E Ink Holdings surprised Asian stock markets Monday with worse-than-expected December sales, with the company’s shares dropping the maximum allowed in a single day. December sales declined 55 percent from the prior month, and were down 57 percent compared to December 2010. November’s sales were 33 percent lower than October, but chairman Scott Liu indicated that all of their holiday orders had been shipped early “in response to customer demands,” with “a portion of November orders [going out] in October, which contributed to the fact that November sales revenues were lower than earlier expectations. But December’s sales were far below […]
Bestseller Radar
How Many Self-Published Authors Were Bestsellers In 2011?
Self-publishing success stories were another big, perhaps overplayed, theme in 2011, and the new year starts off with the transition of Amanda Hocking bestsellers to St. Martin’s. The first in her Trylle Trilogy SWITCHED was reissued on January, with both the ebook and 336-page paperback priced at $8.99. TORN follows on February 28 and ASCEND will be rereleased on April 24. Here’s a link for an NPR All Things Considered piece on Hocking. Meanwhile, a user of Penguin start-up Book Country, Kerry Schafer, elicited interest from agent Deidre Knight for her fantasy novel BETWEEN, and made a two-book deal with […]
eNews: eBooks Fill the USA Today Bestseller List; Patterson Sells Over 5 Million eBooks; and More
Heavy post-Christmas ebook buying is evident in USA Today’s latest bestseller list, published Thursday morning, on which ebook versions outsold print editions for 42 of the top 50 books. Below are the outliers that sold more in print (one of which, Wimpy Kid, is not available in ebook form). This time a year ago, USA Today suddenly showed 19 of the top 50 titles selling better as ebooks than in print; up until then, no more than two of their top 50 met that criterion. 11 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever, Jeff Kinney 19 Inheritance, Christopher Paolini 23 […]
Nicholls, Oliver and Pratchett Top UK 2011 Charts
The Guardian has printed their annual look at the Nielsen UK sales charts, this time with more depth and transparency than ever. The presentation includes downloadable files of the top 5,000 or so selling books and data about the leading genres across the market. We’ve simplified some of the highlights below, but you can get the full data here. As in the US, Nielsen only tracks print book sales in the UK and does not currently capture ebook data (though ebooks comprise somewhere between 8 to 10 percent of the UK market right now). Nielsen UK does capture nearly all […]
Bestsellers: ELF ON THE SHELF’S Rising Popularity; Big Sales for Tim Tebow
The AP looks at the rising popularity of the holiday picture book ELF ON THE SHELF, which has sold 2.5 million copies since its 2005 publication by CCA & B Publishers, the Marietta, GA-based publishing houses founded by ELF creators Carol Aebersold and her daughters Chanda Bell and Christa Pitts after a round of publisher rejections. CCA&B recorded $10 million in revenue in 2010 and now employs 25 people. “We used to have to stop people in the aisles at retail shows and explain what this was,” Pitts explained but now, “people are coming in and they already know. It’s […]
Nielsen Ranks 2011’s Top Bestsellers
Nielsen Bookscan published top ten bestseller lists across a number of disciplines, including print fiction, print non-fiction, and print children’s/YA (Bookscan, of course, still does not measure ebook sales, and accounts for somewhere in the vicinity of 75 percent of print sales, excluding Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, and other outlets.) Please note the lists do not include sales figures, and that they track data from January 3 through December 11. (A Nielsen spokesperson told us that complete year-end sales data will be available after January 4.) These lists also reflect Nielsen BookScan’s practice of listing bestsellers by individual editions/ISBNs, rather than […]