As a group, ABA bookstores had a good year in 2012–but what’s implied in this BTW story is more significant than the stated statistics, ratifying our “story we can’t report” from yesterday. The ABA provides another indication that, despite happy anecdotal holiday sales reports,holiday book sales were soft, providing a soft ending to the year as early blockbusters (Hunger Games; Fifty Shades; etc.) gave way to a holiday season with few dominant, breakout books and a cooling off of the ebook market. (Barnes & Noble’s “core” non-Nook-related bookstores sales fell 3.1 percent during the holiday sales period.) What the ABA […]
Industry Statistics
The Year In Deals: 2012
It’s time for our annual look at trends in dealmaking from the previous, based as usual on reports to Publishers Marketplace. Which comes with the usual qualifiers: PM deal reports represent only a portion of activity in the marketplace, and characterizations of deal size in particular are dependent upon disclosure from the parties involved. We infer relatively consistent habits over time from our community, and the PM dataset of deals is the only such resource robust enough to analyze over time. To us, the granular year-to-year changes are more indicative than anything else. Once again, total recorded deal volume increased, […]
Print Sales Fall Over 9 Percent In US, 3.4 Percent In UK
US print book sales as tracked by Nielsen BookScan fell 9.3 percent in units for 2012. The biggest decline came from the smallest format segment, mass market books, where unit sales fell 20.5 percent. Trade paperbacks weakened more than hardcovers during the year. (Nielsen BookScan does not currently track US ebook sales.) In the UK, Nielsen BookScan’s data shows consumer expenditures on physical books fell 4.6 percent for the year, to £1.514, with unit sales declining 3.4 percent to 202 million books. With 10.6 million print copies sold during the year, EL James accounted for one out of every 20 […]
Nielsen BookScan Expands to Include Walmart Data
Nielsen BookScan US announced that they are incorporating sales data from what has been the largest elusive seller of physical books in the US. Beginning with the first week of January 2013, point-of-sale data for printed books sold at over 4,000 Walmart locations across the U.S. and Puerto Rico will be included in the service’s sales database. BookScan estimates that with the new data, they will account for over 80 percent of the US retail print book market. “Greater accuracy of information and insight into book consumers is what all BookScan clients want, and adding Walmart data provides a big […]
As In June, Trade Paperbacks and eBooks Carry the Trade
The AAP reported sales for July from the nearly 1,200 publishers they track. Overall net trade sales of $522.5 million were up 12 percent, with all of the gains and then some coming from trade paperbacks and adult–very adult–ebooks, still led by the remarkable 50 Shades trilogy. July’s trade total was $16.4 million lower than in June. Children’s sales, boosted earlier in the year by release of the first Hunger Games movies, registered $98.1 million–down 9.5 percent compared to $108.4 million a year ago. eBook sales were almost the same as in June, at $137.8 million, up 62 percent versus […]
Self-Published Books Account for Close to Half of the “Traditional” Titles Bowker Tracks
Bowker has released a special analysis of title counts in the fast-growing self-published books segment. The new tabulations follow data from the company earlier in the year showing self-published print books comprising a substantial portion of the “traditional” annual output. (“Traditional” books does not count the over one million titles from POD factories.) When first reported in June, Bowker said self-published print books accounted for 36 percent of the “traditional” production in 2011; now the new report puts the total of 148,424 printed self-published books last year at 43 percent of the “traditional” output. While Bowker’s main year-to-year stats still […]