Sep 6, 2022·edited Sep 6, 2022Liked by Lincoln Michel
Hey y'all, it's Kristen McLean, lead industry analyst from NPD BookScan. I thought I would chime in with some numbers here, since that statistic from the DOJ is super-misleading, and I'm not sure where it originally came from, since we did not provide it directly.
It is possible it came from our data, and was provided by one of the publisher parties, but based on the 58,000 figure, it's not obvious what exactly it includes in terms of "publisher frontlist". 58,000 titles is way too small a number for "all frontlist books published in a year by every publisher"--that's more like 487,000 frontlist titles--so it's clear it's a slice but I'm not sure HOW it was sliced.
NPD BookScan (BookScan is owned by The NPD Group, not Nielsen, BTW), collects data on print book sales from 16,000 retail locations, including Amazon print book sales. Included in those numbers are any print book sales from self-publishing platforms where the author has opted for extended distribution and a print book was sold by Amazon or another retailer. So that 487K "new book" figure is all frontlist books in our data showing at least 1 unit sale over the last 52 weeks coming from publishers of all sizes, including individuals.
Lots of press outlets have been calling about it today, so I did a little digging to see if I could reverse-engineer the citation, and am happy to share our numbers here for clarity.
Because this is clearly a slice, and most likely provided by one of the parties to the suit, I decided to limit my data to the frontlist sales for the top 10 publishers by unit volume in the U.S. Trade market. My ISBN list is a little smaller than the one quoted in the DOJ, but the principals will be the same.
The data below includes frontlist titles from Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Scholastic, Disney, Macmillan, Abrams, Sourcebooks, and John Wiley. The figures below only include books published by these publishers themselves, not pubishers they distribute.
Here is what I found. Collectively, 45,571 unique ISBNs appear for these publishers in our frontlist sales data for the last 52 weeks (thru week ending 8-24-2022).
In this dataset:
>>>0.4% or 163 books sold 100,000 copies or more
>>>0.7% or 320 books sold between 50,000-99,999 copies
>>>2.2% or 1,015 books sold between 20,000-49,999 copies
>>>3.4% or 1,572 books sold between 10,000-19,999 copies
>>>5.5% or 2,518 books sold between 5,000-9,999 copies
>>>21.6% or 9,863 books sold between 1,000-4,999 copies
>>>51.4% or 23,419 sold between 12-999 copies
>>>14.7% or 6,701 books sold under 12 copies
So, only about 15% of all of those publisher-produced frontlist books sold less than 12 copies. That's not nothing, but nowhere as janky as what has been reported.
BUT, I think the real story is that roughly 66% of those books from the top 10 publishers sold less than 1,000 copies over 52 weeks. (Those last two points combined)
And less than 2% sold more than 50,000 copies. (The top two points)
Now data is a funny thing. It can be sliced and diced to create different types of views. For instance we could run the same analysis on ALL of those 487K new books published in the last 52 weeks, which includes many small press and independetly published titles, and we would find that about 98% of them sold less that 5,000 copies in the "trade bookstore market" that NPD BookScan covers. (I know this IS a true statistic because that data was produced by us for The New York Times.)
But that data does not include direct sales from publishers. It does not include sales by authors at events, or through their websites. It does not include eBook sales which we track in a separate tool, and it doesn't include any of the amazing reading going on through platforms like Substack, Wattpad, Webtoons, Kindle Direct, or library lending platforms like OverDrive or Hoopla.
BUT, it does represent the general reality of the ECONOMICS of the publishing market. In general, most of the revenue that keeps publishers in business comes from the very narrow band of publishing successes in the top 8-10% of new books, along with the 70% of overall sales that come from BACKLIST books in the current market. (Backlist books have gained about 4% in share from frontlist books since the pandemic began, but that is a whole other story.)
The long and short of it is publishing is very much a gambler's game, and I think that has been clear from the testimony in the DOJ case. It is true that most people in publishing up to and including the CEOs cannot tell you for sure what books are going to make their year. The big advantage that publisher consolidation has brought to the top of the market is deeper pockets and more resources to roll those dice. More money to get a hot project. More money to influence outcomes through marketing, more access to sales and distribution mechanisms, and easier access to the gatekeepers who decide what books make it onto retailers' shelves. And better ability to distribute risk across a bigger list of gambles.
It is largely a numbers game and I'm not just saying that because I'm a numbers gal. It's a tough business.
Hope this is helpful.
If anyone has questions, they are welcome to reach out to me directly at kristen.mclean@npd.com.
My pleasure. If you ever want to do an AMA here, I'm always happy to do one. Part of my mission is to de-mystify the data as much as possible. It's a big complex industry, and no-one has a complete view--it would be impossible. But I'm happy to pull back the curtian on anything that I do in any way that's helpful.
