As regular readers know, we chart the domestic dealmaking data ahead of both the London and Frankfurt Book Fairs. Ordinarily we would provide a first look this Friday and then follow up next Wednesday, but with the cancellation of LBF, we wanted to see how the dealmaking trends have been lining up. The good news is that deal volumes are looking strong overall, only 5.5 percent below last year’s final pre-London total, so likely to finish well ahead of last year. Fiction deals have already rebounded, running 8.6 percent ahead of last year’s final total. And debut fiction deals are […]
Industry Statistics
AAP November 2019 Stats Show Weak Sales
As we explain regularly, AAP StatShot data can vary widely from month to month (and that does not seem to be an indicator of anything significant). And we already know how 2019 trade print sales turned out from a unit perspective from NPD Bookscan. With all of that in mind, the AAP November 2019 data is markedly lower for both adult and children’s trade books, only in part owing to a particularly strong comp year. Adult print sales totaled $304 million, compared to $466 million in November 2018. (November 2018’s updated reporting was only slightly lower than the $473 million […]
2019 Diversity Study Offers a More Comprehensive Baseline
The 2019 Lee & Low Diversity Baseline Survey results are in, and “the field is just as White today as it was four years ago,” write Jason Low and Hannah Ehrlich in their analysis of the data. But that data pool itself presents a much broader, richer understanding of who works in publishing than their first landmark effort from 2015. Through expansive outreach by Lee & Low, the new survey garnered over twice as many responses (7,893 responses in 2019, versus 3,706 in 2015), across 153 companies, this time including university presses and literary agencies, too, along with all of […]
2019’s Book Club Picks, Part Two: How Did the Booksellers Pick?
As promised, this is the second part of the in-depth look we started yesterday, tracking the performance of well-known monthly book club and spotlight picks. This installment focuses on selections from booksellers and librarians, who generally highlight new release titles, as they should. In some cases that helps their sales track record, since they often pick anticipated and pre-ordered books from commercial authors or titles that come with a big publisher promotional push. On the other hand, sometimes those titles publish late in the month, so our window on sales does not always include four weeks worth of data. (In […]
2019’s Book Club Books: How Did the Pickers Pick?
The burst in attention and impact for book clubs and monthly spotlight picks among booksellers, celebrities, and media outlets prompted our popular monthly “How Did They Pick?” feature, which tracks print sales of selected titles. Over time, that sales data has shown that not all picks are created equal; some are aggressively marketed commercial hits, while others are quiet releases and sell fewer than 1,000 copies in their selection month. The sales impact from club to club varies widely as well. Below we have charted each club’s most and least resonant picks of 2019, and we show you their average […]
Next Week’s Bestsellers
We are beginning some experimental work with BookStat, the service that tracks and estimates online book sales across all formats, to provide some market insights not previously available. One feature of the system we particularly like (and helped to inspire) is that it tracks pre-orders on a daily basis, right alongside sales of books already on the market, providing a broader view of titles attracting interest from readers. That feature becomes particularly interesting for tracking new release titles (and over time helping to distinguish between actual opening week sales of books, versus their accrued pre-orders). It also means we can […]