A wave of big books landed last Tuesday, with Hillary Clinton’s What Happened registering the biggest opening week, topping Bookscan’s chart with just under 168,000 print copies sold across the outlets they track — which publisher Simon & Schuster notes is “the biggest first week sales recorded by any author for a hardcover nonfiction title published since 2012.” (That’s almost twice the opening week sales in June 2014 of Hard Choices, which moved approximately 86,000 print books — and was said to have comprised total sales of 100,000 to 120,000 units in the first week — though well behind opening […]
Industry Statistics
AAP Data Shows Soft April
The AAP reported their monthly StatShot statistics for April, after dropping the first three monthly reports for the year in one batch on August 1. As usual, you should not read much into a single month’s report. Gross print shipments to accounts declined $42.5 million, or 7.5 percent, in April, with adult sales down a little more than children’s and young adult sales. As with the first quarter’s numbers, however, year to year comparisons get a little skewed since the final, revised numbers for 2016 rose again in April. (So April 2017 looks worse in comparison as the revised counts for […]
Handbook for Gaming Sales
The ABA has admitted belatedly that Lani Sarem’s Handbook for Mortals “should not have made it onto the Indie Bestsellers list” last week (where it was listed as the No. 2 young adult fiction hardcover) and “it isn’t appearing this week.” The organization added, “We’re always reviewing our procedures to improve them, and, following this, we are refining the way we do things.” That leaves USA Today as the only organization to have stood by including the book on a bestseller list, ranking it at No. 34 last week. Separately, Thu-Huong Ha at Quartz has done some good follow-up, and after first […]
Measured Trade Print and eBook Units Near Flat In First Half
NPD Bookscan posted a headline report on book sales for the first half of 2017, with the trends of the last couple of years continuing: Print sales continue to rise modestly, through online and book-focused stores, pretty much balanced out by declines in ebook sales. Through outlets tracked by NPD Bookscan, print book sales for the first 6 months of 2017 were 311 million units, up 2.6 percent from 303 million in 2016. Their retail and club channel, dominated by Amazon and chain bookstores, was up 4 percent, as mass merchandisers and others continued to fall, down 8 percent. eBook […]
Revised AAP Stats Show Trade Just Above Flat In First Quarter
After a quiet delay, the AAP released their StatShot sales data for the first quarter of 2017. (The main press release presents rolled up Q1 data only. But the organization still tabulates their data on a monthly basis, and provided monthly breakouts for each individual month to members in the same format as previously.) You may recall that we came to the reasoned conclusion a year ago that month-to-month variations in AAP trade stats were providing more noise than signal in understanding market performance. The new shows a market that was pretty darn flat in the first quarter of the […]
Blended Statistics Part 3: The Full Consumer Market
Thanks to those who have been writing in with enjoyment of our StatsFest, and apologies to those who are overwhelmed (we’re trying to make this as straight forward as possible), but we soldier on. Today’s installment is brief, but important, as we knit together numbers across trade — and this will prove important ground work for the following piece, which tries to estimate what authors “make” from traditionally-published books. So now we fold together digital and print data to provide a consolidated view of what the full trade publishing market looks like (which also lets us put in context the […]