Random House Children’s reports another very strong opening day for Christopher Paolini, with INHERITANCE selling 489,500 units yesterday (including print, ebook and audio editions), it’s first day on sale. The publisher says “hardcovers dominated the opening-day sell-through, with an 83/17 percent print to digital split.” Paolini’s BRISINGR sold approximately 550,000 units on opening day in the US in September 2008, back when Borders was still operating. In other sales news, Simon & Schuster continues to demur regarding any reporting of sales over the past two weeks for Walter Isaacson’s STEVE JOBS biography. But we’ve spoken to few executives familiar with […]
Industry Statistics
AAP eBook Sales Stay At Around 20%
The AAP has caught up on their monthly reports, issuing sales totals for August. eBooks were still the second-largest trade segment, behind adult paperbacks, registering $88.8 million. Per the trend for most of the year, ebooks are still running at about 20 percent of reported trade sales. We’ve straightened out some things that have confused us in the past few months, so we’re going to take a different approach to our explanations and disclaimers this month. Currently, 18 publishers report ebook sales to the AAP; the only company of scale that reports print sales but not ebook sales is WW […]
AAP July Sales Numbers
The AAP is still catching up on their monthly sales numbers and just released their statistics for July. (To repeat last month’s reminder, this is the data from the limited set of publishers who reported monthly to the AAP, not to be confused with the larger pool of annual data and estimates reflected in the new Book Stats program the publishers organization runs along with the BISG, which debuted in August). After June’s pronounced declines in adult hardcover and trade paperback sales compared to a year ago, the July numbers show a rebound, at least for adult hardcovers. Net sales […]
Deal Volume Grows Ahead of Frankfurt
With the Frankfurt Book Fair looming, we have compiled our semi-annual look at the state of dealmaking, this time bolstered by some very pretty charts. Visualizing our data should make it easier for readers to draw their own conclusions from the statistics, and it allows us to reveal more nuance to the figures as well. The first chart below looks at all US Publishers Marketplace deal reports from September. Deal volume among “comparable categories” continues to grow, up 7.5 percent over last year (when reports jumped almost 17 percent from the recession trough of 2009). But total deal volume is […]
Briefs: Amazon Lights a “Kindle Fire” Under Its Tablet; Quercus Sales Fall From Larsson Ebb; and More
Multiple reports (including this one from TechCrunch) indicate that Amazon’s tablet, which will be formally introduced at an event Wednesday morning, will be called the Kindle Fire, and will not be ready to ship until the second week of November. For the first six months of 2011, Quercus reported sales of 12 million pounds, down 20 percent from a year ago (largely due to a natural ebb in Stieg Larsson volume sales, which had boosted Quercus’s bottom line significantly for the past few years) though profits rose slightly to 3.4 million pounds during the same time frame. The cost of […]
Looking for Facts About Self-Published eBooks
With abundant stories of self-published success via Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, Barnes & Noble’s PubIt and other outlets–and growing concerns as to whether self-epublishing opportunities and increased acquisitions by Amazon’s own imprints poses a challenge to established publishers–we made self-published ebooks the topic of our latest proprietary consumer survey. As with the insightful look at where Borders customers might take their book-buying dollars, the data was compiled exclusively for Publishers Lunch by Bowker PubTrack, through their regular online survey of book buyers. In this case, answers come only from the 11 percent of people surveyed who bought ebooks during the […]