Oh I'd love that! I did have one quick Q on the data you posted. Does "unique titles" mean separate ISBNs or are hardcover/paperback/etc. editions of the same book combined here?
Separate ISBNs -- which could include newly released PB editions of previous HCs. It's pretty rare that both HC & PB editions appear in the same 12 month "frontlist" period. Most reissues keep the previous ISBNs, so it's mostly brand new books, or new editions of previous HC releases. Also, for us "frontlist sales" are all sales that occur within 12 months of a book's release. So on the 366th day, sales flip into the "backlist" bucket. So the sales referenced in the data above are "frontlist sales" from those 47+K books in this dataset that appeared within 12 months of the book's release, and that appear in the last 52 week period. Make sense?
Yeah it does! Does this mean some of these titles would only have a few weeks or months of sales? Like frontlist titles from, say, three weeks ago would be included?
(probably wouldn't dramatically change the numbers though.)
Yes, that's right. It includes the frontlist sales of the books published last week. So one week of sales. But it also includes the week 52 sales of a book that will drop into the other bucket next week, so it kind of all washes through.
Correct, we track audio and eBooks separately. And digital formats do not necessarily follow the print patterns. For instance, for someone with a prominent audio platform like a podcast, or a well-known musican or artist writing a memoir, their audio-share can climb well above 50% of sales when we line up all of the formats. Likewise, authors in specific genre-driven fiction will see their eBook sales share much higher than print or audio. Or, their audio may be much higher if their fans prefer the format--that happens a lot in sci-fi. It all depends. But overall, the print market dwarfs the digital markets at the top line, and all of it underlines the fact that topline data is only good for looking at big trends and directionality. Every book and author can perform differently than the common wisdom, and the exceptions are sometimes the most interesting thing to watch for futurists like me.
That is so useful and illuminating. Thank you for bringing clarity to this discussion - you're clearly a writing gal as well as a numbers gal. PS Sorry if my tweet lead to those calls.
Amazingly generous analysis! I’m pumped to now know where my bestselling business book fits into the NPD data verse! What’s even more sobering about a that your total ISBN count is NOT a count of authors.
Because of the original weird stat about how many books had sold less than 12. I think it’s a pretty useless benchmark. I generally use 5k as a threshold for commercial viability at the big publishers.
Great info and fascinating background to the stats- My question is how much of this concentration of sales/success on to a few blockbusters and the low sales among the 66 percent is driven by the marketing practices of the big publishers, who may pay a big advance for a book they want to "own" and keep out of the market but will then fail to provide the marketing backup for the same book? Basically, are they often betting big but then not following through on their investment? And the person left out in the cold in that scenario is the writer, and their art. This could be death to the artistic process, to the energy around our publishing culture. It's tempting for us to see sales as reader-driven market magic around a title but it's also I suspect driven not by readers but by the actual decisions and profit-motivations of the publishing industry. And then I'm curious about how much of this discourse about author "careerism" and a perceived lethargy and lack of innovation in our literary culture is down to the business-focused practices of the big publishers? This is a whole other story I realize, and one that is present in the discourse. Thanks for this fascinating discussion!
Hi Kristen, thanks for this, really good data. Similar to people claiming "“as many as 50% of papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, referees and journal editors.” They also claim that 90 percent of papers published are never cited." Simply people reading the data wrong or reading the data to suit a narrative to drive views and clicks.
I am a fellow of a UN Sustainable Development Goals group and one of the things we have been trying to figure out is which are the best selling textbooks in sustainability, energy, climate change, etc. Can you possibly help with this?
Thanks, Dilip. I don't have an easy answer on the best texbooks for those topics as it's a bit out of my wheelhouse. I do know there is an upcoming webinar co-sponsored by Publishers Weekly and Westchester Publishing Services on sustainability and accessibility in publishing, and some of the panelists (besides me) may have an answer for your question because they are better versed in the world on University and Academic presses. More information: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN__zOqIa7kRaan7q-wJBnKKg Good luck!
Dilip, I'm not a publishing professional in any way whatever, but I cannot miss the chance to underscore the recent work of the one author your group should read before any others this year: Stuart L. Hart, "Beyond Shareholder Primacy" (Stanford Business Books). Seriously, this is absolutely at the heart of how to meet those goals. (I admit he has long been a friend - doesn't change the fact!)
Hey y'all, it's Kristen McLean, lead industry analyst from NPD BookScan. I thought I would chime in with some numbers here, since that statistic from the DOJ is super-misleading, and I'm not sure where it originally came from, since we did not provide it directly.
