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If there is an overriding theme this first quarter in print books, it is that children’s is the place to be.
In the first 12 weeks of the year, Nielsen BookScan’s Children’s, Young Adult & Education category was up an impressive 7.1% in value terms, against an overall print market decline of 2.5%. At £269m, 2014 has the lowest Q1 total through BookScan since 2002 (£265.1m). However, this does represent the shallowest Q1 year-on-year decline since 2009, which had an identical 2.5% drop, indicating a more stable market.
Meanwhile, Fiction has continued its downward print spiral of recent years (Fifty Shades-influenced 2012 excepted), falling 7.9% in Q1 by value, while Non-Fiction: Trade dropped 5% year on year.
This is not surprising, of course, given that children’s titles are more digitally resistant than those for adults, fiction in particular. We do not have overall digital data for Q1, but as several publishers revealed, “e” growth has exceeded expectations. And, as our latest E-book Ranking (see page 13) shows, the digital market is proving very robust indeed.
Yet in sales through bookshops, children’s is booming. Of the top 10 specialist children’s publishers in the UK, all have grown in Q1, some with huge leaps. The star in 2014 has been Egmont, with its Minecraft link-up helping it to a 50% rise in revenue year on year, enabling it to muscle into the top 10 UK publishers chart (right).
Minecraft: The Official Redstone Handbook and The Official Beginner’s Handbook are the third and fifth bestselling books overall in Q1 respectively; the two titles alone accounted for 41% of Egmont’s £2.6m in BookScan revenue.
Hilary Murray Hill, who joined Egmont from Scholastic as m.d. of the newly created books division in March, acknowledged that Minecraft was driving growth, but also pointed to other properties, such as Mr Men and Angry Birds. “The growth has largely been down to Minecraft and we’ve seen a very good performance from those titles. Other strong brands are Mr Men and Angry birds, where most of the growth is from the printed books,” she said.
Outside of the top 10 publishers, there were double-digit gains for children’s and/or education specialists Scholastic (up 13% to £3.4m), CGP (+23% to £2.6m) and Bonnier (+17% to £900,000). Usborne had a healthy 5% leap (to £3.6m), while Walker (£1.9m), Nelson Thornes (£1.9m) and Igloo (£1.2m) all had marginal growth.
Most of the larger general groups have, as one would expect, declining print growth. Industry leader Penguin Random House was down 6% to £60.6m, with a market share of 23%, level with Q1 2013.
There have been strong print quarters from RH Children’s Books (+2% to £3.4m) and a less-than-1% rise for Transworld (to £7.4m), an excellent result for a division with a very digital-friendly list. Penguin’s Children’s Books, incidentally, is not stripped out from the rest of Penguin through BookScan.
PRH c.e.o. Tom Weldon said he was pleased with the company’s Q1, claiming that the group’s “digital growth had exceeded the [print] decline.” He added: “We are seeing strong digital growth, faster than we expected. We expected growth to be around 10% or 11%, but it’s been around 25%.” Weldon added that e-sales have been boosted by “a lot” of retailers discounting, particularly on titles like Dan Brown’s Inferno, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (both Transworld) and Helen Fielding’s Mad About the Boy (Cape).
Hachette is £2.7m down thus far in 2014, almost the exact amount Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (Orion) and Dave Myers and Si King’s The Hairy Dieters (Weidenfeld) sold in Q1 2013.
Like Weldon, Hachette c.e.o. Tim Hely Hutchinson said the group had better-than-expected digital sales. He added: “February was a record-breaking month in digital, with sales exceeding £7m for the first time. Because our lists are weighted towards fiction, we are bucking the trend in that our digital sales are continuing to grow very strongly and this means that for some authors, the balance is shifting away from print.”
HarperCollins also declined through BookScan. Its group m.d., Simon Johnson, said “e-books have been strong” post-Christmas, and he praised the group’s “stand-out” children’s and YA performance, where it has “increased [its] share by 20%”.
One of the bigger players with print and digital success is Pan Macmillan. Sales through BookScan jumped an impressive 11%, and it increased its market share from 3.1% to 3.5%, led by Julia Donaldson, 2014’s bestselling author. Pan Mac m.d. Anthony Forbes Watson was “delighted” by the increase in print market share: “I have tended to take the view that it’s difficult to win share in the physical book market because of reduced bricks-and-mortar space . . . it proves to us that physical books as a format are where energy and creativity is.”
Genre focus
Fiction’s seemingly terminal decline (in print at least) masks significant growth in some sub-genres within the category. Graphic novels are having a spellbinding year—especially Manga. Its sales for Q1 are just under £900,000, a whopping 32% higher than they were in Q1 2013.
Short Stories and Anthologies has also emerged as a growth area. As more and more collections have appeared on publisher’s lists—including Tenth of December (Bloomsbury), the Folio Prize-winner by George Saunders—sales for the category have significantly increased: up 35% in value terms on Q1 2013. Joanne Harris’ and Alice Munro’s recent collections sold 32,000 copies combined, and 10 individual titles are in Q1’s TCM Top 5,000, versus 2013’s five.
The Adult Non-Fiction: Specialist category is certainly having a much better time of it than Trade; sales have fallen just 1.24%, to £35.2m. A significant portion of the sector’s decline came from the Law category, which fell 9% in value.