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Some Numbers

January 3, 2014
By Michael Cader

Smashwords reported via their blog that their sales rose by a third last year, to $20 million. Revenues rose less than title volume, which grew 45 percent. eBook data deniers should take careful note, including founder Mark Coker’s warning to authors that “2014 could be the first year where ebook sales, measured in dollars, decrease.” It’s a great business to build from scratch but still very modest in scale.

While Smashwords added about 86,000 new titles in 2013, Amazon said recently that “more than 200,000 exclusive books were added to the Kindle store in 2013.”

Amazon-owned Goodreads posted their own statistical infographic for 2013, which notes that Dan Brown’s Inferno was their “most popular book” of the year, with 17,000 reviews. Goodreads grew to 25 million members, as the site expanded internationally.

In calling THE GREAT GATSBY their “book of the year,” USA Today noted the classic “sold more than 1.5 million copies” in 2013, “triple its typical annual sales.”

Over at Publishers Marketplace, we reported more than 10,000 deals for the time ever in 2013 (10,282 to be exact). The growth came mostly from children’s books and deals by digital publishers, with fiction, nonfiction and international deals roughly flat.

Our Publishers Launch Conferences partner Mike Shatzkin notes at the end of his beginning-of-the-year blog post that for the fifth annual Digital Book World, coming up quickly on January 14 and 15 in NYC, “we’ve counted them up and there are 156 speakers and moderators on the two-day DBW program, plus dozens more in DBW’s workshop program and the Publishers Launch Kids conference.” That’s an amazingly rich and comprehensive line-up, amplified by more than 1,000 attendees from across publishing. Use the quiet snow day to get yourself signed up now, and use this link for Publishers Lunch readers to get the best discount left on individual DBW and value-priced total access pass tickets, saving 10 percent.

Filed Under: eNews, Free

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