Publishing Industry Market Update; Vol. 1, Issue 3
Welcome back to our third issue of the Yates & Yates Author Coaching monthly newsletter providing a brief update of the current state of the book publishing industry. As always, feel free to share with your friends, colleagues, or anyone else who might care.
Onward and Upward
September picked up where August left off. After August saw a 5% increase over the prior year, September did one better – 1% that is. Juvenile Fiction remained on a tear. And Bob Woodward’s Trump exposé, “Rage,” sold over 450,000 copies in half a month. With essentially all genres outperforming last year’s numbers, September 2020 was clocked at around 6% above 2019.
Exceptions: Brick-and-Mortar Still Stuck in COVID Concrete; Scholastic Still on Detention
It’s not all good news. We’ve witnessed an incredible rebound in the publishing industry after the initial shelter-in-place shutdown. But there are still segments that are struggling. July numbers showed that in-person bookstore sales continued to slump. Clearly, online sales have more than filled the void, but bookstore sales were down 24.6% from 2019, and that’s after June was down 35% year-over-year. Those numbers will threaten the survival of mom-and-pop indies, as well as the name-brand chains.
And Scholastic, even with the juvenile fiction and non-fiction sales explosion of 2020, is down 7% across the company with a big hit in their book club division (down 27%), and a more than 50% drop in their school-based book fair business. Forget Hogwarts, we need Fairhaven Elementary to re-open!
Snowden Fought the Law….
Well, you know the rest of the song, so you know who won. It wasn’t Edward. A U.S. District Court judge has ruled that all royalties earned from Edward Snowden’s book, “Permanent Record,” will go to the U.S. government. The Justice Department successfully argued that earnings from the now-Russian resident’s 2019 book were ill-gotten since he had signed non-disclosure agreements with both the CIA and the NSA. That’s gonna lighten the comrade’s bank account by OVER 4 BILLION...rubles (though that’s still $5.2 million).
There’s a reason they call it “the long arm of the law.”
Serious Note
In troubling international news, a Christian online bookstore owner is out a lot more than just money (though he was fined $30,000, too). Chinese bookseller Chen Yu has been sentenced to 7 years in prison for selling unapproved religious books. And the Chinese government might not be done yet. A house church pastor in China told a persecution watchdog group that he had been investigated for buying books from Yu’s online store. We at Yates & Yates Author Coaching have long been supporters of persecuted Christians. Go to Open Doors to find out what you can do to help.
So, you think you want to write a book…. If you are an aspiring author, and you don’t know where to start, well you can START HERE. We have a comprehensive e-course for anyone who thinks they might want to write a book. Check out START HERE: A Beginner’s Guide to Publishing Your Book. And if you know an aspiring author, it’s never too early to start your Christmas shopping.
