from The Bookseller:
World Book Day director Kirsten Grant said she was “delighted” with the event this year, as sales of children’s books increased 24% week on week in the wake of the March event.
“I was so delighted with World Book Day this year, it was so much bigger than in 2014,” she said. “I felt we turned the corner not only in book sales and token redemption but also in terms of the huge saturation of media coverage.”
Grant said booksellers saw “loads” of children buying books around World Book Day on 5th March, a claim backed by Nielsen BookScan figures, which show that for the seven days to 7th March 2015, the children’s, YA and educational book market totalled £6.8m, 24% up on the previous week (£5.5m). Sales were also 6.5% up compared to the same week in 2014, in the week ending 8th March 2014 when the value of the children’s market was £6.4m.
Grant attributed the growth to sales of the 10 “hugely popular” World Book Day £1 titles, which altogether sold a total of 837,950 copies across a seven-week period, beginning two weeks before World Book Day, a 7.3% increase from 780,600 copies last year.
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This year Grant also launched TeenFest, an online festival about YA books, featuring interviews with authors, music playlists and blogs, with content spread across social media and WBDTeenFest.com. The website had 42,000 page views during the event and Grant said she “definitely” wants to do it again, even though few boys took part (boys only made up 15% of those using the site this year).
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Another goal for next year is to improve token redemption; one million out of the 14 million tokens sent out were redeemed [sic].
I’m wondering if that should read “one million of the 14 million tokens sent out were NOT redeemed” – if not, it’s a shocking statistic and one that can only be attributed to a failure at school-level to promote them.