Here is some very good and much needed news for anyone working in the world of publishing for children!
The second annual edition of BookStats, a collaborative venture between the Book Industry Study Group and the Association of American Publishers, has just been released and brings good news for children’s fiction.
The category had the strongest performance of any trade segment in 2011 – adult or children’s – with sales up 11.9% over 2010, to $2.78 billion. The increase was led by a huge jump in e-book sales, which rose 374.8% to $220.3 million, and a solid performance for hardcover books, whose sales rose 14.7% to $1.29 billion.
Paperback figures, which combine trade paper and mass market, were fiction’s only soft spot, down 3% to $1.07 billion.
Nonfiction sales also fell slightly, by 2.1%; one contributing factor may be ever-shrinking school and library budgets. Still, the increase in overall sales made the children’s category the fastest growing segment last year, with total sales up 9.4%, to $3.3 billion.
This is the kind of news the publishing world has been wanting and needing for quite a few years. Let's hope the trend continues. In that way, everybody wins!
The second annual edition of BookStats, a collaborative venture between the Book Industry Study Group and the Association of American Publishers, has just been released and brings good news for children’s fiction. The category had the strongest performance of any trade segment in 2011 – adult or children’s – with sales up 11.9% over 2010, to $2.78 billion. The increase was led by a huge jump in e-book sales, which rose 374.8% to $220.3 million, and a solid performance for hardcover books, whose sales rose 14.7% to $1.29 billion.
Paperback figures, which combine trade paper and mass market, were fiction’s only soft spot, down 3% to $1.07 billion.
Nonfiction sales also fell slightly, by 2.1%; one contributing factor may be ever-shrinking school and library budgets. Still, the increase in overall sales made the children’s category the fastest growing segment last year, with total sales up 9.4%, to $3.3 billion.
This is the kind of news the publishing world has been wanting and needing for quite a few years. Let's hope the trend continues. In that way, everybody wins!
