Bookselling by numbers

Although the Christmas rush came later than ever, it helped to cap a solid year of growth for book retailers in 2004, year-end data from Nielsen BookScan suggests. The year was not without its challenges--especially for the independent sector as it watched discounts deepen ever further.
BookScan’s figures from its Total Consumer Market put sales at £1.59bn for 2004. This is an increase of 6.4%, or £95.8m, on 2003. Considering that was the year that brought the fastest selling book in living memory, J K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Bloomsbury), most retailers and publishers regard 2004’s performance as more than satisfactory. As the timeline (above) of the TCM sales shows, revenue peaked in the final two months of the year, but had been remarkably consistent throughout the preceding months. Peaks and troughs were less pronounced than in previous years, although summer sales were buoyant.
Sales growth was steeper by volume. Copies sold through the TCM totalled 205 million, up 7.7% year-on-year, outstripping growth by value. Furious discounting accounted for the discrepancy between the two growth figures--average selling prices were less in 2004 than in 2003.
Year-on-year revenue growth through BookScan’s narrower, high street-based General Retail Market measure was slower at 0.8%, suggesting that non-traditional channels such as the internet took the majority of growth in 2004.
Figures from Book Marketing Ltd’s Books and the Consumer survey, based on customers’ diaries rather than till data, indicate a broadly flat market in the first 46 weeks of the year. This perhaps reflects tough times in the direct mail sector, where sales are measured by BML but not by BookScan.
Bestseller sales got bigger in 2004. Eleven titles sold more than half a million copies through the TCM--compared to five in 2003 and one in 2002. Significant marketing spend by publishers and support from retailers were important factors in these titles’ success, but there was still room for such surprise hits as Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Profile). Even the publishers of Gillian McKeith’s You Are What You Eat (Michael Joseph) and Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea (Vintage) did not expect them to top the half a million mark. There is apparently still room for quirky and relatively unheralded titles such as these to flourish.
Dan Brown was the chartbuster of chartbusters. The Da Vinci Code (Corgi) sold 1.6 million copies through the TCM, 650,000 ahead of the next biggest seller. It topped The Bookseller’s mass market fiction chart for 23 weeks out of 24 in the second half of 2004, and sold more than one million copies in the final four months. Brown’s other books added a further 1.7 million copies to the author’s overall volume sales. Transworld m.d. Larry Finlay claims Brown was a significant driver of market growth in 2004. "I don’t