The Bookseller.com

4th July 2008

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Indies beat rivals with 14% sales surge

27.02.08 Graeme Neill

Independent booksellers are surging past the wider retail market, with the total value of their book sales rising 14.3% last year.

The figures are the first definitive data on the independent sector provided by Nielsen BookScan, and were unveiled at this week’s BA Small Business Forum event in Cambridge. BookScan put the value of the UK independent bookselling sector at £163m in 2007, up from £143m the previous year. Indies now make up 9.1% of the overall market. They sell books for an average of £8.91 per copy, over £2 more than rival retail channels.

Delegates also heard from BA president Graham Rand, who told them that they were well placed to react to a "tough" market. "Indies can be much faster on their feet to react and change, to sway with the breeze and respond to those forces," he said. "The big companies might have bigger resources, but they also have shareholders, quarterly rent bills running into millions, eye-watering staff salary bills and huge fixed costs. Who can adapt and thrive better?"

Jeremy Neate, head of research and internet development at Nielsen BookScan, said that children's books were among the winning genres for the indie market last year. The sector had an average market share of 11.6% of children's books by value. In general fiction indies had an average market share of just over 7%.

Independents achieved the greatest market share of Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader, with the sector responsible for 25.4% of total sales. Other strong performers were Suite Française, Restless and Half a Yellow Sun.

Penguin Group was the king of the independents, with £15m sales through small bookshops. Random House titles generated over £14m of sales for indies, HarperCollins £12m and Hodder Headline more than £10m.

Neate revealed that the publishers with the most proportion of their sales through indies were Ordnance Survey and NPI Media, both with 22.5%. Other publishers popular with indies are Profile, Usborne and Walker. At the opposite end of the scale publishers that sold few titles through indies were Parragon, Mills & Boon, McGraw-Hill and Elsevier.

The figures follow BA research last month showing 81 indies opened last year and 72 closed. This was the first net growth in the sector in two years. Despite closures of high profile shops like the Pan Bookshop, Grindley Books and the Northallerton Bookshops far in 2008, the indie sector has had an encouraging start in overall terms. Neate told delegates that the indies were achieving £2.7m worth of sales per week in January, compared to £2m a week in the same period the previous year.

Retail Graeme Neill Independents