The AAP released their monthly StatShot report for November 2012, showing flat trade sales overall but a small spike in the growth of ebooks–which comprised 18.1 percent of all trade revenues in the month. Adult trade sales of $434.5 million were up $9.6 million from a year ago. Adult hardcovers declined 21.5 percent, at $155.6 million, while trade paperbacks were up 20.6 percent at $116.9 million (though virtually flat compared to October numbers.) As in October, eBooks comprised the third-largest segment for adult books, at $94.8 million — but was just a 20.7 percent increase over $78.5 million a year […]
Industry Statistics
Bookselling: WSJ on ResultSource and Paid Bestsellers; UK Indies Decline
The old saw of authors “buying” their way onto bestseller lists through carefully timed bulk orders gets a fresh twist in Friday’s WSJ, which reports on the San Diego-based company ResultSource. The marketing firm, according to the paper, charges authors “thousands of dollars for its services” to buy copies of the authors’ own books–mostly as pre-orders–to boost opening week sales (and many of those copies are then returned). The service is particularly popular for business book authors, who can monetize the “bestseller” credit (even when it’s a single week on the list) for years at speaking engagements and other lucrative […]
September Sales Rose Modestly As eBook Percentage Dropped Again (And K-12 Suffered)
The AAP released their monthly StatShot report for September 2012, with data from close to 1200 publishers, and as they state, it “reflects the trends we’ve seen all year: continued publishing growth overall with significant increases in children’s/young adult (especially eBook format) and slight erosion in religion publishing.” For September, however, children’s and YA books fell 4.2 percent (the big growth came earlier in the year) at $145.6 million overall, while net adult book sales of $468.1 million were up 2.8 percent–but that was due to reduced returns rather than higher gross shipments. So for the month, net trade sales […]
Sizing the UK eBook Market
The Bookseller obtained 2012 unit sale data on ebooks from six of the UK’s largest publishers, leading them to postulate that the total British ebook market comprised £235 million in publisher sales last year. (If their estimate is correct, it would mean that the top publishers have a much smaller share of ebook market in the UK than the US.) Reported to them by publishers (akin to AAP sales reports), Random House sold 11.2 million ebook units; Hachette 8.7 million; Harper UK 7.2 million, and Pan Macmillan 4.5 million. Some of those units were driven by the deep-discount 20-pence promotional […]
ABA Sales Softened In Second Half; UK eSales Still Lag US Considerably
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 […]
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, […]