Publishers surprised by boom in book sales

Like everybody else, book publishers will be happy to see the end of this year.

But, for many of them, the year has brought some positive news, which has been as welcome as it was surprising: Business has been good.

With many stuck at home and activities from concerts to movies off-limits, people have been reading a lot - or at least buying a lot of books.

Print sales by units are up by almost 8 per cent so far this year, according to NPD BookScan.

Sales of e-books and audiobooks, which make up a smaller portion of the market, are up as well.

"I expect that at the end of the year, when you look at the final numbers, it will have been the best year in a very long time," Ms Madeline McIntosh, chief executive of Penguin Random House US, said of the industry.

When the United States slammed shut in March, book sales dropped sharply - but the dip did not last.

While parts of the industry have continued to struggle, such as bookstores and educational publishers, publishing executives say demand came rushing back around June.

Many of these sales went to Amazon, but big-box stores, especially Target, also did well. As essential businesses that sold items such as groceries, they were allowed to stay open through the lockdowns.

Mr Dennis Abboud, chief executive of ReaderLink, a book distributor to major chains such as Walmart, Target and Costco, said his company's online sales nearly quadrupled over last year.

"It was really a tale of two cities," he said. "The beginning of the year was mega-soft and the end of the year was mega-strong."

Even though the number of people commuting has plummeted this year, audiobook revenue is up by more than 17 per cent over the same period last year, according to the Association of American Publishers. E-book sales, which had been declining for the past several years, are also up by more than 16 per cent.

There have been a few particularly powerful themes in bookselling this year.

The Black Lives Matter protests, following the death of Mr George Floyd at the end of May, caused a rush on books about race and anti-racism.

Bookstores had trouble keeping titles like How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi and So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo in stock.

Political books, especially about US President Donald Trump, have also performed well. That was a particular boon for Simon & Schuster, which published some of the biggest presidential tell-alls of the year, including Ms Mary Trump's Too Much And Never Enough, which sold more than 1.35 million copies in its first week.

Former president Barack Obama's memoir, A Promised Land - published by Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House - has sold more than 3.3 million copies in North America since it was published last month.

New books - which, in industry-speak, are called the frontlist - have sold well, but so have older titles.

"There have been frontlist successes like A Promised Land or Untamed, absolutely," Ms McIntosh said of Mr Obama's book and a memoir by Glennon Doyle.

"But things like The Very Hungry Caterpillar have sold more copies than we have in the past. It's just this remarkable lift of the whole market."

Parts of the book world have struggled. With many churches and other houses of worship closed, the sale of religious books has dropped, according to NPD BookScan, and the travel category has tanked by more than 40 per cent in print.

Independent bookstores have also had an extraordinarily difficult year.

Many were closed to foot traffic for months and scrambled to turn their stores into fulfilment centres for online orders - something they were never built to do on a significant scale.

Some stores reported to the American Booksellers Association earlier this year that their sales were down by at least 40 per cent.

But Ms Allison Hill, the trade organisation's chief executive, said the last few weeks have been encouraging.

"The stakes were very high going into the holiday season," she said. "We won't really know where everybody stands until the holiday season is completely finished."

NYTIMES