According the Guardian's article published on January 13, 2015, sales of printed adult fiction have declined by over £150m since 2009, new figures show, as ebooks take an increasingly large bite out of the market.
The adult fiction market was the worst-performing of all areas of the book business, down by 5.3% in 2014 to £321.3m, with volume sales down 7.8% to 50.7m. In 2009, printed adult fiction was worth £476.16m.
“The ebook has quite demonstrably hit the commercial end of the fiction market,” said the Bookseller’s editor Philip Jones. “Almost any drop in adult fiction sales can mainly be put down to the migration to digital, which is obviously still continuing. We think consumer ebooks this year will be worth £350m, with most big publishers reporting ebook growth of double digits – and almost all of that will be in fiction.”
And the piece of news that had me smiling was:
Within adult fiction, there was growth for three unexpected categories: short stories, westerns and graphic novels.
Now why am I not surprised that Westerns are in there?
Since PP began, we have added to our stable (okay bad pun) and the list of authors and series continue to grow. We've seen series with low sales and series with high sales and series I'd thought would bomb but had done the reverse. We've been a gnat whisker away from deals and gotten deals I'd thought would be neigh on impossible. But there is still a market out there for Westerns. And, boy, am I glad. We are now scheduling books into 2018, so there is much more to come for the Western fiction fan. And long may you read them.
