Over at Juno Books they have some sales figures for October, and the news is somewhat depressing:

Publishers’ net book sales fell 20.1% to $644.5 million in October, as reported by 80 publishers to the Association of American Publishers. Sales for the year through October were down 3.4% to $8.362 billion

However, if you’re a genre author, there’s a fairly thick silver lining as far as romance and fantasy mass market paperbacks go:

2007 fantasy mmp @ 49 wks 1,600,424
2008 fantasy mmp @ 49 wks 1,831,768

2007 romance mmp @ 49 wks 1,314,764
2008 romance mmp @ 49 wks 1,976,838

For units sold, that’s pretty hefty growth there.

(via Swivet)

Categories: publishing

2 Comments

steve buchheit · December 16, 2008 at 10:01 am

Saw her post yesterday. Yep, that’s good news. It would be interesting to see the full breakdown and how much the success of “Twilight” influenced purchases.

S Andrew Swann · December 16, 2008 at 1:14 pm

I suspect that there’s a bandwagon effect, as in the Harry Potter books gave a boost to all YA fantasy, and fantasy as a whole. Twilight is probably doing something similar.

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