Big Numbers for the Big 5

With the first 6 months of 2021 in the books, we have seen an industry-wide increase in same-period sales up 18.1% over 2020. Some of that jump can be attributable to the adversely COVID-impacted March and April 2020, but if you’ve been hanging with us for the past year and a half, you know that by May 2020 and on through the rest of that year, we were on a hot streak. So, these are some terrific numbers to report, with Publishers Marketplace conjecturing that we may have just seen the best 6- and 12-month periods ever!

The Big 5:

Penguin Random House:  Up 10.8% worldwide; 22% ($1.3 billion) in the U.S.
Lagardere/Hachette:  Up 16.4% worldwide; 14.8% in the U.S.
HarperCollins:  Up 20%
Simon & Schuster:  Up 9.2% (reporting separately from PRH pending merger approval)
Macmillan/Holtzbrinck:  (privately held, but presumably performed similarly well)

More Mergers

Hachette Book Group knows what to expect, and it’s expecting to be the country’s #3 trade publisher be...

Your book’s promise is what fulfills your commitment to the reader. 

When we are talking about a book’s promise, here’s what we mean: let’s say you were sitting with one of your readers telling them what your book was about (the premise). And then you say, “I promise that after you finish reading my book you will …”

One of the most critical mistakes a book can make is breaking its promise to the reader. So much of the success of a book is tied to its promise. Without a great promise, there’s nothing for the reader to pass on or look back at. Oftentimes the reason why you forgot about a book is that its promise went unfulfilled. Broken promises are a huge factor in determining its success.

Think about a couple of recent bestsellers that deliver on their promise: Greg McKeown’s, "Essentialism," promises to help the reader identify their highest contribution, and does; Jennie Allen’s book, "Get Out of Your Head" promises to help readers to stop letting toxic thoughts from holding us ca...

More Reading = More Book Sales

A U.S. Department of Labor survey among Americans aged 15 years and older showed that reading time increased 21% during the second half of 2020. Turns out people were actually reading all those books they bought during the heart of the pandemic. Reading time increased from 28 minutes a day during July through December 2019 to 34 minutes a day for the same period last year. The biggest age-group increases came in the 20-34 and over-65 age brackets. The over-75 crowd won the event . . . which they do every year – clocking in a whopping 95 minutes per day (can you say “retirement,” anyone?).

The biggest surprise came from men, who ratcheted up their reading time by 30%!  I wonder if that will stick.

Here We Go Again

We spent the first year of this blog telling you how pleasantly surprised we were to see the 2020 sales reports come in, month after month, ahead of what we all felt was a really decent 2019. Well, here we go again. The first half of 2021 is ...

Have you signed up for our upcoming free training, The Secret Path to Getting Published?

The truth is many writers and potential authors are lost on the publishing trail. They know where they want to go, but they don’t know how to get there. That’s why we are excited about our upcoming webinar, The Secret Path to Getting Published.

In it, you’ll discover:

• How to capture the attention of an agent or editor
• What a book proposal is and why it matters
• 3 common deal killers that amateur writers make
• How to stand out from the crowd of aspiring authors
• The 9 pro tips to use in getting an agent and publisher
• Tips to significantly improve your chances of getting published
• And much, much, more!
  

Here’s a sneak peek at pro tip #1.

Pro Tip #1: Understand that your book proposal is a marketing tool that agents and editors will use to evaluate your book and platform. Therefore the writing needs to be concise and compelling.

Your book proposal is NOT a manuscript. And your manuscript is ...

The hook of your book is a sentence or two that is meant to tease the reader to purchase your book.

“What’s the hook of the book?”

This is one of the most important questions your book has to answer. You cannot presume that a reader is going to pick up and buy your book just because you tell them to. If you ask your reader a compelling question, you captivate them, and they will sit up and take notice.

You might have heard this term before, but essentially a book hook is a sentence or two that is meant to tease the reader to purchase your book. The hook is the backbone of a good book idea.

Your book hook should be intriguing, pique curiosity, and make the reader want to learn more.

To build a great hook, your hook is going to answer two questions:

1. Why Your Book--among all the books that are out there (and there are a lot), out of all the things they could be reading, of the discretionary income they could spend, why should they buy YOUR book? What makes it stand out from the rest
...

