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 think there’s any doubt that Dan’s books are reaching out to people who don’t usually read." Sales show no sign of abating so far in 2005.
The second biggest seller of the year was Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Random House), sales of which neared 1.4 million copies in hardback and paperback, adult and children’s editions. The Random House Group also had the biggest non-fiction book of the year, and the third top seller overall--Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (Black Swan).
More evidence that big books got bigger can be found in the number of titles selling more than 100,000 copies--149 last year compared to 134 in 2003. A different analysis of the top titles shows that the bestselling 100 books of the year shifted 27 million copies between them, accounting for 13.1% of the TCM (against 12.8% in 2003).
It is overly simplistic to claim that retailers supported frontlist releases at the expense of range. The number of different books sold last year increased--BookScan recorded sales of 556,000 unique ISBNs in 2004, up from 548,000 in 2003. The increase comes despite a reduction in the number of new books published by large trade publishers. It may also reflect renewed efforts to promote backlist more imaginatively. Frontlist books--defined as titles published in 2004--accounted for 45.8% of sales by value, a decline from 46.7% in 2003.
The BBC’s The Big Read in 2003 helped to stoke public interest in backlist, with booksellers continuing to push older and established titles in 2004. "What was really gratifying for us about 2004 was that our backlist sales were up on budget," Rachel Cugnoni, Vintage publishing director, says. "That’s partly down to the Big Read in 2003, which made a massive difference to books such as [Sebastian Faulks’] Birdsong, but I think booksellers have also woken up to the fact that you have to work harder with backlist."
Another breakdown of the BookScan figures for 2004 shows that sales of adult fiction rose 7.7% to £409m, making up more than a quarter of the market. The 10 largest publishing houses are almost totally dominant in this sector, taking 95% of sales.
Sales of adult non-fiction comfortably outstripped adult fiction, up 8.2% to £973m. High-brow genres such as narrative history and science were especially strong, but celebrity-led books increased their share of the market too. Sheila Hancock’s The Two of Us (Bloomsbury) was the top-selling biography on 386,363 copies, while other prominent celebrity books included Feel: Robbie Williams (Ebury Press) on 324,936 copies, Katie Price’s biography Being Jordan (John Blake) with 315,522 copies, and Paul Gascoigne’s Gazza (Headline) on 205,783 copies.
In children’s books, sales held up well by comparison with 2003, which saw the Harry Potter hardback. Revenue slipped 3% to £207m in 2004, but the number of books sold rose by 4.5% to 44 million. The numbers suggest that Rowling has expanded the market as a whole and not, as some fear, solely for her own books.
Few would have predicted 18 months ago that daytime TV chat show hosts Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan would become the biggest single drivers of book sales in 2004--but so they proved. Most publishers and booksellers agree that last year was a golden one for media coverage of books in general.
"The book trade is getting more publicity through various media than I can remember for the past 20 years," Iain Corlett of Linghams booksellers told The Bookseller’s annual survey of retailers after Christmas. "It is a golden opportunity, and we must make the most of it."
Joanna Prior, Penguin group marketing and publicity director, says: "We all felt that it would be hard to beat The Big Read in terms of exposure, but the way the media has built on that is tremendously exciting. Rather than seeing it as the enemy, we’re now embracing the media and working with it."
The commercial success of those titles selected for the "Richard & Judy" Book Club suggests that consumers respond well to recommendation. Its winter and spring selections created a handful of paperback bestsellers, and transformed the careers of some authors who were not previously household names.
One of the first books to be featured, Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea (Vintage), ended 2004 with TCM sales of more than half a million copies. By comparison, O’Connor’s 2001 paperback Inishowen (Vintage) has sold 11,000 copies. Two other club choices, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (Picador) and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (Black Swan), also passed the half a million milestone, and Cecelia Ahern’s PS, I Love You (HarperCollins) racked up just under 400,000 copies sold.
The "Richard & Judy" show’s summer reading club repeated the success on a smaller scale later in the year. Of 2004’s top 25 paperback novels, eight were featured on "Richard & Judy". The 16 lucky choices sold 4.3 million copies between them last year--accounting for more than one in 50 of all book purchases.
"R&J" also accelerated growth in the number of reading groups in the UK, and helped publishers better to understand the value of word-of-mouth recommendation. Gail Rebuck, Random House Group chairman and chief executive, says: "More than ever, we have seen the impact of recommendation on sales--through the ’Richard & Judy’ Book Club and the worldwide success of The Da Vinci Code." On the evidence of early sales of "R&J" selections for 2005, the show’s ability to influence book buyers will grow this year.
Beyond "Richard & Judy", TV shows in general created a crop of bestsellers. The surprise tie-in hit was Gillian McKeith’s You Are What You Eat (Michael Joseph), which sold half a million copies in two months over the summer. The success of Michael Palin’s Himalaya (Weidenfeld) and Jamie Oliver’s Jamie’s Dinners (Michael Joseph) was more predictable. The latter sold huge numbers even before Oliver’s Channel 4 series went on air--the big TV names are as bankable as ever. The big screen generated sales too, with Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (Picador) the winner here.
Literary prizes helped to lift sales of winning titles. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was already a success in hardback, but its adult appeal increased after it won the Whitbread Book of the Year award in January 2004. Man Booker Prize-winner Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (Picador) increased weekly sales 10-fold after the ceremony, but did not see a prolonged lift. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (Canongate), winner of the Man Booker in 2002, racked up 261,529 unit sales in 2004.
World Book Day remains a vital spur to book buying--it helped to lift unit sales by 9% during the week in which it took place. Promotions such as these provided solid growth in 2004, and suggest that consumers will be receptive to additional, and still more innovative, ways of recommending books for reading and buying.