Publishing Industry Market Update; Vol. 1, Issue 4
Welcome back to our latest 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 be interested.
BIG
And what’s bigger than Amazon?
Love him or hate him, we all secretly hope Jeff Bezos is our long-lost uncle. It should come as a surprise to exactly NO ONE that Amazon is having a momentous 2020. For the quarter ending September 30, 2020, Amazon exceeded already high expectations with a 37% jump in revenue and a near-doubling of net income ($69.1 billion and $6.2 billion, respectively).
Amongst the numerous business lines companywide (of which I expect the public only has a partial understanding), Amazon reported an increase in its online store sales of 27%/$48.3 billion, which was dwarfed by the increases in revenue from third-party seller sales (53%/$20.4 billion). It seems that while selling items in-person at retail has become a challenge, or at least a perceived health concern for customers and/or employees, some enterprising business people must have found a parachute of sorts—pivoting to online sales through Amazon’s more than established mega-platform. On Prime Day alone (OK, it was actually 2 days—October 13-14), these third-party opportunists grabbed $3.5 billion in revenue, up 60% from last year’s event. Of course, that was before Mr. Bezos took his 30% share. Wanna do that math? It’s a good 2 days.
BAD
On top of the COVID-19 headaches suffered by our friends at Barnes & Noble this year, the rain became a downpour on October 10, 2020, when America’s largest bookstore chain fell victim to a massive cybersecurity attack. While B&N said no consumer credit card data was compromised (I bet that leaves Home Depot and Target feeling all wet), what was exposed included customer names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses, as well as historical transaction data – so now the Russians know what kind of books we’ve been buying.
The breach was systemwide and resulted in a complete network shutdown, which lasted days in some areas of the company – like customers’ Nook library data. But perhaps the biggest bummer from the breach—at least for the likes of Y&Y super-author Dr. David Jeremiah—was that B&N’s internal and external reporting systems were offline through the weekend, so no reporting was made to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or BookScan for sales made during the entire week ending October 11, 2020. A real buzzkill if your release date was October 6!
MORE OF THE SAME
This is only our fourth issue of our Market Update, but the song remains the same: after three quarters, the year of our collective discontent continues to deliver stellar book sales. Q3’s anchor leg of September sprinted home with an astonishing 14.6% pace over last September. Sales of all books are up 6.4% over the first nine months of good ol’ 2019, with adult trade books clocking in with an 8.9% increase (See election year hits from Mary L. Trump, Sean Hannity, John Bolton, and Bob Woodward), and children/young adult up 7.7% (with wins from fiction series superstars Suzanne Collins, Stephanie Meyer and Dav Pilkey). Predictably, the digital segments (ebook and downloadable audio) have made those numbers look Bush League by comparison, belting gains nearly a full third or more over their 2019 stats.
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 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.
