The UK print market is estimated to be down 11 percent versus 2019; Ireland is down by 2 percent
In our previous issue, we updated you on NPD BookScan’s figures for US print sales, which are trending positive versus 2019. Now we have the latest information on the UK and Irish markets, tracked by Nielsen. The bad, top-level news: the UK is estimated to be off by 11 percent on print sales versus last year. The good news: summer sales are coming in strong.
The year started off positive: the first quarter saw 3 percent growth in UK’s unit sales. But that growth started to decline in February, and sales dipped even further once lockdown hit. Titles that have done well in the UK during the pandemic are similar to what has succeeded in the US: children’s books, particularly those focused on preschool and early learning. In the week prior to lockdown, historical fiction also saw a significant sales jump of 216 percent versus 2019. That’s partly due to Hilary Mantel’s highly anticipated release, The Mirror & the Light. Once that title is excluded, the category grew by 32 percent versus the same period in 2019. Other fiction categories performing well include general and literary fiction as well as crime, thrillers, and adventure.
In July, UK sales are tracking up by more than 17 percent versus July 2019. Hazel Kenyon, who heads up UK book research at Nielsen, said on an optimistic note, “Appetite for new books is not abating.” Post lockdown, outperforming fiction categories in the UK include crime fiction especially as well as children’s picture books and children’s fiction. It’s a market “that’s still finding its feet,” Kenyon said. “We still need to wait and see how it’s going to settle down. Is summer going to look different than prior years … especially with the change in the publishing schedules?”
UK online book purchasing in 2020 has modestly increased to 38 percent from 2019’s 36 percent. We wonder if this has contributed to the UK’s weakness in sales versus the US market—or maybe it’s simply that the US market has a higher rate of online purchasing already, at an estimated 50 percent of sales. The spring bankruptcy of UK’s major wholesaler, Bertram, may have also played a role, although this wasn’t brought up by Nielsen. Steve Bohme, who does research on the consumer side for Nielsen, said that many older consumers are reading books they already own and doing some digital borrowing. Increases in purchasing are being driven, he says, by digital formats and younger buyers. While UK book buyers are keen to support bookstores and achieve some normality in their book browsing and buying habits, safety concerns remain a barrier.
Ireland’s physical book market has declined by 2 percent versus 2019. Sales have remained more stable in part due to a strong first quarter (up 8 percent), and the strength of Sally Rooney’s bestselling Normal People, recently released as a TV series by the BBC and Hulu. (Rooney is an Irish author.) In fact, this year Ireland has enjoyed two bestselling books that have exceeded 30,000 unit sales, a feat last achieved in 2009. (The other title is Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens.) Nielsen projects for Ireland a best-case scenario of 4 percent growth by the end of 2020 and a worst-case scenario of a 7 percent decline, depending on how the pandemic unfolds.
Meanwhile, US print sales are up by 2.8 percent in the first half of the year, according to NPD BookScan. Growth is driven by:
- children’s nonfiction, up by 25.5 percent over 2019
- nonfiction books on race relations and social justice
- children’s fiction (excluding YA), up by 7 percent
- YA fiction, up by 5.9 percent
- adult fiction, up by 2.9 percent
- graphic novels, up by 10.3 percent
To find signs of trouble, you have to look at sales reports from major publishers. For example, the Association of American Publishers StatShot report for May 2020 estimates an overall sales decline of 12 percent versus May of last year. One reason for the decline is the challenged textbook market (a result of closed schools), a sales category not really captured by NPD BookScan. The UK is seeing that same decline.
Crunching those StatShot numbers further to exclude the academic publishers, Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch reports (subscription required) that 2020 shipments of trade books are estimated to be down 16 percent from a year ago, with net sales declining 9.3 percent. And finally—helpful for thinking about publishers’ sales decline—Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt says that Barnes & Noble sales are down about 20 percent overall from last year.
Ebook sales reports might appear mixed on the surface, but overall, sales are way up. US traditional publishers report 4.3 percent growth in ebook sales through May 2020, after a long history of decline. Even though NPD PubTrack Digital (which tallies sales through reports from traditional publishers) currently reports a decline in ebook sales versus 2019, Erin Somers of Publishers Lunch points out this doesn’t look so bad when you consider that, during the first three months of the year, NPD showed ebook sales down 18 percent versus 2019. Now they are down only 5 percent through April. Publishing Perspectives offers more detail on ebook sales trends, with category-specific information.
Bottom line: When comparing the performance of the US and UK book markets, a person sitting in the US is likely to feel quite lucky—so far. We see a few factors likely contributing to the continued resilience of US print sales: the prevalence of online purchasing in the US market (driven by Amazon, of course); the strength of Ingram’s print-on-demand operations and fulfillment and the overall robustness of the US supply chain; and the current events/bestseller effect, with race relations and politics driving high sales of titles such as White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened, and Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough. As seen in the case of the relatively stable Ireland market, some outperforming titles can bring a book category into a growth position or soften—even turn around—a decline for the market. In past years, this has been called the “Harry Potter effect” to describe those years when a new Potter series book was released.
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.
