How has your new year gone so far? I’m in the throes of agony. My janetlane.net website went down for two scary days before my service reinstated it. To add insult to injury, for some mysterious reason my hosting techs have not been able to fix, my email service allows me to send out emails, but I can’t RECEIVE emails. I may have been hacked, so there’s a trip to my computer guru in my near future.
I’m taking a break from the exhaustingly long tech support calls so I can look ahead to better days.
Here are some forecasts of what we can expect in 2020.
1. Audiobook sales to soar. In Fuse Agency’s Laurie McLean’s annual prediction blog, she sees another record year, fueled by new readers in the youth and senior demographic groups.
Disturbingly for traditionally published authors, the Big Five publishers, as well as smaller publishers, now demand audio rights in their publishing contracts. Many have also brought their audiobook production in-house.
2. Marginalized authors (see #ownvoices), encouraged by burgeoning sales and awards earned by ethnic authors, will enjoy increased sales.
3. More mid-list author orphans as publishers abandon them in favor of the tried-and-true bestselling authors. In McLean’s words, it’s “like pulling teeth” to close deals for debut authors. If they don’t hit it big right out of the gate, there’s less hope for a traditional contract. These orphaned authors will likely turn to self-publishing and ebooks.
4. External marketing pressure will make the Big Five more cautious in their acquisitions. Those pressures come from Brexit as it affects multinational corporations, VATs, increased tariffs for Canadian paper and the trade wars with China.
5. Subdued self-pubbed ebook sales. Indie sales will level off, not reaching the great numbers of the last several years. McLean attributes some of that to the fact that authors couldn’t sustain their writing pace of four to five books a year, and to readers who stuffed their Kindles with 99-cent specials that either weren’t good reads, or caused buyer paralysis because there was not enough time to read them all. McLean also credited industry “cheaters” to this trend—deceitful authors who gamed the algorithms. Until caught they made a good haul, but legitimate authors suffered.
6. Thievery continues to take its toll. Many more honest authors, tormented by plagiarism, will grow discouraged and stop investing the work required to write quality novels. Scam services will unfortunately continue to flourish.
In spite of all this, McLean predicts self-publishing will continue to thrive.
7. Increased indie author collaboration on marketing and series. This predicted by Written Word Media.
8. Organic reach will continue to decline. As Facebook withdraws the accessibility of organic reach (free Facebook readers), authors will be forced to advertise. An ad/marketing strategy will no longer be optional. Both traditionally published and indie authors must run ads to compete.
9. Email lists grow even more valuable, especially in light of #8.
10. Big five publishers will increase use of KDP (Amazon Kindle Unlimited) for their backlists.
11. Patreon and similar “marketization” techniques will be further explored by indies.
12. Global reading will flourish. To finish my dozen trends, Joanna Penn shares these impressive statistics. “I have now sold books in English, in 136 countries, which is very quickly because that (number) was 86 this time last year. That’s a lot more countries in one year, and that’s all in English.” Penn goes on to say it’s predicted that by 2025 there will be another 1 billion Internet users. She notes that these are middle class people able to buy books, and that’s exciting.
Of course, predictions are only as good as the crystal ball used to divine them. I’m wishing all of you — and me — a rewarding and profitable new year!
For further reading…
Thank you. It’s always helpful to hear what’s up with the industry. And what is likely to come. Great research, Janet!
You’re welcome, Karen. The saying rings true, “The only constant in life is change.” Let’s hope they’re mostly good changes!
Great article, Janet. I wasn’t aware of several of these trends. Very helpful! Alice
You’re welcome, Alice!