Print books have slightly declined for the first nine months of 2022. Overall sales in the United States have dropped from 570 million copies sold in the January through September in in 2021 to 542.6 million in 2022. Adult fiction has been the the strongest category all year and rose 9.5% in the first nine months of the year. One of the most successful authors of the year was Colleen Hoover, with sales of It Ends with Us nearing two million copies sold, while her Verity and Ugly Love Verity and Ugly Love have also posted sales of more than one million copies each. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens was the fourth title to have sold more than one million copies through September, with sales just over 1.6 million.
Taking a look at non-fiction sales in the first nine months of 2022, the most successful book was Atomic Habits by James Clear, which sold more than 933,000 copies, whereas The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk sold around 466,000 copies.
The only other major category to post an increase in sales besides adult fiction was young adult fiction, where sales inched up 0.4%, helped by a good third quarter. Jenny Han was the category star, with four of her books tied to the streaming service hit The Summer I Turned Pretty selling about 1.1 million copies.
Sales in juvenile fiction and nonfiction were down 8% and 9.9%, respectively. In juvenile nonfiction, unit sales in the social situations/family/health segment had the largest decline, falling 19.5%, while biography/autobiography sales dropped 13.6%. The only subcategory to have an increase in the nine-month period was holidays/festivals/religion, where sales increased 4.8%.
All print formats had declines in unit sales in the period, with the struggling mass market segment having an 18.4% sales drop. Hardcover unit sales fell 8.9%, much higher than the 1.8% drop reported by trade paperbacks.
via Publishers Weekly and NDP Bookscan
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
