Because the just-released NPD Bookscan sales data covers the week ending December 22, it’s too early to make any definitive statements about the important holiday sales period — but the indication is that once again, holiday book sales experienced a strong final surge, even if it’s not the same big holiday lift that retailers in general experienced. (Mastercard data showed retail sales excluding autos up 5.1 percent through December 24 for the full holiday stretch.) Bookscan shows print sales in the most recent week of approximately 33.7 million units, up from about 27 million units the week before — and […]
Statistics
S&S Reports FEAR Sold Over 750,000 Units On Opening Day
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 in the announcement, “Bob Woodward’s FEAR is selling with the force of a cultural phenomenon, in extraordinary numbers across the board, in hardcover, ebook, and audio editions. Based on immense pre-publication and ongoing interest, the reading public clearly has an enormous appetite for what we […]
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 $17 million compared from 2015. But now, in the final analysis (AAP modifies the previous year’s data month by month as the comparison baseline), 2016 sales were a big $7.006 billion. So we missed our chance to proclaim that 2016 was up by 5.4 percent. […]
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 returns, which is the better indicator of current and future sales — were $595.5 million for the month, down a modest 1.9 percent (or $11.7 million). But the real reason sales look flat is because the historical comparison data for August 2016 was revised upwards. […]
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; and digital audio was $19.1 million, growing $3.3 million from 2015. Total digital sales registered $112.7 million — compared to $136.6 million a year ago. Bear in the mind that on a comparative basis, ebook sales are expected to keep falling at least through September […]
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 and then — to our mind — renders it mostly useless by multiplying it to pretend that we can say something about the other 70,000 or so registered and active publishers who never report data to anyone. (The AAP does not release the direct, actual […]