Publishers Weekly

the week in publishing

Tillie Walden’s Are You Listening? won the 2020 Eisner Award for Best New Graphic Novel. Other Eisner winners included George Takei for his graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy and Raina Telgemeier for Guts, named Best Kids Graphic Novel. Online sales at Amazon jumped 48% in the second quarter of 2020 over the comparable period in 2019, to $45.9 billion. Total revenue rose 40%, and operating income skyrocketed 87%. Literary agents from North America have written an open letter to London Book Fair organizers, protesting their refusal to issue refunds to agents who canceled their attendance prior to the fair’s official announcement that the event would not take place. Lagardère Publishing reported that revenue in the first six months of 2020 fell 7% compared to the same period in 2019. Deep declines in…

waiting game

With Labor Day only five weeks away, it has become clear that a substantial number of publishers, both in New York City and elsewhere, will not be returning to their offices in anything resembling full force before 2021. Moreover, organizers of a few industry events set for early next year have already announced they will be moving them from inperson to online. PubWest, for one, announced that its annual conference, originally planned for February 4–6 in Denver, will be virtual. Those developments follow decisions to hold many fall 2020 publishing events online. All of the fall regional bookselling shows, which some had speculated could mark the return of in-person meetings, have gone virtual. BISG canceled its annual meeting—which had originally been planned for spring but moved to September 11 in New…

print unit sales jump by 20% in late july

With double-digit increases in all but one category, unit sales of print books rose 20.2% in the week ended July 25, 2020, over the comparable week in 2019, at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. Though it didn’t have the biggest gain in the week, the adult nonfiction segment had the top book, as Mary L. Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough sold nearly 406,000 copies, driving a 23.9% increase in sales in the category. A book with a different point of view, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps by Ben Shapiro, landed in second place on the adult nonfiction list, selling more than 54,000 copies in its first week. Print unit sales jumped 47.3% in the juvenile nonfiction category over the week ended July 27, 2019. Big…

big changes for publishing in w3c

EPUB has become the gold standard for e-books globally in the three years since the International Digital Publishing Forum—the organization that created it—became part of the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C). The consortium has made a lot of progress in supporting and improving the standard under the auspices of its Publishing@W3C activity. EPUB is now the primary format for accessible books, and the W3C has also created a formal specification for audiobooks that is being rapidly adopted by audiobook publishers and reading systems. Now the W3C is moving to the next phase of its Publishing@W3C work. Last week, during a pair of webinars, six speakers from around the world—all of whom have been important contributors to the publishing activity—presented plans for the next generation of Publishing@W3C, which will start up in September.…

revell celebrates 150 years

Revell Publishing was founded in 1870 by Fleming Hewitt Revell, allowing him to publish the works of Dwight Lyman Moody, his famed evangelist brother-in-law. Since then, it has evolved into a contemporary trade house offering faithful living advice, inspiring personal narratives, and novels that always end on an up note. Executives at Revell, which is based in Ada, Mich., and parent company Baker Publishing Group said the key to staying in the publishing business for 150 years is the imprint’s ability to pivot to face challenges and changing times while remaining anchored in the Christian perspective. They’re certain this commitment will carry Revell through today’s issues, which range from a pandemic and demands for racial justice to more industry-specific challenges such as disappearing Christian retail outlets, heightened competition from multinational publishers,…

aap pegs 2019 industry sales growth at 1.1%

The Association of American Publishers has released its final estimates of industry sales in 2019. According to AAP, total sales increased 1.1% over 2018, to $25.93 billion. The increase was led by the pre-K–12 category, where sales were $4.07 billion, a 20.4% jump. In the trade category, the largest publishing segment, sales inched ahead 0.4%, to $16.23 billion. The AAP also estimated that unit sales grew at a slightly faster rate than revenue, with units up 2%, to 2.86 billion. Among some of the highlights from the report, total online sales rose 1.7% in 2019, to $8.22 billion. Online sales grew nearly 20% over the past five years, while sales through physical retail fell 35.9%. In 2019, sales through physical retail dropped 9.2%, to $5.86 billion. Within the trade category, online sales…