In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte metaphorically collects his winnings from predicting nearly a year back that the boom in book sales during 2020/2021 would not last once the pandemic lockdowns began to ease off:
I noted last June in SHuSH 103, “Big Guys Lose Their Minds”, that book sales, especially for the leading firms — Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster — were ramping up during the pandemic, reaching 10% to 20% above 2019 levels. I also noted that the numbers were making some of these publishers giddy.
HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray, for instance, gave an interview in which he proclaimed that humanity had entered a new era of permanently higher book sales and added that he was ratcheting up his spending to meet the increased demand.
“We are being aggressive in terms of buying books. We’ve seen the book pie grow, maybe 15 percent,” says Murray, “and so our response, which is part opportunistic and part defensive, is to be aggressive in buying right now. Because if that pie remains large, we want to make sure that we get a nice share of the larger pie … we want to make sure that we have a lot of new, exciting books in the future that will maintain our revenues at the current levels.” Yikes.
In that June newsletter, I anticipated the world returning to normal and book sales falling back to earth as vaccinations took hold and the coronavirus waned (we also promised to check back in a year — so here we are, a few months early).
It did not feel dangerous, that prediction. While it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between a temporary spike (or drop) in sales due to extraordinary circumstances and the beginning of a long-term trend, it’s always safest to pick extraordinary-and-temporary amid an unprecedented pandemic with people locked up and not behaving normally. Also, my buddy Jack David at ECW Press agreed with me and he’s been doing this forever. And it wasn’t like Brian Murray had any evidence to back his claim that an era of permanently higher book sales had dawned.
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The share prices of big publishing companies don’t tell the same sort of story because they tend not to be pure-play book publishers: Simon & Schuster, for instance, is owned by multimedia giant Viacom; HarperCollins by the omnipresent Rupert Murdoch; Penguin Random House is less than a quarter of Bertelsmann’s business. But first-quarter 2022 revenue figures for those firms are available and they show that the great give-back is underway in the book world, too.
The headline in Publisher’s Weekly reads “The Book Sales Boom is over”. Here’s the US data:
And that’s just the beginning. Sales will continue to slide throughout 2022 and into 2023 as the world normalizes, people concentrate on doing all the things they’ve not been able to do the past two years, run through the extra cash they accumulated in the pandemic, and resume their former library borrowing habits.
What happens at the big publishing companies? If, as Murray’s comments would lead you to suspect, they’ve budgeted and spent for the good times to continue, unhappy times await.
