Michael Jubb's recent report on (UK)
Academic Books and their Future (warning ! dreaded pdf format !) -- part of the
Academic Book of the Future-project -- makes for depressing reading.
Matthew Reisz's piece in
Times Higher Education sums it up pretty well:
Worst sellers: warning of existential crisis for academic books, as "the number of individual [academic] titles sold rose by 45 per cent, from 43,000 to 63,000" between 2005 and 2014 -- but (Nielsen BookScan-tracked sales figures): "show a decline for academic books of 13 per cent between 2005 and 2014, from 4.34 million to 3.76 million annually".
Add it all up, and: "this meant that average sales per title fell from 100 to 60"
University presses continue to churn them out:
University presses accounted for 11% of sales in both 2005 and 2014 from all the publishers analysed, and their revenues for 13% of the total in both years, indicating that their average revenues per title were slightly higher than the average for all publishers.
But in 2005 they represented 43% of the titles for which sales were recorded, so their sales per title were only a little over a quarter those for other publishers.
In the 'Literature' category:
The number of titles recorded with sales rose by 37%, to 10.8k [...].
But sales were only around a quarter of those shown in history, and between 2005 and 2014 they fell by
nearly half, to 365k.
The result was that sales per title fell from 88 to 34
(As a point of comparison, my essentially self-published monograph,
Arno Schmidt: a centennial colloquy had sold, as of 31 May, 117 copies (72 paperback and 45 e-versions) -- with a few more sold in the past few weeks.)
Then there's this:
including all the creative writing titles, during the seven years 2008 to 2014, the submitted version of only just over half (54%) of the books submitted in English literature and language had any UK retail sale.
Of those, 355 (16%) had sales of more than one hundred, and 128 (6%) of more than a thousand.
(Emphasis added.)
Lots of caveats re. the titles that are counted and so on ("Comprehensive and reliable statistical data on sales of academic books is notable mainly by its absence"), but the study is well worth closer perusal -- if you can read through the tears and head-shaking.