The AAP continues with their program of much more timely release of the monthly StatShot statistics, publishing the February 2019 report. Unfortunately, as we suggested in reporting on the January data, asserting any meaningful comparisons has become more dubious still — particularly for adult books — given the large changes in the pool of reporting…
Industry Statistics
AAP’s January StatShot Shows 7 Percent Decline in Adult Trade
The AAP released their StatShot publisher-reported monthly sales statistics for January. As we have explained before, the statistics for any given month turn out to have little or no statistical significance, particular for the print categories. The current report has adult trade sales at $352.5 in January 2019 (down 7 percent from $380 million last…
London: So Many Debuts, So Few Big Deals
We’ve run out of polite synonyms for modest and soft, so we’ll start our final look at the dealmaking patterns leading into the London Book Fair with what jumped out as most distinctive. Debut fiction is always a closely-watched market bellwether, particularly as the mainstream fiction market appears to languish. The good news is that…
AAP Trade Sales Look to Have Finished Well for 2018
The AAP released their StatShot publisher-reported sales data for December and the full year 2018, a substantial improvement on their traditional timing. What the data tells us is harder to declare, for reasons we will detail below, but here are a few key takeaways. For now, adult trade sales are reported at $5.131 billion for…
AAP November Stats Show Strong Revenues Ahead of Holiday
We already know from NPD Bookscan that tracked consumer print book sales rose 1.3 percent by units in 2018, and soon the AAP will provide us with full revenue statistics for the year. In the meantime, the organization released their StatShot publisher-reported sales statistics for November. As expected, with the release of Michelle Obama’s BECOMING,…
Germany’s Book Trade Trended Slightly Positive in 2018 — Thanks to Price Increases
In 2018, Germans bought fewer books, but paid more for them, according to stats in the January issue of the German Publishers & Booksellers Association’s publication. “The [sales] balance for the year 2018 is … a wafer-thin increase of 0.1 percent” according to the report, but the number of copies sold fell by 1.4 percent….