Business Insider somehow obtained (sub required) a 25-page confidential document that includes data about Amazon’s book retail business for the first 10 months of 2022. Since Amazon never releases this kind of granular data, it’s a unique opportunity to understand what sells at Amazon and in what quantities, even if the data set is quite narrow. Unfortunately, Business Insider hasn’t made the full document available, so all we have to go on is what they’ve decided to share from it. But the document includes information on both unit sales and overall revenue from books, such as:
- In the first 10 months of 2022, Amazon earned $16.9 billion worldwide from its books category (print books, ebooks, and audiobook sales). In the US alone (Amazon’s biggest market), it was $9.5 billion. The three largest overseas markets are UK, Germany, and Japan.
- The print-digital split for those 10 months in the US market: 456.5 million print books and 419.8 digital books. However, dollars earned looks very different: $7.4 billion for print books and $2 billion for ebooks. (It’s unclear if Kindle Unlimited is part of the ebook figure.) This raises a question not answered by the Business Insider article: The print and ebook figures add up to $9.4 billion out of $9.5 billion total sales in the US, but it’s certain that audiobooks do not represent a mere 10th of a billion in earnings. So something isn’t being reported correctly or isn’t being well explained.
- Japanese manga sells so well it shows up as its own line item.
In Michael Cader’s analysis of the information (sub required), he notes that BookScan-reported sales for a similar period would make Amazon responsible for selling “an astonishing 77 percent of BookScan units.” Because it seems unlikely Amazon is in fact responsible for selling 77 percent of all print books in the US (at least as tracked by BookScan), Cader suggests that some share of Amazon sales in the US store are being exported to customers abroad, although “we can only guess at this point.”
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
