Deal reports rebounded in the first quarter of 2024, likely helped by an early convening of the London Book Fair and driven by strong investment in adult books. The gains come in comparison to a lower bar from a year ago, when Harper Collins was dealing with a strike and cutbacks. This quarter’s deal volumes were nearly back to the record total from 2022, and six-figure sales hit a new high. Adult fiction sales set a new record, up 20 percent over last year. Adult nonfiction recovered meaningfully from last year’s lull, gaining 10 percent, though still well off its […]
Deals
Using AI to Search Deals and Dealmakers
We have launched an experimental use of an AI-powered search approach at PublishersMarketplace, called Matcher. Up until now, our corpus of over 200,000 deal reports has only been searchable through basic word matching and Boolean search strings—and our Dealmakers lists, while quite extensive, only cover the 100 or so sub-categories that we tag and track. Matcher is designed to help you find agents and editors that “match” your manuscript, using natural language descriptions of your work. In this initial phase, it comes in two versions: Deal Matcher lets you search through the deals database, and highlights the editors and agents involved […]
Fourth Quarter Deals: Fiction Rises, Nonfiction and Children’s Declines
Today we report on dealmaking statistics for both the fourth quarter of 2023 as well as the full year — which means that most of our focus is on the annual trends. To recap: Q1 deals were weak — due in large part to the strike at Harper Collins and continued conservatism at Penguin Random House — and then sales rebounded in Q2, helped by later dates for the book fairs, with particular strength in the bigger six-figure deals. Q3 deals declined again, even as major deal reports hit record levels. Fourth quarter deals continued to paint multiple pictures. Adult […]
2023: The Year In Deals
Today we report both fourth quarter and full-year 2023 statistics for US deal reports. Dealmaking patterns were somewhat in line with sales in 2022, as most key domestic deal statistics ebbed from record levels in 2021 but still held at high levels relative to previous years. Things did soften after a strong first quarter, and then picked up a bit in the fourth quarter. In particular: – US deals finished down by 2.7 percent — like print sales as measured by Circana Bookscan, the third-best year in recent charting, and well ahead of 2020 and earlier years. – Adult Fiction continued its […]
Publishers Make Record Bets on Fiction Heading Into Frankfurt
The trends we noted in our recent analysis of third quarter deal reports — fewer overall reports, growing totals for adult fiction, but record numbers of “major” deals — come into concentrated relief as we narrow down into the traditional “pre-Frankfurt” dealmaking window in particular. Since 2021, the Frankfurt Book Fair has fallen a week later than usual, yet again our counts include one extra day of deal reports — but that makes for even comps to 2022 and 2021. For many years, FBF would come five weeks after Labor Day, so our count usually covers five weeks plus one […]
Third Quarter Deals Ebb Overall, Gain At the Highest Level
Consumer book sales have continued to fall versus last year and the big pandemic highs, but are still running at their third-best level in years. (Circana Bookscan has YTD units at 527 million, down about 4 percent from 549 million units a year ago.) Meanwhile, investment by publishers in future product both aligns with and diverges from the consumer sales trend. As a reminder, Q1 deals were weak — due in large part to the strike at Harper Collins and continued conservatism at Penguin Random House — and then rebounded in Q2, helped by later dates for the book fairs, […]