In its first week on sale, JK Rowling’s highly-anticipated THE CASUAL VACANCY sold approximately 157,000 printed copies in the US in the sales outlets tracked by Nielsen Bookscan. In the UK, where Nielsen Bookscan tracks nearly the entire print sales landscape, they counted sales of roughly 125,000 copies in the first week on sale. The publisher has not reported on ebook sales in either territory.
Industry Statistics
Charting the Slowdown In eBook Growth
Further to yesterday’s reporting of AAP monthly sales data for April, we have updated versions of our standing charts of ebook sales patterns. One clear trend is that the days of doubling or more are over; as the ebook sales base rises, the year-over-year growth is moderating. In fact, over the past few months, that growth rate has dropped dramatically. As this tabulation shows, September 2011 was the last time AAP-monitored ebook sales doubled. The growth rate diminished in October, just in time for the biggest quarter of book sales, and held through the post-Christmas ebook spike in January. But […]
A Closer Look at What BookStats Says About the Trade (It’s Still Flat)
Now that BookStats has released some additional data to their paying subscribers, we’re allowed to provide deeper coverage of our own of their “extrapolations” of revenue shifts across trade publishing. (Our first story is here.) As a standing reminder, we subtract religious book sales of roughly $1.5 billion from the BookStats “trade” data. So all of the data you see below is our own modification and analysis of tables generously provided by BookStats. And this all derives from two relatively simple spreadsheets; the BookStats full annual report and electronic digital dashboard provide a wealth of additional, highly granular data across […]
2011 Trade Sales Fell Slightly In New BookStats Figures, As eBooks Near $2 Billion and Comprise 31 Percent of Adult Fiction
The annual BookStats statistical survey–a joint project between the AAP and the BISG–released a small set of “headline” data on Wednesday, in advance of fuller publication of data to subscribers next week. According to their extrapolations, the overall US publishing business inclusive of all sectors (trade, educational, professional, scholarly, etc.) accounted for $27.2 billion in sales, down roughly 2.5 percent from $27.94 billion in 2010, though unit sales grew by 3.4 percent. For the trade, where we focus our reporting and analysis, they estimate sales of $12.517 billion for 2011, down slightly from estimated sales of $12.59 billion in 2010. […]
Children’s Sales Keep March Numbers Stable, As eBooks Moderate to 22% Overall
After two strong months of sales reports, the AAP numbers for March show a flatter overall trade market, with children’s sales (powered by the Hunger Games) registering big gains that almost kept pace with the decline in adult sales (which do not incorporate the 50 Shades phenomenon yet). Net trade sales from reporting publishers totaled $477.5 million for the month, $200,000 ahead of the revised total for March 2011. Net children’s and young adult sales jumped from $95.9 million a year ago to $140 million this year. eBook sales seem to be following their pattern of peaking at the beginning […]
Sales After Oprah Endorsement Are Good, But Are They Wild?
The launch of Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 on May 30 with the selection of Cheryl Strayed’s WILD–and national media attention for Oprah’s return to book recommendations–has boosted the book’s profile and sales for certain. But will the cable + online Oprah profile come anywhere close to the impact of her syndicated television book endorsements? For the sales week ending June 10, Nielsen Bookscan reports print book sales of approximately 11,300 copies, up roughly 7,700 units from the prior week (with weekly sales having ranged from 3,100 to 4,400 copies over the previous four weeks). That is the book’s best week […]