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In the first half of 2013, Random House held on to the number one spot at the top of the publisher league table, retaining the position which it gained in 2012, having previously not topped the pile since 2006. Meanwhile, the 20p e-book promotion had a seismic effect on sales of some of 2013’s top 50 titles.
These are two of the top-line findings of The Bookseller’s Half-year Review, the analysis of the bestselling books, publishers, authors and genres for the first 26 weeks in 2013.
In its last six months before the merger with Penguin, RH recorded £67.7m in revenue through Nielsen BookScan, giving it a 12.6% share of the UK print books market in 2013. The share is broadly in line with 2012’s E L James-boosted half year (12.7%), while value sales slipped 7%, from £72.5m.
However, even stripping out James’ numbers, RH would be up 1% (£65.9m to £66.8m), and it would still top the publisher chart. RH was helped greatly by Dan Brown’s Inferno (Bantam), which sold just over 501,000 copies for £4.97m through BookScan, with an additional 205,000 e-book units. Brown and Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (TCM: £1.2m) powered Transworld to a 24% rise in print revenue, to £20.1m.
Penguin was the only “Big Four” group to record physical sales growth, up £230,000 to £62.5m. Penguin Random House—whose merger was completed after the half-year mark—combined to claim £130.2m, or a 24.2% share, of the UK books market—up from a combined 23.6% share in 2012.
Second-placed Hachette saw its TCM revenue dip 7% to £64.1m, with its market share falling from 12.1% in 2012 to 11.9%. Orion was the group’s star—the only one of Hachette’s publishers to record physical sales growth (up 4%). Gillian Flynn (£2.1m) and The Hairy Bikers (£2.8m) combined for 28.7% of Orion’s £17.6m.
Meanwhile, the 20p e-book promotion run by Sony in the early part of 2013, and matched by Amazon, was a boon to e-book volume for two Top 50 titles. In a print-only chart, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (Canongate) would have been in eighth place, selling 150,000 copies. Yet on the back of the 20p promotion, it shifted around 406,000 e-books for a combined total of 556,000 units, making it the third-bestselling title thus far in 2013 for physical and digital combined, trailing only Inferno and Gone Girl.
Even more dramatically, The Hundred-Year-Old Man..., Jonas Jonasson’s massive hit for tiny indie Hesperus Press, shifted over 396,000 “e” units, mostly 20p e-books, which would propel the Swede from 19th place in the print chart to fifth spot in a “p” and “e” combined list, with 524,000 copies sold.
The film tie-in to Life of Pi helped Canongate soar 41% in BookScan revenue to £2.6m, yet that growth was dwarfed by fellow Independent Alliance member Short Books. Mimi Spencer and Michael Mosley’s much-imitated hit The Fast Diet sold £1.9m through the tills—and its companion recipe book earned £540,000—propelling Short Books to a 597% rise. Taken together, the Indie Alliance rose 12% to £19.8m, which would make it the fifth-largest publisher through BookScan.