Review of the Year 2014: Publishers - Risers and fallers

Rising Stars

The number one spot in our High Flyers chart for publishers on the rise may give a few booksellers pause for thought. Createspace is Amazon’s print-on-demand self-publishing arm, and it has recorded triple-digit percentage growth through BookScan for three years on the trot. To give context to its rise, Createspace is now effectively the 30th biggest publisher in the TCM, outselling Elsevier (£6.3m), Profile (£6.2m) and Canongate (£5.8m) last year. 

While self-publishing has been effectively incorporated into the e-book mainstream, there does remain a good deal of sniffiness in print, at least from bricks-and-mortar outlets. Createspace’s success raises the question of whether bookshops need to look more seriously into stocking self-published titles—though it would undoubtedly take some risk to order in Createspace titles, as they originate from a company broadly perceived by booksellers as the Great Satan.  

A bookshop may want to stock self-published titles if its customers are rabid Minecraft fans: five of Createspace’s top 10 titles last year were based around the game—all seemingly flaunting licensing and copyright—led by Minecraft: Awesome Traps to Trick Players and Mobs by “Minecraft Books”, which shifted 8,441 copies. 

Minecraft is the reason for Egmont‘s strong performance; it posted the best year-on-year rise of any top 20 publisher. In a year of children’s success, it is also unsurprising that the sector is over-represented on the High Flyers list, with four entries. Bonnier just missed out on the overall publishing top 20, but with its autumn acquisition of Igloo Books it will undoubtedly be in it next year. Bonnier’s rise was driven by standout Alfie Deyes, whose The Pointless Book (Blink) earned £1.1m from a 195,000-unit sale. That is a massive 150,000 copies more than the group’s next biggest seller, Aleksandra and Daniel Mizielinska’s Maps (Big Picture Press). 

Meanwhile, Canada-based Phidal and surging newcomer Nosy Crow both chalked up their second straight years in the High Flyers chart.

When the iPad launched in 2008, the received wisdom was that it and other tablets would destroy the printed graphic novel market. Graphic novels did wobble for a couple of years, but they have rebounded. All four BookScan adult graphic novel categories were up last year, led by Non-Fiction & Literary (55%), Manga (25%) and Superheroes (21%). Manga specialist Kondansha Comics had a huge (122%) spike thanks to Hajime Isayama’s Attack on Titan—its top 17 titles in 2014 were all from the series—while Panini had particular success with film-boosted Marvel properties Avengers and The Guardians of the Galaxy.  

Tate Publishing can thank Henri Matisse for its surge—books based around the Tate Modern’s blockbuster exhibition on the artist took in more than £1.4m through the TCM. Sort Of was also helped by a late artist, Tove Jansson. The celebrations around the centenary of the Moomins’ creator’s birth meant Jansson was responsible for 11 of Sort Of’s top 20 titles in 2014.

Falling Stars

Our Steep Fallers is always somewhat unkind, as it invariably features publishers who have enjoyed an excellent 12 months, but appear because they have failed to replicate the success of a record year. For Exhibit A, we have Short Books. In 2013, Short was eating up its The Fast Diet success. The zeitgesty health book by Mimi Spencer and Michael Mosley enabled the publisher to shift £3.8m through BookScan, an outstanding 371% rise on 2012. 
It has been back to reality in 2014, with Short selling almost £2.2m less through the TCM year on year. But this should not be disappointing: the £1.6m Short earned in 2014 is up 93% on 2012, and is the fourth best total the indie has recorded through BookScan since publisher panel records began in 2001. 

Are Harry Styles and Co not quite “the thing” anymore? Century Books was also in last year’s High Flyers. This is not the Random House division but a Devon-based indie specialising in supermarket sales of licensed product titles, particularly One Direction. Century had 22 titles in 2013’s TCM Top 5,000, 13 of which sold more than 10,000 units. In 2014, just nine titles of the publisher’s books posted a five-digit volume sale through BookScan. 

Private Eye’s slump is due to the success of 2013’s Christmas gift title, Nick Newman’s Private Eye: A Cartoon History, which added an additional £325,000 to the publisher’s total that year. With no “extra” book in 2014—and despite the Private Eye Annual 2014 outselling its predecessor by 6%—revenues were down by 25%.    

Like Tate Publishing in High Flyers, both British Museum Press and V&A Publishing are subject to the vagaries of exhibition success. In 2013, the British Museum’s Pompeii and Herculaneum show attracted 471,000 visitors—the third most popular exhibition in the museum’s history—and its two Pompeii tie-ins earned over £800,000 through the TCM. Last year’s 2014 Vikings exhibition had fewer visitors (290,000) and its companion book, Vikings: Life and Legend, sold a leaner £170,000. 

Similarly, in 2013 the V&A had its fastest-selling exhibition ever, David Bowie Is, which generated £1.1m in tie-in book sales. That proved to be a total that the tie-ins to 2014’s major exhibitions, John Constable: Making of a Master (£101,000) and The Wedding Dress: 300 Years of Bridal Fashions (£97,000), could not match. 

Though illustrated publisher New Holland had been struggling for some time—its TCM sales dropped 66% between 2008 and 2013—its 48% decline in 2014 is largely due to Bloomsbury acquiring its natural history list in autumn 2013. 

Haynes is a good example of the TCM data only telling part of a publisher’s story. Its 27% drop is largely the result of a UK restructure in September 2013, with the company moving its focus to digital and “more profitable Haynes manual-style titles, rather than the more generalist, lower-margin coffee-table books”. The result has helped the bottom line, as the motoring specialist reported a rise in profits in its most recent financial results.