and welcome to about books, a program about the publishing industry produced by c-span's book tv. now in a few minutes, we'll talk about books sales in 2024 and the latest market trends for 2025. but first, here's some news from the publishing world. well, this week saw the inauguration, of course, of a new president. and nbc news reports that now former president biden is set to write a book about his time in the white house. the book nbc says is intended to provide mr. biden with the opportunity to tell his version of his presidency and its

conclusion. mr. biden has written two memoirs promises to keep that came out in 2007. and promise me, dad, which came out ten years later. his previous books were written with a ghostwriter, and that's a fact that was revealed last year. amid a special counsel investigation into mr. biden's handling of classified documents after his time in the obama administration. and in other news, a federal grand jury in california has charged three people with defrauding elderly authors of nearly $44 million. the scam involved convincing these authors that publishers and filmmakers wanted to turn their books into blockbuster movies, but only if the victim first paid fake transaction and tax fees. the group called itself page turner press and media and had been operating since at least 2017. the fbi identified more than 800 victims of the scam. quote what started with the

promise of a hollywood dream turned into a devastating nightmare for victims. that's according to tara mcgrath, us attorney, author should stay vigilant, do their research and think twice before giving money to anyone. promise. sing a blockbuster deal. and there's also a book story from the world of sports in an nfl playoff game. eagles star receiver a.j. brown was seen reading a book while sitting on the bench between plays. it turned out to be a self-help book published in 2020 by author jim murphy. it's entitled inner excellence train your mind for extraordinary performance and the best possible life. well, after the game, which philadelphia won, by the way, the book became amazon's number one bestseller. it had previously been ranked around 520,000 on the amazon list. the author, jim murphy, told axios that sales of the book

went from five books a day to more than 10,000 a day. wide receiver a.j. brown has praised the book on social media. he wrote, quote, i bring it to every game and i read it between each drive. i use it to refocus and lock in. despite what may transpire in the game. good or bad. and now i look at the us book market. well, brenna conner is a book industry analyst with a company called circana mishcon. what is circana? circana is a market research company. we track the performance of industries across the u.s. and globally. and when it comes to books, how do you count how many books are sold and what are bestsellers? that's a great question. so our books industry is just one of many that we track at circana, and i am the book's industry analyst. so i work with our books data almost every day and our books data is post based, which means

point of sale. and we're getting data across more than a thousand retailers in the us. so every time someone buys a book, we're capturing that sale along with all of the metadata attributes attached to that book. so that includes the amazons and the local bookstores, etc., correct? it includes every major book retailer that you would expect, including those that you mentioned, along with mass merchants like walmart and target or the 1200 independ ent bookstores in the us, along with a variety of other bookstores in 2024. can you tell us how many books were sold in the united states? how many book units? yeah, there were over a 700 million books sold in the us in 2024. and in terms of how that compares to prior year, we saw growth of 1%, which is significant for the industry because we're coming off of two years of contract, decade of decline.

so this return to growth is notable. any ideas why book sales were declined for two years and now have a 1% growth? yep. after the pandemic, many things changed for all of us, including our shopping habits and what we needed. so following the pandemic, there was a resurgence in book sales. so 2021 marked the highest year of book sales that we've tracked since we started tracking books in 2004. there were a variety of reasons and categories that grew in 2021 and 2022 was the second highest. so we were coming off of a few years of these unusually high sales periods and that was why we saw a decline to become a best seller. how many book units need to be sold? it depends on the year this year to be the bestselling book you

needed 1.4 million print units and that title was the women by kristin hannah. and that's a fiction book, is it? yes, that's correct. what about nonfiction? what? how many units are sold? what was one of the bestselling nonfiction books? so one of the bestselling nonfiction books this year was atomic habits. and this has been this is an older title. it came out, i believe, in 2018, but it's been on the bestseller list for the last two years. and one reason for that is because of its popular charity on tiktok. brenna conner do you also measure ebooks and is do is that included in the 700 million? so what i've been referencing up until now has been from our print book data set, but we do have e-book as well as audiobook datasets. those operate a little differently from our print book dataset in that it's published or reported data rather than

retail reported data. so when you look at, you know, back titles, the harry potter titles, the bible, how do they sell every year? hmm. so backlist represents about 7% of overall book sales in any given year. and backlist, depending on the title, continues to sell well. atomic habits, which i just mentioned, is a backlist book, and it's also within the top ten bestselling books of the year. so backlist is certainly a key factor to book sales when you start to slice the market by segment. so looking at adult versus kids, backlist is even more important in the kids market where it accounts for 90% of annual sales. miss carter, how long have you been doing this? i've been working with the books team in books data for the last five years, and i have been with circana for the last decade. i started in a marketing role and then transitioned into books. so here at booktv we concentrate

of course on non fiction books. how do you autobiographies, biographies, history? how do those sell those so well, i can tell you as it relates to biography, there is what i think to be a format switch happening and for many readers, so biography in particular is a category that has been declining in the print format, but it's one of the fastest growing categories in our digital audio format. so i think more readers and more consumers shifting to this digital consumption for adult nonfiction content. can you put a reason behind that? well, i think, you know, we've seen audio engagement happening beyond just audio books. so, for example, podcast listening this has been, you know, an area of growth over the last decade.

