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Simon & Schuster UK is beating the 3% decline in the overall marketplace with sales up more than 18%, according to S&S president and c.e.o. Carolyn Reidy.
In a Christmas letter to staff, she cited a "savvy combination of UK-originated titles” including "X Factor” judge Dannii Minogue’s My Story, and historical writer Phillipa Gregory, who has achieved her "best sales yet in the UK”.
Reidy added that "we are on track to deliver solid financial results, meeting our profit targets and surpassing our prior year by a large margin”. She highlighted US titles including The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee, The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie, Women Food and God by Geneen Roth, Empire of the Summer Moon by S C Gwynne and The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris.
Reidy continued: "I am confident that this year will be remembered as the year in which publishing changed irrevocably . . . this year digital publishing really took off; there is no doubt that its steep growth trajectory will continue for the foreseeable future.”
She described S&S’ take-up of the agency model as "a selling model that enables us to price our books to best reflect the value of our content in a digital world" adding that the model will be rolled out for all of S&S' international e-book sales.
On high street sales she added: "While we were enjoying these advances in digital publishing, the bricks-and-mortar bookselling environment continued to lag previous years, and this is reflected in revenues lower than we’d like. . .
"Having come through this challenging period, we are beginning to see some signs that the marketplace is stirring to life," she said.