stats Archives - Award-Winning Writer and Graphic Designer

Industry News for Writers in my ASJA Monthly Market Monitor Column

dorriolds — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 10:28:18 +0000

“The Golden Age for Writers,” an article by Stephen Marche (Esquire, November 26, 2012), says, in essence, kwitcherbitchin and don’t believe any Chicken Little naysayers warning the sky is falling. To quote ol’ F. Scott Fitzgerald, this is “the best of times.” Tom Wolfe got a cool $7 mill for his last novel. For those of us nowhere near that level, there are more options than ever including self-publishing (no longer a dirty word) and e-books. But wait, there’s more. Right now, the essay has never been more in demand. Due to the Internet—remember that means worldwide web—writers do have more competition but they also have like a zillion more options to sell their work. According to Marche’s research, publishers are making money, too. “Revenue for adult hardcover books is up 8.3 percent from 2011, and paperback sales are up 5.2 percent. Book sales for young adults and children grew by 12 percent last year. E-books accounted for 30 percent of net publisher sales in the adult fiction category in 2011, compared with 13 percent in 2010…. In addition to those happy numbers, the e-reader is creating a new market, not destroying an old one.” If one more kvetching writer tells you publishing is dead, books are dying or nobody is reading, tell them to Google the stats. Forecasts say tablets will reach 112.5 million consumers by 2016 (Forrester, March 6, 2012). I’d say that’s a lot of peops still reading what writers write.

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“Reasons to Re-Joyce” is an appealing essay written by Darin Strauss (Sunday Book Review, The New York Times, December 9, 2012). Not only did Strauss mock the hand-wringing world of whiners moaning about the death of literary fiction, he states, “The naysaying misses the fact that this has been a wildly good book year.” Oh, and by the way, you can trust Strauss has his finger on the right pulse — his most recent book, a memoir titled Half a Life, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The title of this essay is a reference to Ulysses by James Joyce. Strauss claims the novel is still relevant and a strong influence on what he calls a recent slew of “legitimate masterpieces.” Strauss also makes an excellent point that many of the doom and gloom analyses of the so-called downturn in book sales is not based on actual numbers: “It would be one thing if the naysayers were talking about a crash dive of sales figures. Sales figures carry the inarguability of math.” Instead, he argues, the public is under a barrage of nothing more than negative uniformed opinions from glass half empty talking heads. So, rejoice writers and keep writing your books. Readers are still reading.

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“A Strong Author Platform Translates into Book Sales” reports DBW (Digital Book Wire, December 6, 2012). This is an article promoting the Digital Book World Conference & Expo in New York that is taking place January 15–17, 2013. No doubt the recap will offer sound advice for and analyses of the current state of digital book sales. This conference offers trade publishers hard data on today’s and tomorrow’s book biz. The conference refers to itself as “the single largest gathering of senior-level digital publishing execs anywhere.” It promises attendees access to presidents, CEOs, editors, marketers, large and small publishers, agents, authors, booksellers, librarians and techies — in other words, everyone you need to know to manage your success in the digital publishing world. Topics will include the power of social media and how to determine your best strategy from a dizzying array of platforms including Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Pinterest and YouTube. Speakers will cover how to generate media buzz, how to use search engine optimization (SEO) to rise to higher heights in Google searches and the necessity of 365-day marketing strategies to measure the success of your efforts. So, if you are one of those writers who has been reluctant to spruce up your website or blog, and take the plunge into social media conversations on Twitter and Facebook, there is so much more you can be doing to create your own writing success. Run, don’t walk, to social media marketing.

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Latest Facebook Stats

dorriolds — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 23:01:40 +0000

Monthly active users now total 901 million (up from 680 million a year ago).

Daily active users are up to 526 million (up from 372 million last year).

Monthly mobile users now total 488 million.

300 million photos are uploaded to the site each day.

3.2 billion Likes and Comments are posted daily.

125 billion friendships are forged per day.

Revenue for the first quarter of 2012 was $1.058 billion, up from $731 last year.

