Is the economy affecting your books positively or negatively?

[Andrew Kent]

I'm just curious here. Conceivably, the economy could/should be hurting book sales and cancel signings, etc. But it might also be that as people cut back on vacations and larger purchases, books become an affordable form of escapism.

What have you noticed? Is it up, down, or neutral for you and your titles? How do you tell?

[Jon Loomis]

Haven't noticed a difference; the two-cent used copies on amazon seem to be selling as briskly as ever.

[Jack Getze]

I'm hoping all this economic news will make my stockbroker more interesting to readers, but so far it ain't working. Maybe the news has backfired -- now everybody hates brokers even more. Oh, well. :-)

[John McFetridge]

For me personally, it's been awful. I had my first two books picked up for publication in the USA by Harcourt but before they came out the company merged with Houghton Miflin (well, really, both companies were taken over by a venture capitalist company and an educational software company after the textbook divisions), my editor was laid off and my books just dumped. They may have made it into a few stores, but the sales were awful and there was really no promotion at all. One book got quite good reviews and I was hoping to sell a few copies in paperback but now it looks like there never will be a paperback version of that book.

So, it's hard for me to say that my sales were down as they'd never been up.

I've managed to sell my next two books to another US publisher and the first one will be released in early 2010, but as for sales, who knows? Expectations are very low (as are advances), I can tell you that.

Of course, it's hard for me to be too down about all this because I really love to write and I've managed to beat the odds and get published (twice). I can say that the bad economy is quite good for the kind of organized crime I write about, so there's certainly no shortage of material for me.

[I. J. Parker]

Things aren't good. And they may be worse than even I suspect.

[Toni L.P. Kelner]

I don't have enough data about novels. With anthologies, I had one come out in 2007 and another in 2008. The print run on the first was right much larger, and initial sales were higher, but they seem to have caught up. So the smaller print run is good--it gives us a higher sell-through. We didn't sell as many sub rights for the 2008 book as the 2007 one, which may be indicative of something.

It's hard to say, isn't it? I'm just glad my next couple of books will be PBO, because I think they'll be easier sells.

At the Berkley Prime Crime party at Bouchercon, Natalee Rosenstein said they traditionally do just fine through tough times, because books tend to be cheaper entertainment than a movie or dinner out.

[Leighton Gage]

Hard times, fellow authors,
If you're like most of us, it's early days yet to get a straight answer from your publisher on how the first quarter has gone.

. Shemight tell you how many they shipped of your new first-quarter book, but it isn't likely they'll take a position on sales, this being such a consignment business.

I just did a tour for my latest hardcover. It took me from Florida, through St. Louis, Indianapolis, Houston,Scottsdale,Tucson, San Diego, Los Angles, San Francisco/San Mateo, Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, 2 venues in Virgina, 2 in Pennsylvania, one in New York, one in Massachusetts and one in Vermont. I covered most of the ground that I covered last year and I met a lot of knowledgeable people, not the least of which were Jim Huang and Barbara Peters.

In short, I covered virtually the same ground I covered in last year's tour, eschewing only a few shops I struck off for chemistry reasons,

Were the majority of the Book sellers upbeat?
They were not.

Did I sell anymore books than less year?
No way!
Nope, I sold lots less - and so did most other people.

And, this year, I had a trade paperback of last year's book to sweeten the shopping basket.

There are, granted, a few islands of prosperity out there (Houston, Saratoga, FL) but they are few and far between. Editors at Sleuthfest told me hard covers are down as much as 40 to 60%, more if you're a midlister as the grand majority of us are.

Reviews? I've gotten excellent reviews by the trades: Booklist, PW, Kirkus and LJ and even put them up on my site.
To no effect.

What we need, all of us in the fiction field, are more newspaper reviews. But where I we gonna get them, huh, with papers firing their reviewers right and left and the remainder reluctant to review mid-listers two years in succession in order to do justice for the other thousands of authors who are screaming for their attention?

Thank God for libraries and the starred reviews of folks like LJ and Booklist. There, at least, i'm running ahead of last years' figures, And foreign sales are more manna from heaven.This yeas, those foreign sales might just well be the single most important force for keeping fledglings like myself in this business. It's a hard world out there, guys, make no mistake.
Want proof?
Check your Ingram numbers. (and compare.)
Check your Amazon rankings.(and compare)

And, if you're not a debut author,, and if the New York Times this year wasn't as kind to you as it was to me last year, I suggest you tighten your belt,

The one thing for which I thank my luck stars is that I'm with a publisher who doesn't take the short term view. I;m not an orpan, as I fear so many of us are going to be before long. And I know that all I have to do to put new books on the street is to continue writing well.

Which is why I'd better get off the internet and stuck back into "The Tenth Passenger", the fourth book in my Brazilian Federal Police series.

L