Press Release: Miscellaneous Announcements
Irish Consumer Market Trends For 2009
Posted at 10:56AM Thursday 21 Jan 2010
Nielsen Book releases Irish Consumer Market Trends for 2009Nielsen Book runs BookScan the world's largest market measurement and analysis service, which tracks retail sales data in: UK, Ireland, US, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Italy, Spain and Denmark. Transaction data is collected at the point of sale from all major book retailers and made available to the book industry. Nielsen BookScan measured a total of €156.5m in value sales with a total of 14.6m units (volume) sold in the Irish Consumer Market down 5.4% in value but up 4.4% in volume year on year. Best selling titles include Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture which, sold 74,233 units pipping Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol to the post by just over 4,000 copies. Stephenie Meyer's continued success is reflected in the Irish charts with titles from the Twilight series taking positions 3 and 4 followed by The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson. Despite the strong contenders in the fiction charts, overall sales of Adult fiction were down slightly and represented €42.3m at -1.6% down on last year. This equates to a value share of the total Irish market of 27.8% (volume 30.2%). Trade Non Fiction also suffered in 2009 with value sales down 4.6% while Specialist Non Fiction bucked the trend by showing growth of 4.8% in value on 2008. Despite the drop in Non Fiction overall, there were strong sales of titles on Current Affairs which grew by a staggering 210% in value on last year due to the unsurprising interest in recession-related titles and Sports titles saw an increase of 9.0% in value due to large sales of Grand Slam: How Ireland Achieved Rugby Greatness. Children's book sales have had a remarkable year due to the buoyant effect of Stephenie Meyer. Value sales have shown an increase of 6.1% on 2008. It looks like J.K. Rowling's popularity has been replaced by keen interest in anything by Stephenie Meyer. The first ever Great Irish Book Week was held during the week of 24 to 31 October 2009. The 30 Irish titles selected for GIBW had sales through the Irish Consumer Market of 1,095 units making €23,128 during that week. Of the 30 titles the biggest sellers were The Collins Press' The GAA: A People's History which sold 181 copies during GIBW and the Royal Irish Academy's Judging Lemass which sold 128 copies during GIBW. The highest chart position was achieved by The GAA: A People's History which reached number 16 in the Irish Hardback Non Fiction chart in week 47 of 2009.
|
