Digital Marketing for Creatives

Is anyone buying books anymore? Apprently so, apparently not, depending on who you talk to and their ability to understand statistics.

There was a rash of articles bemoaning the fact that people do not buy books anymore. This incorrect claim was based around quotes and stats from the DOJ vs. PRH (Penguin Random House) trial in the US. Now these stats have demonstrated a couple of things…

Firstly, a lot of people have demonstrated that they do not understand statistics, and this was evident in how they were interpetting the statistics from the case.

Secondly, a lot of people buy books if you actually take the time to understand the statstics. In fact, if we look at evidence from BookScan (who log point-of-sale purchases) we see that almost a billion books were purchased in 2023. Ok, for a little more precision, a conservative estimate would be around 900million books.

Of those people commenting on these statistics, Seth Godin included the following graph to detail something pretty important. Namely, a lot of books do not sell very well. See below.

The KDP marketplace is awash with books at the moment, and a lot of people are not selling that many. I suspect that over time a lot of these low-content and poor quality writers will naturally drop out of the marketplace, however, what all of these statistics demonstrate is that if you want your book to sell, you need a good marketing strategy to stand out from the rest of the marketplace.

I’ve written a short blog post highlighting a few ideas on how to start gaining some traction for your marketing/sales. You can find it here.

I’m going to post some articles on digital marketing strategies, utilising email/newsletters for marketing as well as details on useful marketing tools (all free) Why not follow my blog to get notified when these articles are posted?