USA Today has analyzed the bestseller list they will publish in the paper tomorrow, reflecting sales in the unusual post-Christmas week. Launched by millions of newly-gifted devices with e-reading capability and assisted by lousy weather in many parts of the country, all six of top bestsellers for the week sold more ebooks than print books, as did 19 of the top 50 titles. USA Today notes that “tt’s the first time the top-50 list has had more than two titles in which the e-version outsold print.” (Many publishers have indicated that their biggest titles were already selling anywhere from 20 […]
Statistics
The Year In Sales: Print Sales Decline Less Than eBooks Gained, As Retail Market Share Is Hit
Many in the trade were feeling relatively positive about business trends at the end of the year until the Borders news broke. For the 51 weeks of book sales, through Sunday, December 26, print book sales as tracked by Nielsen BookScan were down 4.4 percent overall. (The comparable reporting period from 2009 ran through December 27.) With ebook sales at the major reporting houses rising from roughly 3 percent a year ago to approximately 9 percent or more in dollars (and likely even more by units) by the end of this year it’s likely that the decline in print sales […]
Nielsen BookScan UK’s Top 50 Books of 2010
The Guardian has downloadable spreadsheets of the top 100 books of the year in the UK, along with the top 100 books since Nielsen BookScan started collecting UK point-of-sale data in 1998. Here are the top 50 books of last year. Despite all the opening-day attention for former prime minister Tony Blair, he finishes the year in 27th place: 1 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Stieg Larsson 1,156,530 2 The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest Stieg Larsson 995,845 3 The Girl Who Played with Fire Stieg Larsson 957,063 4 Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals Jamie Oliver 874,546 5 The Lost […]
Amazon Provides Authors with Limited Nielsen BookScan Data
As of today Amazon is letting authors enrolled in their “Author Central” program (e.g. FiledBy for Amazon) access a small window of Nielsen BookScan sales data for their own books. Needless to say, the offer is a major inducement for authors not already enrolled to sign up for the Author Central. The program shows the most recent four weeks of sales as tracked by Nielsen, on a week-by-week basis. It also provides geographical breakdowns, showing the same limited data set according to local DMA markets. They provide a nice visual national mapping of the data that Nielsen itself provides to […]
All Kinds of Etc., and People News, Too
Hachette Book Group is celebrating making Crain’s Best Places to Work in NYC for the second year in a row, rising to No. 19 (from 24 a year ago). Norton has named Edward Crutchley the next managing director of its UK subsidiary, effective February 1, 2011, after Alan Cameron retires. Cameron is the firm’s founding managing sirector, joining Norton in 1979. Crutchley has been most recently regional sales director, institutional online sales at John Wiley UK, which he joined when the parent company purchased Blackwell. (Norton uses Wiley UK’s warehouse.) Steven Wilson has joined Book Sales Inc. New York as […]
Bush Sells 775,000 Copies In First Week On Sale
Crown says that they have recorded sales of 775,000 copies for former President George Bush’s DECISION POINTS in its first week on sale in all editions, including ebooks, audio and export editions. As was the case with the opening-day sale, they say it’s the largest first-week sale for any nonfiction title published by Random House, Inc. since former President Bill Clinton’s book in 2004. eBooks comprised “more than 100,000 copies, or approximately 14 percent of all units” sold (and at least 50,000 ebooks were sold the first day by the company’s prior report). Crown says they have reprinted another 350,000 […]