INSIGHT
‘‘ Neilsen
Where book selling and book lending meet
I
joined Nielsen in 2009 when the UK print book market, although flourishing, was starting to feel the effects of digital
disruption in the form of ebooks. A subsequent five-year decline in sales year on year turned a corner in 2014 when we appeared to see consumers rediscovering their love of print with bestsellers from Minecraft, John Green and a new author called David Walliams and year on year sales showed growth once again. Since then, the book market has gone from strength to strength with 2021 posting the highest value sales on record, with £1.82bn spent on physical books through UK shop tills. Nielsen has been measuring book sales for over 20 years and I joined as an account manager, working with publishers to help them get the most value out of what is, in its basic form, the number of books sold. You could ask ‘surely publishers know this already?’ but not necessarily so. Publishers know the sell-in figures, how many they have printed, or shipped from their distributor’s warehouse, or how many a particular retailer has ordered. Knowing the true sell-out figures can only come from the retailer, which again many publishers do have, but the BookScan service provides a complete picture across all retailers (including WHSmith, Waterstones,
Bookshop.org and Amazon UK as well as independent bookshops and supermarkets), regularly, by week for every book sold. Not just those from certain publishers or in certain categories, but across the board so that competitor information is also available.
So why is this data so useful to 46 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
publishers, retailers and anyone else operating in the book space? Because it tells a publisher what is popular. It provides a window into the tastes of consumers as well as a clear indicator of what promotions and marketing campaigns work. It does not define the ‘best’ books, but it should help a publisher understand, for a given title or author, how many they are likely to sell and over what time frame to allow the correct number of copies to be printed (and we all want to minimise wastage). For agents and authors, it helps to benchmark the potential sales for a new title, helping with contract negotiations. For commissioning editors, it indicates where consumer tastes are heading; are vegetarian cookery books still selling well? What about handicraft titles, is there a gap in the market for a book about knitting mermaids? At a higher level it provides businesses with the strategic overview of the market performance and their share of it to benchmark performance. More recently we’ve been able to assess the impact of lockdown with digital book sales buoyant and once shops reopened in Summer 2020, we saw boosts in print sales.
Inspecting the market by segment, we saw adult fiction posting the strongest growth of the broad sectors, as consumers continued to look for escapism and comfort reads amid the ongoing pandemic. Children’s books reached a lifetime high and non-fiction titles related to personal development and mind, body and spirit had their highest year yet, while celeb memoirs, history and the world/ideas/culture also saw growth. In general, though, the year was not able to replicate the sales highs measured in 2020 as lockdowns forced us towards books
Hazel Kenyon is Director of Book Research at Nielsen International.
... the book market has gone from strength to strength with 2021 posting the highest value sales on record, with £1.82bn spent on physical books through UK shop tills.
for learning, activity (baking bread, mainly...) and information. We also observed a growth in backlist titles appearing in the top titles. Of the top 1,000 bestsellers in 2021, 53 per cent were published in the same year, compared with 62 per cent in 2017. One way to elevate a backlist title back into the limelight is via social media and in 2021 we saw the power of BookTok prove that, with several books selling in vast quantities and earning the subtitle accolade of ‘TikTok made me buy it!’.
I see information such as this adding to the already significant knowledge and expertise that librarians have on what your users most want to borrow, to help you make well-informed decisions about stocking lists and displays. Insight on trends observed in the consumer market can help you tailor your offering to your readers, in particular, when spikes in popularity are being driven by social media platforms, weekly sales data can inform on the titles selling unexpectedly well in a timely fashion. IP
March 2022
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