Our first little experiment last month proved to be popular, so we’ll continue our monthly recaps of how the previous month’s high-profile retailer and book club picks fared in the marketplace. (Of course these statistics are only a partial view, of print sales only. Some of these books were highly anticipated — and well pre-ordered…
Industry Statistics
Jenna Bush’s Today Picks Have Some Power
EW probably goes overboard in declaring Jenna Bush Hager as “demonstrating an individual power not seen since Oprah’s glory days” in her monthly book picks on The Today Show, starting in March. But her selections do have noticeable impact, and provide a clear sales lift. Her inaugural pick was her strongest, however; according to NPD…
AAP Releases Annual “Estimates”
The AAP released their separate set of annual “estimates” — StatShot Annual — on Friday. As usual, the most important thing for us to cover here is to remind you that, in contrast to the AAP’s monthly reports, these “estimates” are the product of taking real data and then multiplying it to pretend to account…
First Quarter AAP Sales Are Ahead of Recent Average, Clouded By Continuing Restatements
The AAP reported monthly StatShot statistics for March and, as with the first two reports of 2019, the news is not what you will read elsewhere. The remarkable finding continues to be a significant restatement of adult sales for the previous year, with early 2018 weaker than previously shown. Once again, the tabulation of adult…
The New AAP Reporting Pool Looks to be Smaller, But February Statistics Show A Gain
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…
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…