn into book, whether it is through the Fifty Shades route or via the latest celebrity chef glossy tome, that there is a next step available to them. We must now work hard to provide good quality further reading opportunities for all.You can click here to see the sales charts described above.