The shelf-life of books: an exploration of the lifecycle and longevity of books in the UK in the 21st century

Abstract

This thesis, situated within the field of publishing studies, investigates UK trade non-fiction print book sales between 2001 and 2015. It uses mixed methods to analyse the market for books, the bookselling function, and the corpus of longselling non-fiction titles. The research articulates and defines longsellers as distinct from bestsellers as well as quantifying how many new titles published between 2000 and 2015 achieve above-average sales longevity (beyond one year), and explores in qualitative terms what distinguishes these books. The research employs a range of theoretical models and frameworks to explore the phenomena of longsellerdom including: descriptive statistics, Darnton’s Communication Circuit, Bhaskar’s theory of framing and amplification, Anderson’s long-tail economics, and Bourdieusian sociology of literature. From the Nielsen BookScan dataset, a subset of longselling works was identified. This subset of longselling titles is an original contribution to scholarly knowledge that serves to fill the lacunae into works of non-fiction as a genre of publishing. The qualitative research components included interviews with actors within the bookselling and publishing industry; consideration of the backlist and the mechanism by which works might become longsellers. Case studies of five longselling works are provided to explore in detail some of the factors that have contributed to longsellerdom namely, Testament of Youth (1933) by Vera Brittain; Cider With Rosie (1959) by Laurie Lee; In Cold Blood (1965) by Truman Capote; The Story of Art (1950) by Ernst Gombrich; and The Right Way to Play Chess (1950) by David Pritchard. Key findings from this research are that: longsellerdom is incredibly rare and distinct from bestsellerdom; there are some genres (e.g. self-help), topics (e.g. war) and forms of writing (narrative non-fiction) that appear frequently in the list of longsellers, indicating these areas of writing and publishing, when successful, can be enduring and lucrative.