It is possible it came from our data, and was provided by one of the publisher parties, but based on the 58,000 figure, it's not obvious what exactly it includes in terms of "publisher frontlist". 58,000 titles is way too small a number for "all frontlist books published in a year by every publisher"--that's more like 487,000 frontlist titles--so it's clear it's a slice but I'm not sure HOW it was sliced.
NPD BookScan (BookScan is owned by The NPD Group, not Nielsen, BTW), collects data on print book sales from 16,000 retail locations, including Amazon print book sales. Included in those numbers are any print book sales from self-publishing platforms where the author has opted for extended distribution and a print book was sold by Amazon or another retailer. So that 487K "new book" figure is all frontlist books in our data showing at least 1 unit sale over the last 52 weeks coming from publishers of all sizes, including individuals.
Lots of press outlets have been calling about it today, so I did a little digging to see if I could reverse-engineer the citation, and am happy to share our numbers here for clarity.
Because this is clearly a slice, and most likely provided by one of the parties to the suit, I decided to limit my data to the frontlist sales for the top 10 publishers by unit volume in the U.S. Trade market. My ISBN list is a little smaller than the one quoted in the DOJ, but the principals will be the same.
The data below includes frontlist titles from Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Scholastic, Disney, Macmillan, Abrams, Sourcebooks, and John Wiley. The figures below only include books published by these publishers themselves, not pubishers they distribute.
Here is what I found. Collectively, 45,571 unique ISBNs appear for these publishers in our frontlist sales data for the last 52 weeks (thru week ending 8-24-2022).
In this dataset:
>>>0.4% or 163 books sold 100,000 copies or more
>>>0.7% or 320 books sold between 50,000-99,999 copies
>>>2.2% or 1,015 books sold between 20,000-49,999 copies
>>>3.4% or 1,572 books sold between 10,000-19,999 copies
>>>5.5% or 2,518 books sold between 5,000-9,999 copies
>>>21.6% or 9,863 books sold between 1,000-4,999 copies
>>>51.4% or 23,419 sold between 12-999 copies
>>>14.7% or 6,701 books sold under 12 copies
So, only about 15% of all of those publisher-produced frontlist books sold less than 12 copies. That's not nothing, but nowhere as janky as what has been reported.
BUT, I think the real story is that roughly 66% of those books from the top 10 publishers sold less than 1,000 copies over 52 weeks. (Those last two points combined)
And less than 2% sold more than 50,000 copies. (The top two points)
Now data is a funny thing. It can be sliced and diced to create different types of views. For instance we could run the same analysis on ALL of those 487K new books published in the last 52 weeks, which includes many small press and independetly published titles, and we would find that about 98% of them sold less that 5,000 copies in the "trade bookstore market" that NPD BookScan covers. (I know this IS a true statistic because that data was produced by us for The New York Times.)
But that data does not include direct sales from publishers. It does not include sales by authors at events, or through their websites. It does not include eBook sales which we track in a separate tool, and it doesn't include any of the amazing reading going on through platforms like Substack, Wattpad, Webtoons, Kindle Direct, or library lending platforms like OverDrive or Hoopla.
BUT, it does represent the general reality of the ECONOMICS of the publishing market. In general, most of the revenue that keeps publishers in business comes from the very narrow band of publishing successes in the top 8-10% of new books, along with the 70% of overall sales that come from BACKLIST books in the current market. (Backlist books have gained about 4% in share from frontlist books since the pandemic began, but that is a whole other story.)
The long and short of it is publishing is very much a gambler's game, and I think that has been clear from the testimony in the DOJ case. It is true that most people in publishing up to and including the CEOs cannot tell you for sure what books are going to make their year. The big advantage that publisher consolidation has brought to the top of the market is deeper pockets and more resources to roll those dice. More money to get a hot project. More money to influence outcomes through marketing, more access to sales and distribution mechanisms, and easier access to the gatekeepers who decide what books make it onto retailers' shelves. And better ability to distribute risk across a bigger list of gambles.
It is largely a numbers game and I'm not just saying that because I'm a numbers gal. It's a tough business.
Hope this is helpful.
If anyone has questions, they are welcome to reach out to me directly at kristen.mclean@npd.com.
Extremely, thank you so so much for commenting!
My pleasure. If you ever want to do an AMA here, I'm always happy to do one. Part of my mission is to de-mystify the data as much as possible. It's a big complex industry, and no-one has a complete view--it would be impossible. But I'm happy to pull back the curtian on anything that I do in any way that's helpful.
Oh I'd love that! I did have one quick Q on the data you posted. Does "unique titles" mean separate ISBNs or are hardcover/paperback/etc. editions of the same book combined here?