so i think that more consumers are getting used to listening to nonfiction content, whether that's coming from a book or a podcast in their ears. brenna conner let's go back to that 700 million. you talked about how it does not include e-books. does it include audiobooks? so the 700 million that i quoted was only for print talk about digital book performance. i can tell you that both e-book and audio books posted double digit growth in 2024 compared to prior year, and it was audiobooks that was the fastest growing format up to 5% compared to last year. audiobooks have been a very strong format in the ebook industry and certainly the fastest growing format in the industry over the last five years. now i believe that e-books have kind of plateaued at 25% of the market. is that correct?

and what percent of the market is audiobooks? do you know? sure. so audiobook represent about 20% of the market. and e-books also sits at 20%. i would have said that, yes, the plateau statement was correct last year. however. or sorry, in 2023. i would have said that was correct. but in 2024 we actually watch growth in the audio or in the e-book format. this is led primarily by adult fiction. so adult fiction was a key growth driver in the print market. and that also translated into the e-book market as well. so sales for fantasy romance as well as thrillers are driving growth in print as well as e-books. e-book sales were up 10% in terms of unit sales in 2024 compared to prior year. so 700 million hard copies plus 20% more e-books in 20% more audiobook? correct. do audiobook and e-books bring

the same profit margins to publishers? oh, that's a good question. that's actually an area that i don't have visibility into with my data set. i'm sure that it varies by publisher and when you think about the cost of printing a book versus the cost of producing an audiobook versus an e-book, i'm sure that the profit margins vary across formats. what about self-publishing? how many books are sold by self-published? hmm. so self-publishing is not an area that i can that i have metadata for. so i can't look at the market and filter by only self-publish to see how self-publish is self-publishing versus traditional publishing outperform. but the self-publishing would be included in that 700 million that you spoke of. so long as it is sold through the retailers who report to our data, including amazon, where a

lot of self-publishing books are sold. correct. all books have an isbn number attached to them. what is that? and isbn is a unique identifier to each item or each book that identifies that book and an isbn. so if you're talking about kristin hannah as the women, for example, the bestselling book of the year, her isbn for her hardcover book would be specific to that hardcover format. and then later when the paperback is released, she'll have a different isbn attached to that book. now, ms. connor, we touched on this briefly earlier, but circana is reporting that adult nonfiction books declined by 1.3 million units in 2024. that's pretty steep decline, isn't it? i adore nonfiction has been underperforming for the last few years in terms of the scene,

whether it's a steep decline or not. i think when when you account for the percent change, it's down about 1%. so i wouldn't say it's steep by that measure, but it's also the largest category by sales volume for the print market. so 1.3 does sound like quite a big drop. how do political books do political books sell? well? i can tell you that the high point for political books sales in our data was. between 2018 and 2020, when there was a lot of content published around the administration, the trump administration. and can you tell a difference between republican and democratic administration? when it comes to book sales. there is nothing in terms of a metadata tag that allows me to

separate democrats versus republicans. but i can tell you in watching these trends over the last five years, that the books that tend to sell well while we have republican in office tend to be more critical of the opposite party. and the same is true for when there is a democrat in office, there tends to be more books that are critical for that party. brenna conner we've all been in bookstores or seen books that have at the top new york times best seller. how do you achieve that label? and is that more of a marketing label or a something like that? that's a great question. i would be curious to know the same. so the new york times is has their own methodology and i can tell you that our dataset is not feeding into their bestseller rankings. so they have their own unique methodology that, i don't know, a whole lot about. i'm not sure that there's anyone who knows a whole lot about it,

but i think certainly having the, you know, on the title printed that it's a new york times best seller does help to make a book stand out on a shelf or a table at a retailer. and the same with amazon as far as their algorithms ranking of books online. i don't have any insight into how amazon ranks their bestsellers. that's a that's a trade secret for amazon, is it? it might be. i just it may not be. i just i can tell you that i .aven't had any visibility now, you mentioned tick tock and books, book reviews. what's been the impact of tick tock on books? it's been a big impact. so within tick tock, there is a hashtag that's called book talk. and under this book tock hashtag, there has been millions of videos posted from passionate

readers who are excited to share books that they really liked, excited to share, books that they bought, and they're excited to read. and the book community has a really helped to boost sales in the print book market. i can tell you in 2024, there were 59 million books sold. from authors who are prominent on tick tock and the categories in which these authors are following are also some of the fastest growing categories that we're watching. and so certainly book talk and tick tock has had a big impact on book sales for the last few years. sun,ect areas that are growing are. yep. so it's it's largely adult fiction. and this includes fantasy and romance as well as thrillers and some science fiction brenna conner and other large segment of books are children's books. how are they doing? how many children's books are

