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Close of play in the book market for 2009
By insidebooks | January 13, 2010
For 2009 Nielsen BookScan, which tracks nearly all retail book sales, reported consumer sales in the UK market of £1.751bn and 235.7m books. This is an average selling price (not cover price) of £7.43 per copy. The figures show a small fall from the previous year of 0.5 per cent (by volume) and 1.2 per cent (by value). This represents a broadly flat market and the decline does not come anything near the precipitous fall in sales of some other industries, for example car manufacturing. The average selling price fell by 6p and is at its lowest since 2001.
Around 3 per cent of the total sales by volume belong to two authors, Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown. Between them they sold 7 million books and their books make up five out of the top 10 bestselling titles. The other titles were by Marian Keyes, Stieg Larsson, Kate Atkinson, and Jodi Picoult, alongside the Guinness World Records 2010.
You can hear an LBF podcast about book sales last year - Jonathan Nowell from Nielsen Book being interviewed - here. He says that sales were lower partly as a result of fewer people going abroad on holiday, and therefore not buying so many holiday reads. He also predicts fewer celebrity biographies in the future; and more experimentation coming from smaller, independent publishers. In international comparisons, the UK sells more books per head of population (4 per capita) than other countries covered by Nielsen - e.g. 3 in Australia and 2.5 in the USA.
In Inside Book Publishing we write about trade or consumer publishing …
Consumer book publishing is the high-risk end of the business: book failures are
frequent but the rewards from ‘bestsellers’ – some of which are quite unexpected –
can be great. At the top end of the spectrum is the Harry Potter series. The potential
readers are varied, spread thinly through the population, expensive to reach, difficult
to identify, and have tastes and interests that can be described generally but are not
easily matched to a particular book. Publishers bet to a great extent on their
judgement of public taste and interests – notoriously unpredictable. Sometimes the
publication of a book creates its own market. And the authors whose work arouses
growing interest can develop a personal readership, thereby creating their own
markets – perhaps attaining a ‘brand name’ following, especially in fiction. Publishers
compete fiercely for their books.
Few other consumer goods industries market products with such a short sales life.
Generally speaking for a book to flourish, it is vital for the publisher to secure
advance or subscription orders from booksellers before publication and for the
response to the book to be good in the opening few weeks post-publication. The peak
sales of most new books occur well within a year of publication. Most adult hardback
fiction and paperback titles are dead within three months or just weeks, while
hardback non-fiction and paperback fiction written by famous authors may endure
longer. Compared to the non-consumer book publishers, the trade publishers earn
a higher proportion of their revenues from their frontlist publishing. With the
increasing focus on the lead titles that are part of bookseller promotions and which
receive supermarket exposure, frontlist revenues are increasing in proportion
to backlist revenues. Some publishers’ lists are very frontlist weighted (such as
television and film tie-in publishers), while others keep strong backlists alive from
their new book programme and by relaunching old books in new covers, reissuing
them in different sizes and bindings, adding new introductions or revising them. An
energetically promoted backlist provides retailers with staple and more predictable
stock, should earn good profits for the publisher, and keeps authors in print.
Topics: Uncategorized |
April 23rd, 2010 at 8:58 am
[...] The value of the UK book market - what purchasers pay for the end product - was £3.4bn. This is a fall of 3 per cent from 2008. See our previous post Close of Play in the Book Market. [...]