Eoin Purcell
This is Part Two in a series (currently of indeterminate length but I suspect five) of posts. Read the first, Here.
The Categories
I promised at the end of my last post to offer up some analysis of the ICM in terms of categories and trends. The first thing to say about this is that I don’t think people will be surprised by the list in the image below. It reflects the top ten best-selling categories in the 2008 ICM. The image is small but clicking on it will take you to a google document that will have quite a lot of other data as this series moves ahead.
What strikes me as the most interesting part of this top ten categories is that the overwhelming winner is General & Literary Fiction. At 30.9% of the Top 1000 it is 3 times larger than the next biggest, Crime & Thriller, which is also fiction. If you add in Young Adult Fiction and Childrens Fiction to the mix, fiction makes up a solid 47.29% of the Top 1000. Impressive no?
Interestingly, Autobiography of all varieties makes a solid appearance in the top ten, which is not all that surprising when you consider that it includes titles like:
-
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything
Ma, He Sold Me for a Few Cigarettes
The Diving-bell and the Butterfly
Parky: My Autobiography
Would the Real Gerry Ryan Please Stand Up
My Booky Wook
Ronan O’Gara: My Autobiography
Carra: My Autobiography
Sonia: My Story
Yes readers, the celebrity publishing is alive and well in Ireland, just in case you thought we had a more literary bent here in Ireland.
What does the top ten not show us?
Well for one thing we miss the fact that the 11th most popular category was True Crime. I’m not surprised by this and I suspect most people would not be either. The rest of the top 20 is a bit more diverse. But the number of units and the percentage of the market these categories represent slide rapidly towards less than 1% of the whole ICM Top 100.
Which neatly brings me to the core message this category analysis exercise MIGHT suggest, that publishing fiction is a good route to success. After all fiction seems to account for the bulk of the Top 1000 sales. On the face of it that makes sense, but I’m not so sure about it. However I think I will leave the next post to explain why that is the case.
Two very interesting meetings today,
Eoin
Eoin Purcell's Blog 
[…]Eoin Purcell continues with the second part of his analysis on what makes up the success of a book publish on the Irish market, coming up with a suprising result – or is it?[…]
Interesting stuff, first time I’ve seen these figures. Also worth noting that if you combine children’s and young adult fiction sales it easily represents the third biggest share of the market… td
I’m hoping to find out what the prospects for a book on mental health (Depression) are?
Missing something pretty important here, Eoin, which is the number of titles published per category! Non-fiction is split into heaps of sections, while fiction is only in a few, so it’s apples-and-oranges time. I guess the sums that would be worth doing would be to take, say, the top 1000 general fiction and top 1000 non-fiction (using the major heading rather than subdivisions) and seeing what the distribution of sales and revenues would be … without doing the sums, I would expect that fiction is dramatically skewed towards bestsellers, with non-fiction giving a meaningful return much further down the chart … time to get out the slide rule!
Ivan
Ack Ivan,
You’ve pre-empted my big reveal in part three where I look at exactly that breakdown. I guess I only have myself to blame, I should have had it done by now!
But you are spot on with those rough guesses and the key indicator is ASPS and number of titles per category.
Eoin