The AAP reported monthly StatShot data for June as well as summary data for the first six months of the year and as is often the case — though you never read this in other accounts — the most notable element is the changes in their 2017 comparison data. (Our brief reminder: Every time the AAP reports data for a new month, they include revised, final data for that same month from a year ago. While that historical data should be pretty stable, we find that often there are some big revisions, which the organization does not call out.) What […]
Industry Statistics
Softer Second Quarter Leaves Trade Unit Sales Close to Flat
NPD Bookscan issued a report on sales trends for the first half of the year, with total unit sales running just about flat. Print sales comprised 317 million units for the first half of the year, compared to 311 million in 2017 — but ebook units reported by publishers through their PubTrack Digital service were down by 3 million in the first quarter, at 41 million units. If that trend continues when the second quarter is tabulated, total measured unit sales would be flat. Print books had gained in the first quarter (helped by Fire and Fury giving the year […]
AAP Reports Good April Sales
The AAP reported StatShot sales data for April, which looks positive for a number of reasons. Trade sales of $576.6 were well higher than the final count for April 2017 of $518.6 million (which itself is higher than the initially-reported $505.3 million a year ago). And the AAP is still working with a reduced data pool that is missing the PGW publishers for this year. The biggest gains came from adult hardcovers (up $26.1 million in gross shipments, and $20.3 million on a net basis) and adult trade paperbacks (up $11.8 million in gross shipments, and $12.6 million net.) Digital […]
AAP Adds Annual Estimates for 2017
The AAP released their annual industry guesstimates for 2017 — this is the product called StatShot Annual, compiled separately from the monthly StatShot reports which tabulate actual publisher reports only. (StatShot Annual uses “modeling” — e.g. multiplication — taking reported data, and presuming there is a valid methodology for using the known to make estimates for all of the publishing entities that never ever report any data, despite multiple efforts to reach them. It’s a good method to tell Congress this might be a $26 billion industry when you are lobbying, which is the AAP’s primary function, though it isn’t […]
UK Trade Stats Show Big Export Business Vulnerable to Brexit, Foreign Exchange and More
We value industry-compiled statistics, but this week’s release of 2017 numbers from the UK’s Publishers Association provides a reminder that you need to focus on the data itself rather than the press release (which will always tell that you business is great). Like most of the UK press, we’re going by the headline release rather than the full dataset. (Generally we’ll only report on data that we have seen in full, but the UK coverage is so abundant and confusing, we’re making an exception. What the announcement says is, “The UK publishing industry had a record-breaking year in 2017, with […]
ABA Membership Rolls Grow Again
In advance of Book Expo, the American Booksellers Association told the AP that the organization added 78 members in the last year, growing to 1,835 members overall. Members store locations totaled 2,470, an increase of 149 from a year ago. That follows a quieter year, in which core membership had declined by 18 and member locations had grown by only 10 stores. ABA ceo Oren Teicher says in that in the first four months of 2018, ABA member stores reporting sales to Bookscan grew unit sales by over 5 percent — more or less in line with (actually slightly below) […]