Net income dropped to $205 million for the quarter, down from $233 last year.
source: Huffington Post

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Viral Content: Why Some Posts Spread and Others Don’t

dorriolds — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 10:05:24 +0000

I just read an interesting article from sixrevisions.com. The title of the article is Viral Content: Why We Share Some Things and Not Others. They quote research on this topic and share facts, for example, The New York Times has at least 1 article tweeted every 4 seconds.

The article refers to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and claims that the top 2 tiers of hierarchy explain why people share: “People want the respect of others, and they want to feel a sense of belonging.”

Here is a very interesting study from the New York Times’ Consumer Insight Group if you’d like to read more.

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Population and Online Statistics

dorriolds — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 08:38:33 +0000

According to Wikipedia, as of October 22, 2010, the world’s population—the population of humans on planet Earth— is currently estimated to be 6,876,600,000. Spelled out that number is six billion eight hundred seventy-six million six hundred thousand. That is one heckuva lot of people. Hard to wrap my head around it. This figure comes from the U.S. Census Bureau. According to the International Telecommunication Union’s October 19,2010 newsroom press release, the number of people online by end of 2010 is estimated at 2 billion. The number of internet users has doubled in the past 5 years. The number of people having access to the Internet at home has increased from 1.4 billion in 2009 to almost 1.6 billion in 2010. According to New Media Trend Watch, the number of people online around the world will grow more than 45% to 2.2 billion users over the next five years, according to a report by Forrester Research, Inc. with the global online population expected to reach 2.2 billion by 2013. Asia remains the biggest global internet growth market where 43% of the world’s online population will reside by 2013 with 17% of the global online population in China alone. Growth rates in the US, Western Europe and the major industrialised nations in Asia Pacific such as Australia, Japan and South Korea will slow to between 1% and 3%.

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Top 25 Newspapers on Twitter

dorriolds — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 22:49:27 +0000

If you were to rank the Top 25 U.S. newspapers by how many Twitter followers they have, the New York Times wins by a landslide with 2.6 million followers. Wall Street Journal is second on the list but has only 464,591 followers. Read more … I found this article on Journalistics blog and found it very interesting.

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Social Media Stats

dorriolds — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 11:13:53 +0000

Americans spend nearly a quarter of their time online on social networking sites and blogs, up from 15.8 percent in 2009 (a 43 percent increase) according to new research released today from The Nielsen Company. The research revealed that Americans spend a third of their time online (36 percent) communicating and networking across social networks, blogs, personal email and instant messaging. I was surprised to read that email remains top on mobile Internet activities. In a Nielsen survey of mobile web users, there is a double-digit (28 percent) rise in the prevalence of social networking behavior, but the dominance of email activity on mobile devices continue with an increase from 37.4 percent to 41.6 percent of U.S. mobile Internet time. Read the rest of the Nielsen report

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How Businesses Budget for Social Media

dorriolds — Mon, 17 May 2010 13:54:49 +0000

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Statistics re Twitter & Facebook

dorriolds — Sun, 16 May 2010 23:14:30 +0000

100 million users access Facebook through #mobile devices. They’re 2x more active on #FB than non-mobile users. Twitter now has 60 million users. Facebook has 400 million users. HubSpot estimates the average Twitter user now has 300 followers. In July the number was 70. When clients tell you they don’t have time for social media you can explain to them that they have the same amount of time that all of their competitors have — 24 hours per day. We all choose how to use those hours. In my opinion social media is here to stay and it is something everybody needs to make time for if they want to network in the work world. My two cents.

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Social Media Sites / Pie Chart Breakdown of Users

dorriolds — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 09:15:24 +0000

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Magazine Readership INCREASED!

dorriolds — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 11:30:45 +0000

According to an ad run by ESPN magazine in the April 19th issue of US magazine, magazine readership has increased 11 percent during the 12-year life of Google. Just as movies didn’t kill radio, TV didn’t kill movies, the Internet will not kill magazines. As a writer I find this news inspiring! Hope you do ... Read more

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