Thursday, April 14, 2011

Publishing in the Black

I was encouraged by this Publisher's Weekly article showing some of the major houses reporting good results for 2010. The most amazing part of this is how a single author can have a dramatic effect on an entire multi-million dollar publisher - as in the case of Stephanie Meyer and Hachette. The best piece of information in the article was:

While the improvement in the economy helped all publishers in 2010, companies where profits improved all pointed to two main contributing factors—cost controls and skyrocketing e-book sales.


Ebook sales for major houses:

  • Random up 250% - 10% of sales in the U.S.

  • Penguin up 182% - 6% of Penguin's worldwide

  • Simon & Schuster's up 122% - 8% of revenue,

  • Hachette Book Group - 10% of HBG's sales last year.

4 comments:

rdlecoeur said...

According to HC's chief exec at the London Book Fair, heavy book buyers are avoiding bookshops. Not much surprise there then, given the current state of Borders among others. What staggered me was that he stated that there were 40 million ebook readers in the US alone and that fig is up from 15 million just one year ago!

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/heavy-book-buyers-avoiding-bookshops-says-hc-chief.html
Roy

Robin Sullivan said...

Thanks rdlecoeur for posting a link - I always like finding additional sources for data.

Donald Wells said...

I'm beginning to think that even people like J.A. Konrath has underestimated the growth of ebooks. It would not surprise me if the majority of books sold next year (2012) were ebooks. I think ebooks are a juggernaut.

Robin Sullivan said...

Check out my latest post - the February AAP numbers are out and ebook surpassed ALL book formats for the first time.