Separate ISBNs -- which could include newly released PB editions of previous HCs. It's pretty rare that both HC & PB editions appear in the same 12 month "frontlist" period. Most reissues keep the previous ISBNs, so it's mostly brand new books, or new editions of previous HC releases. Also, for us "frontlist sales" are all sales that occur within 12 months of a book's release. So on the 366th day, sales flip into the "backlist" bucket. So the sales referenced in the data above are "frontlist sales" from those 47+K books in this dataset that appeared within 12 months of the book's release, and that appear in the last 52 week period. Make sense?
Yeah it does! Does this mean some of these titles would only have a few weeks or months of sales? Like frontlist titles from, say, three weeks ago would be included?
(probably wouldn't dramatically change the numbers though.)
And thank you so much again!
You asked the question I was wondering about.
Yes, that's right. It includes the frontlist sales of the books published last week. So one week of sales. But it also includes the week 52 sales of a book that will drop into the other bucket next week, so it kind of all washes through.
Assuming this does not include audiobooks?
Correct, we track audio and eBooks separately. And digital formats do not necessarily follow the print patterns. For instance, for someone with a prominent audio platform like a podcast, or a well-known musican or artist writing a memoir, their audio-share can climb well above 50% of sales when we line up all of the formats. Likewise, authors in specific genre-driven fiction will see their eBook sales share much higher than print or audio. Or, their audio may be much higher if their fans prefer the format--that happens a lot in sci-fi. It all depends. But overall, the print market dwarfs the digital markets at the top line, and all of it underlines the fact that topline data is only good for looking at big trends and directionality. Every book and author can perform differently than the common wisdom, and the exceptions are sometimes the most interesting thing to watch for futurists like me.
Thank you so much for sharing! This is immensely helpful.
That is so useful and illuminating. Thank you for bringing clarity to this discussion - you're clearly a writing gal as well as a numbers gal. PS Sorry if my tweet lead to those calls.
NO worries. It's important, and I'm happy to be able to help folks understand, and I DEFINIETLY want the press to ask to get at the accurate facts.
Amazingly generous analysis! I’m pumped to now know where my bestselling business book fits into the NPD data verse! What’s even more sobering about a that your total ISBN count is NOT a count of authors.
Random question - why 12 and not 10 or 100 as the bottom rung?
Because of the original weird stat about how many books had sold less than 12. I think it’s a pretty useless benchmark. I generally use 5k as a threshold for commercial viability at the big publishers.
Thank you for this! If you had a Substack I'd be your number one subscriber.
Great info and fascinating background to the stats- My question is how much of this concentration of sales/success on to a few blockbusters and the low sales among the 66 percent is driven by the marketing practices of the big publishers, who may pay a big advance for a book they want to "own" and keep out of the market but will then fail to provide the marketing backup for the same book? Basically, are they often betting big but then not following through on their investment? And the person left out in the cold in that scenario is the writer, and their art. This could be death to the artistic process, to the energy around our publishing culture. It's tempting for us to see sales as reader-driven market magic around a title but it's also I suspect driven not by readers but by the actual decisions and profit-motivations of the publishing industry. And then I'm curious about how much of this discourse about author "careerism" and a perceived lethargy and lack of innovation in our literary culture is down to the business-focused practices of the big publishers? This is a whole other story I realize, and one that is present in the discourse. Thanks for this fascinating discussion!
Hi Kristen, thanks for this, really good data. Similar to people claiming "“as many as 50% of papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, referees and journal editors.” They also claim that 90 percent of papers published are never cited." Simply people reading the data wrong or reading the data to suit a narrative to drive views and clicks.
I am a fellow of a UN Sustainable Development Goals group and one of the things we have been trying to figure out is which are the best selling textbooks in sustainability, energy, climate change, etc. Can you possibly help with this?
Thank you!
Thanks, Dilip. I don't have an easy answer on the best texbooks for those topics as it's a bit out of my wheelhouse. I do know there is an upcoming webinar co-sponsored by Publishers Weekly and Westchester Publishing Services on sustainability and accessibility in publishing, and some of the panelists (besides me) may have an answer for your question because they are better versed in the world on University and Academic presses. More information: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN__zOqIa7kRaan7q-wJBnKKg Good luck!
Thank you Kristen!
Dilip, I'm not a publishing professional in any way whatever, but I cannot miss the chance to underscore the recent work of the one author your group should read before any others this year: Stuart L. Hart, "Beyond Shareholder Primacy" (Stanford Business Books). Seriously, this is absolutely at the heart of how to meet those goals. (I admit he has long been a friend - doesn't change the fact!)