Simon & Schuster announced big opening day sales for Bob Woodward’s FEAR, saying it sold “more than 750,000” units across all formats. Pre-orders “were the largest for any title in Simon & Schuster company history.” Another reprint was ordered Tuesday, which will give them 1.15 million copies in print. S&S president and publisher Jonathan Karp said…
Statistics
The Final Statistics of the Year (2017)
The AAP released their StatShot data for last December and all of 2017. The real headline, as we have suggested a few times already, is that 2016 was a much better year than originally calculated. This time a year, we were told by the AAP, reported publisher sales for 2016 were $6.63 billion — down…
Trade Was Flat In August (But Up Compared to the Original 2016 Numbers)
The AAP released their StatShot statistics for August sales, with unremarkable results for the trade, which was mostly flat — if you take the new report at face value. Net trade sales for August were $608.7 million, up marginally ($3.3 million) from the same month a year ago. In contrast, gross print shipments — before…
AAP April Report: As Expected, The Digital Decline Continues
The AAP reported their monthly StatShot statistics for April. Per our long look at the reliability of these monthly tabulations, our main monthly takeaway is on the digital data. Adult ebook sales of $85.2 million were down $23.9 million compared to a year ago; children’s ebook sales were $8.4 million, down from $11.7 million a year ago;…
AAP Releases Annual Estimates
On Monday, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) released headline data from the second set of statistics they maintain, called StatShot Annual. In contrast to their monthly reports, which collect dollar sales only as actual reported data from about 1,200 publishers, StatShot Annual tabulates more detailed dollar and unit sales data from almost 1,800 publishers…
eBook Sales Trends and Yet Another Surprise (Newspapers Are Far From Dead)
The other day we learned that you can take something that isn’t news, put it on the front page of the printed NYT, and it becomes very important. While people who work in book publishing likely shrugged at the combination of well-established trends and selective interpretation — ebook sales for traditional publishers have been roughly flat…