Great book ideas start with the premise!!!

The very first step you should take when trying to figure out which book you should pursue first is to sit down and write out a premise of your book idea. The premise of your book is basically its thesis statement.

------------------
“What are the important factors I should consider 
when I am developing my book idea?”
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The premise doesn’t have to be long. Start with 2-3 sentences. A good way to think about the premise is to imagine if you were at a lunch date with someone, and you told them you were writing a book. And then they turned to you and said, “What’s your book about?” THAT is your premise. 

A good premise lays a foundation for where your book is going to take readers. That central idea might answer a question, solve a mystery, or tell a story. The most important part is that it does something. 

The reverse is also true about the premise: if you’re having trouble pulling the premise together or having difficulty ex...

Amazon will be broken up by federal regulators…if the House Judiciary Committee has its way.

Amazon Busting

The Antitrust Subcommittee has set its sights on Big Tech (companies worth over $600 billion), including, of course, Amazon. A handful of bills were introduced in efforts to corral the Facebooks, Googles, and Amazons of the world. Of those, the most notable for the fine readers of this report would be the breaking up of Amazon’s vertical publishing monopoly. The legislation is targeting giant platforms that “leverage their control across multiple business lines…in ways that undermine free and fair competition.” What that could mean for Amazon’s present vertical in the publishing industry is the breaking up or spinning off of Audible, Brilliance Audio, Kindle, Kindle Direct Publishing (self-publishing), and their “Amazon Publishing'' imprint.

Additional measures under discussion include curbs on these platforms’ practices of using “non-public data” (the stuff they collect from ...

At least we know what a lot of you have been doing – more of you than ever before…

Listening to Audiobooks

The Audio Publishers Association—yes, there is an association for everything—released its annual survey results and found another double-digit increase in audiobook sales in 2020. That’s up 12% from 2019, for a total of $1.3 billion in revenue. Audiobooks have been on a tear in recent years, so double-digit increases have been the norm. What was surprising is that the sector saw those increases in a year of reduced commuting!

In 2019, 43% of listeners surveyed said they listened mostly in their cars. By necessity, that number fell to 30% last year. But you all just switched to listening at home (55% of audiobook listeners, as compared to 43% the year prior).

The selection is probably helping, too. Last year, audiobook publishers produced 71,000 titles, up 39% over 2019. So, I guess the narrators and sound engineers weren’t spending their days figuring out the unemployment offi...

Can you believe Q1 2021 is already behind us? Time flies when you’re having fun—i.e., selling lots of books!

Where Are They Gonna Put All that Money!?

SHOCKER: Amazon sets another sales record. For the quarter ending March 31, 2021, Amazon posted a massive year-over-year increase in revenue of 44%, or $108.5 billion, over Q1 2020. And profits more than doubled to $8.9 billion. The “online store”—what we all think of when we think of Amazon—saw revenue jump 44% to $36.6 billion, while the revenue from third-party sellers exploded—up 64% over Q1 2020. Yes, anyone can sell on Amazon, and clearly, a lot of people started to do just that when the pandemic hit—and they seem to be sticking with it (and why not). With no signs of slowing, Amazon is forecasting revenue increases of 24%-30% next quarter when compared to Q2 2020 when everyone was buying EVERYTHING on Amazon.  It's good to be the king.

The Rest of the Numbers

More than just Amazon made out big in the first quarter of this year. ...

Sorry, we are a week late here, as we have been exceedingly busy watching the NCAA Basketball Tournament.

HarperCollins Gets in the Game

HarperCollins and parent company, News Corp, are finally getting back on the court in the acquisitions game -- agreeing to purchase the trade book division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for $349 million in cash. After losing to Penguin Random House in last year’s back and forth action for Big 5 publisher Simon & Schuster, HC will now (pending regulatory approval) be taking hold of the trade publishing division of HMH that, with 2020 revenues of $191.7 million, was essentially the 6th largest US trade book publisher. HMH had been seeking to unload the business as part of its decision to focus on being an educational technology company for the K-12 market.

After closing out their June 30, 2020, fiscal year with sales of $1.67 billion and a blazing-fast start to fiscal ‘22 helped by a “historic quarter” ending December 31, 2020, HC’s revenue for the fi...