Sea change in e-book market? Romance beating science fiction at Fictionwise
Fictionwise has long been a hangout for gung-ho science fiction readers. But guess what? As I write this, not one SF e-book is among the top ten sellers. The champ within the genre is Human by Choice, by TeleBlog contributor Darrell Bain and Travis S.Taylor—-just number 19, though. Have SF readers forsaken Fictionwise?
Not at all. Instead Fictionwise has undergone an alien invasion, so to speak—of romance fans with loose purse strings.
“Looking at sales from a single typical month, January 2008,” co-owner Steve Pendergrast reported to the Fictionwise e-mail list, “we find there are about one-third more unique romance buyers than unique SF buyers (someone who bought both would end up in both lists). This is not a huge difference in the absolute number of unique buyers. However, the romance buyers also buy more; on average they buy 62 percent more than SF buyers do in terms of revenue. The combined effect is, Fictionwise now sells about twice as much romance as SF. The reverse was true just a few years ago.”
Possible sea change
So what does this mean for the e-book industry? Definitely a seachange if other stores are experiencing similar results. This suggests:
- The e-book business as a whole needs to take on eBabel and DRM problems sooner than many of the old timers would like, if it doesn’t want to miss out on all the potential business from e-romance fans. As a group, they are probably more tech-hip than the typical reader, but almost surely not as much as the SF crowd. The good news for publishers is that readers of romances probably aren’t as likely to use P2P networks for illegal book-sharing as hardcore techies are. Probably. Anyone feel otherwise?
- For ergonomic reasons, it is important to replace PDF with the reflowable .epub format as soon as possible in most cases—to make it easier for read e-books on cell phones, which many of the new crop of readers will favor. Do you really think they all own Kindles? Of the eBabel formats, the reflowable Mobipocket beats PDF by a long shot in usability. So does ePub, and it’s important for the IDPF and publishers to encourage the development of good reading and creation apps—both commercial and open source.
- Also helpful will be more Kindle-style machines that can download titles without hassles, via wireless. Time for more alliances with phone companies? And what about better software to integrate the shopping and reading functions?
Meanwhile, lest Darrell and friends worry, the less spectacular but still noticeable growth in SF is continuing at Fictionwise. “SF sales are not declining by any means,” Steve told the Fictionwise list. “In terms of unit sales, SF sales in (for example) January 2008 were up 12% over January 2007, and in terms of revenue up even more, 16% year over year. Those are very solid growth rates.”
Your thoughts
So, gang, what do you think are the reasons for romance beating out SF? Part of it, I suspect, is that tech-gear prices are coming down and the number of tech savvy romance fans is increasing—with more women than ever having grown up with tech (reminder: not all romance fans are female). Many, I suspect, love the chance to read E in private without any covers to give them away to the boss or coworkers, or maybe husbands, boyfriends or girlfriends.
Yes, I’d love to hear form other e-stores as well as publishers. Do Steve’s experiences jibe with yours? And what about other genre trends in the e-book world? Just what are the fastest growers, besides romance? I do notice that suspense/thrillers are high up on the Fictionwise list of the top-ten sellers. How does that compare with the past?
May 10th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
“So, gang, what do you think are the reasons for romance beating out SF?”
I used to buy SciFi ebooks at fictionwise. These days there is far more high quality scifi on the Internet for *free* that I don’t have time enough to read it all. In fact, these days, I get all my scifi reading fic from Futurismic’s Friday Free Fiction post like this: http://futurismic.com/2008/05/02/friday-free-fiction-for-2nd-may/
May 10th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Since in the p-book universe romance outsells sf by a large margin I guess that e-bookdom is starting to become closer p-bookdom demographically and taste-wise. The reason given above in the post makes sense and it probably answers the question.
May 11th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
I’d say that it MIGHT mean that women are finally adopting ebooks. And this could be a very significant development. After all, women buy more books than men do, by a fair margin.
NB: Women avoiding science fiction may not be because women aren’t interested in science and speculative fiction. It might be because most science fiction has a notable lack of female characters. After all, romance that leans toward science fiction in tone and setting is a thriving sub-genre.