children's & YA recommendations on the go
The summer was one of rediscovered classics, movie tie-ins, and backlist at indie bookstores across the country. Despite the lack of a must-have YA author or series (as with John Green or Divergent in years past), PW’s annual end-of-summer poll, which surveyed two dozen general and children’s bookstores across the country, showed that children’s book sales were up.
Wow! Julia Donaldson outsells all other bestselling authors and sets a new 5-year record:
Julia Donaldson has bested fellow bestsellers J K Rowling, Jamie Oliver and Dan Brown to become the only author to record annual sales of over £10m in five consecutive years.
The Gruffalo creator sold almost £239,000 last week through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market, to bring her tally for 2014 to £10.02m on just under 2.09 million units.
Donaldson is now the only author to record five years in a row of eight-digit revenue since BookScan records began.
via Donaldson hits £10m for a record-breaking fifth straight year | The Bookseller.
Orion has reported that e-book sales of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl have accounted for 60% of [UK] paperback sales.
The publisher said the novel had sold 250,000 e-books since release across all territories, compared with 410,000 mass market paperbacks, citing it as Orion’s highest ever proportion of e-book to physical sales. In the US, the e-book has sold more than double the copies of the physical book, the publisher added.
Nielsen BookScan has recorded 418,879 copies sold through the UK TCM since the book’s release last year, for a value of £2.2m.
Orion General m.d. Lisa Milton said: “Only a year ago it would have been impossible to believe a novel could sell over a quarter of a million e-books within a few months. As long as there are readers, how anyone chooses to read a book—whether hardback, paperback, audio or e-book—doesn’t matter.”
via Gone Girl e-books 60% of paperback sales | The Bookseller.
I expect my ebook income to drop this year. Why? Because as I’ve noted before there has been a downward trend in my sales since my last report. Here’s an amazing graphic to show that…
Hey, that number in the bottom keeps going down each month. 249 copies seven months ago. 53 copies sold last month. I do think there is much more competition out there now and that there was a big blitz on sales while everyone and their pet got an eReader then filled it up. And the drop in sales is also because of the algorithmic changes Amazon made to how they weight the price of books on the sales chart (if you sell a 9.99 book, it’ll jump higher up the sales chart than a .99 cent book). It became harder for my books to climb the charts and get noticed by buyers.
Yet, I’m happy with the sales. It’s still passive income for me that will go on as long as there are eReaders in the world. I really don’t do much extra work to earn that income. And I’m very much a less work for more money kind of guy!
via Arthur Slade: The YA Fantastical Fiction Guy: Whoa! Two Years of Selling Ebooks….
