In its report this week on 2016’s industry financials, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) puts overall industry revenue at $26.24 billion, which is 5.1 percent below 2015’s figure.
The AAP’s StatShot Annual report comprises data from some 1,800 US traditional publishers and represents those houses’ net revenue (not retailers’ figures). And from that viewpoint, education and scholarly publishing took the biggest hit in 2016; struggling library budgets are thought to have played a role in the decline.
About 40 percent of the AAP’s StatShot revenue is in the education and scholarly space. Each of the sub-sectors there were down:
- pre-K to 12th grade instructional content: -9.2 percent
- higher educational curriculum content: -12.6 percent
- professional books: -22.5 percent
- university presses: -5.5 percent
The picture in trade was brighter. What’s leading the way is adult nonfiction and inspirational and religious crossover titles. Adult nonfiction includes memoir, biography, motivational and, ahem, political books, as well as what remains of the adult coloring-book craze. The category reached $5.87 billion in 2016, up from $4.97 billion two years earlier.
Adult fiction has been on a downward trend for the last five years. Adult fiction declined 0.9 percent in 2016 compared to the previous year. But children’s and YA fiction and nonfiction grew, with the overall category up 5.9 percent. Close to 90 percent of that part of the market was in print.
Audio continues to be the darling of the industry, jumping 18.8 percent in 2016 over 2015. And in the first quarter of this year, preliminary StatShot figures indicate almost a 30 percent increase over the same quarter last year; the AAP tells us that this is the third year in which audio has seen double-digit growth. In 2016, downloaded audio represented 1.2 percent of the market, in the AAP’s assessment.
Ebooks overall have lost about $1 billion of their value as a format since 2013, when they peaked at $3.24 billion. In 2016, they declined to $2.26 billion, a 16.9 percent drop from 2015.
Bottom line: While traditional trade publishing saw a third straight year of increased revenue from physical retail stores—it grew 1 percent over 2015—here’s what some in the business continue to read with trepidation, from the report: “Most of the books purchased in 2016 were bought from an online retailer.” Publishers reporting to AAP’s StatShot sold some 814 million units into online channels last year; they sold about 672 million books to physical bookstores.
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.
