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 […]
Bestseller Radar
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 […]
The WSJ’s New Bestseller Lists
As reported Friday, this weekend the WSJ launched their own ebook bestseller lists, managed by Nielsen BookScan. The inaugural groups–featuring lists of 10 slots each for fiction and nonfiction ebooks, and two combined any-format print and ebook lists–look pretty much like the same data pool already reflected in bestseller tabulations from USA Today and the New York Times. The one notable variant so far is Tom Standage’s A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 6 GLASSES, on the list thanks to being featured as the $1.99 Kindle Daily Deal on October 21. That boost was good enough to make it No. […]
eNews: WSJ Adds eBook Bestseller List, Compiled By Nielsen; Amazon in Talks for Kindle in China; and More
Starting tomorrow, the WSJ’s Weekend edition will feature their own ebook bestseller lists. Like the NYT lists, the Journal will present both ebook-only lists for fiction and nonfiction, as well as combined print and ebook lists in both categories. All titles are eligible–self-published, children’s, backlist, etc.–as long as they have a minimum price of 99 cents or higher. Nielsen BookScan is aggregating the data for the WSJ, drawing on what the release calls “all major retailers,” said to include Amazon, Nook, iBookstore, Sony and Google eBooks among others. Like the other WSJ charts, the new lists will be positional only, […]
Making the List? We Keeping Checking (More than Twice)
Here is the latest in the shifting landscape of ebook bestseller lists. We noticed on the most recent NYT fiction ebook list that two self-published books were counted again, for the second consecutive week: Nancy C. Johnson’s HER LAST LETTER (No. 13) and Victorine Lieske’s NOT WHAT SHE SEEMS (No. 23). Spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said that “the appearance of those books on the ebook best seller list means that multiple channels reported those titles with sales numbers that were among their best sellers.” It all became clearer when we checked again today and saw that the newspaper’s own declaration […]