Today's publishing reality

When Small Crimes was published in 2008, most of its sales--at least before NPR picked it as one of the top 5 crime and mystery novels of the year--came from crime fiction readers working at mystery and independent bookstores handselling the book to their customers. Flash forward 10 years to 2018 and the publishing reality has become something completely different. Many of the mystery bookstores that handsold Small Crimes are gone, and the chances of a book published by a small, independent press like Serpent's Tail  getting reviewed today in NPR, Washington Post, Boston Globe, etc. is close to zero. Independent presses rely more now on ebook sales as there is less shelf space in bookstores for their books than 10 years ago and just about no newspaper review space available. Reading habits have also changed--I think this goes hand-in-hand with there being less handselling of smaller press books at bookstores, but readers are driven more to the bigger books, and in some ways it has become more of a social activity where readers want to join in on the most active conversations on Goodreads, leading even more to only the biggest (i.e. most heavily promoted) books getting read. With these changes, the majority of  books being published live and die with their number of Amazon reviews, and this is especially true for book series. The reason for this is one of the few ways to get book sales and attract new readers is through BookBub ads, and that's where you have a Catch-22 that a book needs a large number of Amazon reviews before a publisher can buy a Bookbub ad. This is what I'm experiencing now with my Morris Brick crime thriller series. From the emails I'm receiving, I know readers are digging the series, but the number of Amazon reviews are woefully low, which has kept my publisher, Kensington Books, from being able to buy a Bookbub ad. The 4th book in the series CRUEL came out last month, and a 5th book (and one of the best crime novels I've written) UNLEASHED will be  out next March, but whether the series continues past that depends on readers leaving reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. That's the new publishing reality.