TL:DR – Print sales are up a little, but whether you should go that way depends on a lot of things.
Print book sales increased in 2024, up almost one percent. In 2023, 778.3 million print books sold, and 782.7 in 2024. These are numbers from Circana BookScan, a service that tracks print and digital sales through chain book stores, some independent book stores, and per their website, covers eighty-five percent of book sales. They do not seem to track indie books, unless the title is published through one of the small presses that Circana obtains data from.
So, does this mean that print books are making a come back and that indie authors need to get serious about distributing our work in print as well as electronically? *wags paw* Those of you who have been around for a while might recall back in 2018-19, when major publishers pulled some odd accounting tricks and announced that they had proven that e-book sales were declining and thus on the way out the door, and print would rule forever.* It turns out that if you price the electronic version of a best seller the same as a hard-cover version, fewer people will go for the e-book. Thus proving that e-books had been a flash in the pan. However, until the cat escaped from the bag, it led to a lot of discussions among indie authors about getting our works into print.
In general, if you write for children or young adults, print is very important. Cedar Sanderson and others who do children’s books, activity books (coloring and what have you) and tales for young readers should be in print. This has gotten a LOT easier since Ye Olde Days of the 2010s, but still needs some care and willingness to deal with finicky computers and printers (commercial type, not on-your-desk type). Parents buy for kids, and parents like to see the book. Kids also need to see the book, and seem to do better with physical titles. True YA likewise, although more teens seem to have books on e-readers or their phones than they used to. But not all teens – I see a lot of hard copies of Sarah J Maas, R. A. Salvatore, and so on.
If you focus on the adult market, it depends. Nonfiction like manuals and textbooks should have a print option. Fiction in print still has a market, or we would not have book stores that sell dead-tree volumes. I am almost entirely e-book, and it costs me sales. However, the price of print books for indie writers is not cheap. We don’t have the volume power of Traditional Publishers. I like offering titles in print. I cringe at asking over $20.00 US for 160K word combined editions. But that’s the printing cost, and a tiny profit. I can’t ask for 70% like e-books give me. No one could afford it.
Going into print also starts the ISBN or no question. If you are in the US, ISBN numbers are crazy expensive, even if you find a sale or buy in bulk. You also have to be a publisher to buy ISBNs in bulk. If you are outside the US, ISBNs are cheap or free. Neither Amazon nor Lightning Source/Ingram require ISBNs, but without one, libraries won’t stock your book (usually), and L.S. won’t offer it for sale to anyone but you. If you only hand sell, no problem.
*If you remember the term “whale math” that someone at PG’s place (PG** himself?) coined to describe how the Big 6 came up with that conclusion, you are old in internet years.
**The Passive Voice, the late and much lamented blog about publishing, books, literature, and other interesting things, run by a publishing lawyer known as the Passive Guy.
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “To Print or Not to Print”
Print is damned important. I say that from my perch as a professional book reviewer. If there is not a print version I am not allowed to review it. I was able to get permission to review e-books a couple of times in 2024, but we got so much pushback from the readers they have closed that door. That decision won’t be revisited for at least a couple of years.
I also say that from my perch as a member of the library board of my city. While libraries are beginning to circulate e-books, many have a rule that there has to be a print version for a book to enter the library catalog.
Maybe a blurb or review in Epoch Times is unimportant, but the biggest problem an indie writer has is breaking through the noise. A review in a magazine or newspaper (even online) is free marketing. A book in the library is free marketing.
Also, if possible have a house press name on the book you put up on Amazon. It is easier for me to get a book greenlighted for review if it is marked “Obscure Publisher Press” (or whatever), rather than “Independently Published.”
Personally I prefer e-books, especially for fiction and illustration-light nonfiction. Yet any books I publish will have a print option as well.
Good points. Also, I remember some early indie guru (maybe Dean Wesley Smith?) making the point that the print edition exists partly to underline what a savings buying the ebook represents, and that’s the main reason I jump through the flaming hoops necessary to have print editions of my work.
Agreed. I think having the print book in the listing makes the ebook look more credible to a buyer who’s trying to decide if a new author is worth taking a chance on.
That surprises me. I didn’t have difficulty throwing together Wizard’s Wood Press.
We produce print versions of all our books. One of them, Sew Cloth Grocery Bags, is only available in print because of the patterns.
We’re able to produce print versions because Bill has mad layout skills. We estimate Agatha Christie, She Watched would have cost us $5000 to have someone else do the layout. He uses Affinity Publishing which is a a miracle product, although before he found Affinity, he used Word.
He lays out the print version first, then formats the eBook. Mistakes are found and corrected.
As a microscopic publisher, we purchased a block of 100 ISBNs. We’ve used about half of them. Buying ISBNs (a ripoff!) in bulk is the only way to bring the cost down. eBooks do NOT need ISBNs. Only physical books do.
We jump through the hoops to get our books on Ingram for libraries and bookshops. They don’t like Amazon’s extended distribution system. Sometimes we sell a copy on Ingram. Offer a 55% discount: 40% to the bookseller, 15% to Ingram, plus the cost of print on demand which you pay. You earn about 17 cents. Ingram just HAS to have different requirements for covers than Amazon. You also will never get the same answer twice from Ingram when problems arise.
Don’t waste your time on the current mad fad of sprayed edges. A friend has done this. Do-It-Yourself will drive you nuts. Paying someone else is gaspingly expensive and you’ll never be able to sell the books for enough to cover your added costs.
Why make physical books?
Because physical books are required if you do events, whether library sales, local bookshop signings, book festivals, or comic/sci-fi conventions. Make them look as nice as possible. Find a comparable book and copy their layout. Make sure that the font size doesn’t change from page to page (I’ve seen that several times).
The real reason for physical books is discoverability.
You’re on the shelf with the other local authors. Your books are sitting on the cafeteria table at work. You appear at events. Your books show up in Little Free Libraries. Physical books get sold and resold and passed around and handed down. They have a long life span and you never know who will see them.
Some people will only read physical books.
Do you want to produce large print, hardcover, or dyslexic editions with special type fonts? We have a hardcover for a few of our books and haven’t sold a single copy. We don’t do the other versions, each of which, by the way, requires a different ISBN.
We use Amazon as our printer for print on demand. We haven’t yet investigated Maple Press in York who, supposedly, will print runs of 25 copies at a lower cost than Amazon. We’d pick up the books ourselves, saving the shipping. But then we’d have 25 copies on hand of each title and would we sell that many? Using Amazon means we can keep to six (6) copies in our inventory, which we are more likely to sell.
There are physical books we no longer carry in our home inventory. We found they don’t sell at our events, even though they do sell online, a book a month. Maybe.
If you’re willing to learn how to lay out a trade paperback, physical books let you tap different markets. But if you’re dependent on someone else doing the trade layout, understanding that each and every page is a separate art element where you have to adjust the leading and kerning to look nice, it’s not cost-effective.
When a pattern breaks, my first impulse is to go see if the method of gathering information changed– it looks like yes, it did change.
After the ’23 merger, it appears they made it a lot easier to send in information, and regularly.
https://www.bookweb.org/circana-bookscan-overview
There’s a section for independent book stores!
:fights baby away from keyboard:
I think this is a great thing, since tradpub pays based off of bookscan. Not, y’know, their own records of what books were printed, shipped, and returned.
I do print versions of most of my books for the reasons listed above – also there are still people who much prefer printed books, especially to give as gifts,, as well as having the printed version to sell at in-person events.
Still, year in and year out, most of my sales are for the e-book versions.