Yatterings

Roger Sutton, over at the Horn Book blog, ponders the question of how many books ever become backlist before disappearing:

“The question that only came to me today is about how much frontlist becomes backlist, and how long it stays there. For example, what percentage of, say, juvenile hardcover fiction published five years ago is still in print? Ten years ago? What percentage of first-novelists get a second crack, and has this figure changed?”

I suspect nothing has changed but publishing needs to get its head around the serious bottle neck that print media has for books and look at developing digital strategies to talk to reader’s directly.

This is a question which has no quick fix or easy solution and will rumble on but it need some serious attention to ensure that book marketing strategies adapt to the changing media. I’m not suggesting that treeware books will ever disappear, far from it, but changes and experiments need to start taking place now to find ways of adapting text to electronics.