Due to slow book sales prior to the election, publishers and booksellers alike were anxiously looking forward to better performance over the holiday shopping season. The good news is that numbers coming out of both Nielsen BookScan and the American Booksellers Association (ABA) have been positive.
- Over the last seven weeks of 2016, the ABA (a trade organization of independent booksellers) reported print book sales were up 5 percent from the prior year.
- More broadly, Nielsen BookScan, which tallies print book sales in the US, reported that unit sales were up by 3.3 percent over the prior year. That result comes with a caveat, however: Nielsen is tracking an additional retailer in 2016 (Family Christian) that didn’t figure into 2015 totals. So performance may be closer to flat, year on year.
- Publishers Weekly has broken out the 2016 performance of each print category based on Nielsen’s figures. Relative to 2015, adult nonfiction had the best performance (+6.85 percent); adult fiction had the worst (-1.04 percent). Board books were also strong (+7.43 percent).
- Book sales through mass merchandisers (e.g., Walmart, Costco) have continued their decline for the third year in a row.
The worst news came out of Barnes & Noble. As we’ve reported throughout 2016, the bookstore has been struggling, and it shed its CEO, Ron Boire, in the fall. During the holidays, the chain reported that comparable-store sales were down 9.1 percent versus 2015. When comparing that figure to the positive reports coming out of both ABA and Nielsen, one can see the problem isn’t necessarily fewer book purchases, but fewer book purchases at Barnes & Noble.
Bottom line: Based on conversations among industry insiders, the question no longer seems to be Will Barnes & Noble survive?, but How long can they survive? The current retail environment has been challenging for many different types of stores; for example, during the first week of 2017, The Limited (a women’s clothing chain) announced it was closing all 250 stores, and Macy’s said it would be cutting 10,000 jobs and closing some stores. Perhaps the new B&N concept stores will shine a light on how B&N can salvage its position, but it may be too little, too late. Meanwhile, given Nielsen figures, one can reasonably conclude that some portion of brick-and-mortar retail purchases from B&N and mass merchandisers is migrating to independent bookstores and Amazon.
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.
