SalesData subscribers have recently received access to a new research study, Sales Trends in Children's Publishing (for those of you who are subscribers, go to the SDA Research Portal to download your copy). The research paper explores sales trends of Juvenile print books in Canada, digging into subject and format performance over recent years. It also examines trends within the category, such as the performance of picture books and the newer phenomenon of 5-Minute Stories.
A couple of notes about our data and sales panel: Data is limited to titles that are designated as Juvenile based on publisher metadata and does not include Young Adult titles. While our research represents approximately 85% of print sales in the Canadian English-language trade book market, a subset of comparable stores was used for this study since we add to SalesData’s panel of reporting retailers every year. This comparable store panel is geographically representative and includes the majority of stores across Canada. It's also a group of stores that have consistently reported data, which means any increases or decreases we see are not due to growth in the panel itself.
The first genre we spotlighted from this report was Humorous Stories. You can read that post here.
While year-over-year sales increases may not be profound, another category in which we are seeing consistent growth is Science Fiction.
Monthly sales performance – Comparable stores
The movie A Wrinkle in Time was released in February 2018, which directly corresponds to the sales spike in the Science Fiction category. As for seasonality, the category as a whole is fairly flat with very slight increases over the summer months and the largest jump in sales happening in November and December.
In 2018, the top-selling title was Madeleine L'Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, followed by Canadian Kenneth Oppel’s Inkling. In 2019, it was the same two books but in reverse order.
Top-selling titles appeal to a wide variety of ages. These include books from Quirk Books’ Pop Classics series, which adapts classic movies and TV shows, such as Back to the Future and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, into books for early readers.
Madeleine L’Engle also makes it into the top sellers with other titles from The Wrinkle in Time series such as Many Waters, An Acceptable Time, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet.
Price distribution for Science Fiction titles
When it comes to price point, the majority of titles that sell are in the moderate price range of $6-$15.
If you're a SalesData subscriber, you can find a complimentary copy of the entire study in the SDA Research Portal. If you’re not, keep an eye out for more posts highlighting a couple of trends from the study that we’ll be posting here on our blog (starting with the first in this series, Juvenile genre spotlight: Humorous Stories).
You can easily request advance reading copies (ARCs) on CataList.