Publishing Industry Market Update; Vol. 3, Issue 1

Before you drag that dried-out, dead fire hazard to the curb, let’s drink some lukewarm eggnog to celebrate a successful Christmas season of bookselling with our December sales update.

Weekly Book Sales Slow…Then Sprint into the New Year

After months of torrid sales reports for print books, we did see some intermittent slowing from week-to-week as we moved into the fall – as prognosticated by the Market Update, because the comparable prior year numbers from fall of 2020 had cast off any remnant of the early-year COVID slow down and were turbo-charged by the quadrennial fuel of a presidential election cycle. So, we continued to see some fits and starts in the November sales figures.

Thanksgiving week saw print sales up 9.7% over the prior year’s Black Friday week, with Barnes & Noble reporting double-digit sales increases for that all-important shopping weekend— strained supply chain and all. The following week stalled, reporting an essentially flat drop of 0.2% from a year prior. By the week ending December 11, we saw a relatively precipitous decline of 12.2%. The last full week before Christmas dropped again, but only 2% from the same period a year ago. Then, Christmas week’s numbers bounced back with a joyful jump of 15.4% over 2020 sales. With just one week left in a very strong calendar 2021, we find the total sales of print books up 9% over 2020. And if you’ve been a faithful reader of the Update, you’ll recall that we were all pretty happy with those 2020 numbers. So, to outpace them makes 2021 the best year for publishing in recent memory.

In the next couple of months, we’ll get reports on how the brick-and-mortar segment fared, but through the first 10 months of the year, bookstore sales were up 39.6% over 2020, including another massive month in October – up 53.4% over the prior year.  For reference, all of retail combined was only up 18.7% year-over-year. A positive sign, to be sure.

Penguin Random House Calls in the Big Guns

Sure to have their day in court, the PRH lawyers have filed their initial response to the Department of Justice lawsuit to stop the PRH acquisition of fellow “Big 5” publisher, Simon & Schuster. As you’d expect, they objected to pretty much all of it—they don’t even like the term “Big 5,” pointing out that “in each of the past three years, three of the top ten highest selling authors…have been published by publishers other than the so-called Big Five.” Can we get a fact-check, please?

The initial objection was directed at the fact that the DoJ didn’t define what a “big author” is – the group that allegedly will be the most harmed by the 1600 lbs. combined publishing monster.

PRH continues to espouse the opinion that this mega-merger will “indisputably” benefit authors, booksellers, and readers “for generations to come,” by “enhanc[ing] competition across the entire spectrum of the publishing industry.” They plan to reinvest their cost savings by increasing the number of books they acquire, as well as investing in programs to help brick-and-mortar bookstores. 

Can we get that in writing?

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