The Association of American Publishers has released their 2024 year-end figures. Overall sales grew 6.5 percent, driven by adult fiction and digital audio (the latter helped by Spotify). Digital audio now beats ebooks in terms of dollars earned for AAP-reporting publishers. Sourcebooks and Entangled, which are driving considerable fiction sales, do not report sales to the AAP, noted this week by Publishers Lunch (sub required), which means growth is better than reported. The average returns rate for 2024 was 15.7 percent, down two percent from 2023.
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.
