The AAP released their Stat Shot sales data for April, collected from approximately 1,200 publishers. With difficult comparisons to a year ago, when Hunger Games was still hot and the Fifty Shades series was just taking off for Vintage, the numbers show declines across the board. Overall trade sales of $490 million were down 12 percent from the previous year. The number that will draw the most remarks is the ebook sales total for the month of $120.5 million, down 13.5 percent compared to 2012, a rare decline for that closely-watched category. But a closer look shows how the drops […]
Industry Statistics
2012 Exports Grow In Line with Trade Sales
The AAP released their second annual report of export sales statistics, extrapolated from the Book Stats data stream and supplemented with additional country-specific data from 150 publishers. As with the previous report, the highlight data provided to us in the press release covers everywhere except Canada — the largest export territory — since some publishers include it within their domestic account. (The full paid report includes information on Canadian sales.) Like the US trade, 2012 exports rose over 7 percent, to $833 million. The unit gain was smaller, at 2.4 percent, and nearly all of the revenue increase came from […]
BookStats Posits That Trade Grew Almost 7 Percent in 2012, Thanks to eBooks
BookStats has released selected industry data for 2012 Wednesday morning and supplemented that release in an initial presentation at the Making Information Pay conference held at NYU. The full data dashboard will be released to paying clients next week, and the entire formal report will be issued in June. Consistent with separate data already reported by the AAP, it was a positive year for trade publishing overall. BookStats puts overall trade publisher sales at $15.05 billion, up $969 million or 6.9 percent. Virtually all of that growth comes from ebooks rather than print books. They estimate the entire publishing business […]
Trade Paperbacks Boost Adult Trade November AAP Numbers, With Overall eBook Sales at 18 Percent
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 […]
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 […]