Tuesday, July 12, 2016

AAP Releases Annual Estimates

Publishers Lunch

On Monday, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) released headline data from the second set of statistics they maintain, called StatShot Annual. In contrast to their monthly reports, which collect dollar sales only as actual reported data from about 1,200 publishers, StatShot Annual tabulates more detailed dollar and unit sales data from almost 1,800 publishers and then -- to our mind -- renders it mostly useless by multiplying it to pretend that we can say something about the other 70,000 or so registered and active publishers who never report data to anyone. (The AAP does not release the direct, actual data collected from the 1,800 reporting publishers, which would be useful in an of itself.) We've stated our case here many times before, so won't bother going into it all over again, but that's why we are noting the StatShot Annual info in brief only. Later this week, however, we will have a detailed analysis for you of a new way of looking and at using the AAP monthly reports, so stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, in the trade (minus religious publishers),
StatShot Annual postulates a total trade book market of $14.74 billion (leaving aside religious books) in 2015, up $450 million (or 3.1 percent) from 2014. By their estimates:

Trade Sales: $14.74 billion [up $450 million, or 3.1 percent]

Adult Sales: $10.47 billion (up 6 percent)
Children's/YA Sales: $4.27 billion (down $150 million)
eBooks: $2.84 billion (down $360 million)
Digital audio: $552 million (up 37.6 percent)

The broader StatShot Annual Executive Report "will be available later this summer" and is available for pre-order from the AAP. As a reminder, in the
already-published hard data sets for 2015, AAP's monthly StatShots (tabulating actual data from about 1,200 publishers) showed:

Trade Sales: $6.652 billion [up $52 million, or three-quarters of one percent]

Adult Sales: $4.944 billion [up $108 million, or 2 percent]
Children's/YA Sales: $1.708 million [down $56.5 million, or 3 percent]
eBooks: $1.317 billion [down $222.5 million]
Adult eBooks: $1.188 billion [down $124 million]
Children's/YA ebooks: $129 million [down $98.5 million]
Digital audio: $205.6 million [up $57.6 million]

Nielsen Bookscan print book sales registered 652 million units for 2015, up by 17.6 million units (or 2.8 percent).

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