Nielsen Book has launched PubTrack Digital UK, an ebook sales tracking service based on the same model that they use in the US. A set of unspecified publishers contribute their own ebook sales data, on a monthly basis, with a three-month delay. Nielsen says “we are not currently releasing the names of participating publishers. However, we can say that we have a significant share of the estimated e-book market.” The top-selling ebook in the UK for 2015 through August was Girl On the Train (566,000 units) and the No. 10 title, How I Lost You by Jenny Blackhurst, moved approximately […]
Industry Statistics
AAP Sales Rebounded In September to Leave Trade Flat Through Three Quarters
After a weak August report, trade book sales as monitored by the AAP across approximately 1,200 publishers rebounded in September. With $665 million in net shipments for the month, up $45.5 million (or more than 7 percent), the gains all came from adult books, as children’s and YA titles were just below flat. As already established by full-year 2015 unit sales figures from Nielsen Bookscan, adult trade paperbacks showed the greatest strength again in September, up $33 million at $138 million in total. All adult publishing categories registered some gains — including hardcovers, up $8.6 million to $188.6 million — […]
More Nielsen Stats: Coloring Saved Sales
Nielsen Bookscan released some additional 2015 statistics, confirming that “2015 was the year of adult coloring books.” As we reported earlier, total unit books for 2015 as measured by the point-of-sale service grew 17.6 million units, or 2.8 percent. Also as previously noted, nearly all of the growth came from adult nonfiction, primarily backlist trade paperbacks. Now Bookscan has confirmed the next logical inference with their own tabulation: They estimate that sales of coloring books grew by 23 million units in 2015 (up from just 2 million units in 2014). That accounts for all of the year’s growth in units, […]
Also From 2015: Subscription Did Work, Just Not For You
Last Friday, after a reporting glitch in the morning, Amazon issued December sales statements to KDP exclusive authors telling them how much the etailer decided to allocate for the Kindle Unlimited subscription pool — $13.5 million — and what that was worth per page, $.004609 in the US. Consistent with the larger pattern from recent months, the payment per page read declined (down 6.7 percent, from $.00492) as the overall pool allocated grew (up 6.3 percent, from $12.8 million). While many observers focused on curtailments in subscription reading programs during 2015 — as Oyster prepared to shutdown, and Scribd adjusted their title mix and […]
Another Lens on 2015: Bestseller Share
As noted a couple of months ago, we have been experimenting with putting filters on top on our big database of national bestseller lists (now over 12 years deep) to extract some comparison info over time. With the year complete, we thought it would be interesting to generate a calculation of NYT “bestseller share” by major publishers. To simplifyy things, the figures below are based on the printed lists only, and calculate total “slots.” (A single title can capture multiple slots on NYT lists in a given week; we track by both titles and slots, but it’s easiest to keep the lens […]
The Print Bestsellers of 2015
As usual, here is our round-up of the top-selling print books of 2015, sold in outlets tracked by Nielsen Bookscan. They year recorded the same number of books selling 1 million units or more — six — as did 2014, but the distribution shifted, with four of those top sellers in adult fiction (whereas a year ago, five of the top six were juvenile/YA titles). Notably, Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer-winning novel sold more than four times as many print copies in 2015 as it did in 2014, when the book was first published. And with Veronica Roth and John Green giving up their […]