Saturday, July 12, 2014

Half year results show print decline slowing


It has been a pretty decent year on the shop floor and in publishing boardrooms thus far in 2014. As we reveal in greater detail in our Review of the Half Year, the physical market for the first half of 2014 fell 2.4% to £526m through Nielsen BookScan. A decline, yes, but the shallowest one in the first half of a year since the market began contracting in 2008.

Owing to the way e-tailers report figures, full six-month data for digital could not be obtained for our review. However, anecdotally, publishers report a rise in digital, although not the stratospheric triple-digit percentage increases of recent years.

Tom Weldon, c.e.o. of Penguin Random House, the UK’s largest publisher, noted the “challenging” print market; PRH had a 7.2% decline in sales through Nielsen BookScan for the first half of the year (technically 24 weeks, not 26, as BookScan’s half year is six four-week periods).
Weldon said: “UK digital sales continue to be our main source of growth although, as expected, the rate is more muted than last year. This growth is largely prompted by the market trend towards lower pricing, as well as some terrific fiction performances, including Tony Parsons, Dan Brown and Jojo Moyes.”

Second-placed Hachette had a broadly similar print decline to PRH (-7.7%), while HarperCollins had the shallowest physical slump of the “Big Three”, down 5.1% to £38.6m.
HC c.e.o. Charlie Redmayne said: “On the physical book side, fiction is slightly down year on year, but that is more than compensated for by our digital. We have had big digital growth, and our market share in digital has really grown a lot more than our physical market share. Our sales of HCUK worldwide e-books are up 30% year on year and we have invested a lot in understanding that market.”

Of the larger groups, Pan Macmillan had the strongest year in print, up a whopping 8% in BookScan value against 2013. Pan Mac m.d. Anthony Forbes Watson said there were “good things happening across all our lists”. He pointed to a 3.7% rise in fiction sales—against a sector which had a print value decline of 9.5%—helped by the “consistently relentless growth book on book” of Jeffrey Archer’s Clifton Chronicles series. Pan Mac’s children’s division grew 5.6%, driven by the half-year’s top selling author, Julia Donaldson, and Rainbow Rowell’s coming-of-age YA hit, FanGirl.
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