sold? a year? so the children's market has been underperforming again since that peak. that was post-pandemic when there was a big boost in kids sales because of a greater need for materials at home to both help educate children. while schools were closed, but also to help entertain kids and things like activity books and flashcards did well. so since that peak kids sales have been underperforming. i mean, but i expect to see a return to growth for the kids market in 2025 because throughout 2024, i watched improvement of kids sales. and in the fourth quarter specifically, kids sales were up compared to fourth quarter prior year. i can also talk a little bit about age segments, if that's of interest to you, please. sure. so i can in terms of the metadata attributes, we have the minimum in the maximum age

ranges for more books. so i can look at that metadata and see how sales are performing across different age segments. and i can tell you that the biggest underperformer within the kids market is the middle grade reader. this includes children, ages. 9 to 12, and this segment has been underperforming, i mean, since 2022. and it's also one that has been underperforming when we compare to that pre-pandemic time period. i think that this is a big concern. and i think that screen time for this age group is a factor here. i think that more children in this age group are probably doing activities related to a screen instead of reading books and i think it's something that parents need to be mindful of and we should be thinking about how to get this age group engaged with books again.

brenna conner is circana, a private company and do you work? are you hired by the publishers who hires you there? kind of is a private company and we to two years ago merged with a different market research companies. so when i first started working with circana, it wasn't circana, it was the npd group. in 2022, the npd group merged with i try to become circana. so i was hired by a initially the npd group, a market research company, but in terms of the clients that work with us in the clients that work with our data, it includes major publishers here in the us. and of course those book retailers as well. final question, what are you what are your predictions for the book market in 2025? great question. i think we will see continue new interest in the adult fiction market, particularly for themes

of escapism, those that i mentioned earlier that are doing well on book talk, fantasy and romantic. see, i'm also watching books with cozy settings. i've seen some standout titles there that have done well last year, and i think that there will be an audience who is interested in reading these types of books. i expect to see a rebound in kids book sales, as i mentioned, because of that improved performance i watched throughout the year. and in terms of adultctn and i expect to see overall stability. so and potentially looking at a flat market for adult nonfiction, but there are pockets of growth that i think will ee.one of those will be pel finance. i think that we've been watching and we there are many changes that have happened in our economy over the last year. and i know that more consumers are interested in improving

their personal finance. and i think some will turn to books to help them do that. i'm also watching pockets of growth in women's health. so overall health and wellness has been a topic of interest for many. and we know that more consumers are interested in health and wellness and improving that. so i think we'll see growth in that area and in particular the women's side of it as well. okay. i lied. one final question. okay. what is a cozy setting? oh, a cozy setting is this is a setting where there's no conflict. so it wouldn't be, you know, a book that takes place in a time of war, for example, or a dystopian environment. so a cozy setting is one that is happy and offers comfort. so one example of a book like this is by lorrie gilmore, and it's called the christmas tree farm and the setting is a barn

that is a part of a christmas tree farm. and, you know, almost like comparable to a hallmark setting. and what are you reading? ooh, right now i so january i tend to read a lot of backlist because it's not a time where there's a whole lot of new releases coming in. so right now i am reading backlist stephen king and it's the do you brenna conner is a book industry analyst with circana. we appreciate your time and i hope you'll come back and update us on the publishing industry later in the year. very good. thank you, peter. and you're watching about books, a program about the publishing industry produced by c-span's booktv. well, each week, dozens of new books are published. here's a few. author kristin martin's debut work explores the history of orphan hood and child welfare from the 1800s to the present. ms. barton, who is a member of the national book critics circle,

has titled her book the sun won't come out tomorrow. for history buffs, richard carr woodin is out with a new exploration of the role that religion played in the civil war. it's called righteous strife how warring religious, nationalist forged lincoln's union. and actress naomi watts takes on the issues of aging and menopause in her new book, dare i say it? everything i wish i'd known about menopause. well, this week on book tv's after words program, oregon democratic senator ron wyden discusses his newest book, it takes chutzpah how to fight fearlessly for progressive change. he was interviewed by wall street journal congressional reporter natalie andrews. here's a preview. i decided when i went into public service and maybe when i'm done, my wife always gets half. what? what's your husband going to do? you know, she says he's going to shoot baskets and drink chocolate milk with his kids. and i always say, maybe i'll think i didn't do it right.

but i decided early on that the best approach was to come up with good policy, good ideas and then work like hell to get them done. if you don't get them done, then they still don't happen. but what really breaks down around here is too often people do their politics first. and every week of, oh, boy, what do we do? let's go out and try to think up a good idea. and i decided that i wouldn't do it that way. and that's why, you know, finding good ideas and i start with the proposition that good ideas is are the foundation of principle of bipartisanship. mm hmm. bipartisanship is not about taking each other's crummy ideas and then putting on a blue suit and red tie or whatever it is. and then go run around and say, look at us. you know, we're bipartisan. you know, i really think that the key is to be a principal and

bipartisan, not one who's basically looking for ideological triumphs. because ideological triumphs, at a minimum, basically insure that there's going to be more polarization in the future. and if you haven't done what you need to do to invest people in a good idea, first opportunity, they'll get rid of yours. and a reminder that afterwards airs every sunday at 10 p.m. on booktv. well, thanks for joining us for about books, a program produced by c-span's booktv booktv will continue to bring you publishing news and author programs. and you can also watch all of our booktv programs online any time at booktv dot org.