CHILDREN'S & YA SALES DROP

According to the Association of American Publishers (AAP) StatShot report for the first third of 2013, publishers saw total trade sales take a six percent drop. These declines were driven by an almost 27 percent decline in young adult and children’s sales across all formats–blockbuster sales of The Hunger Games bolstered this category during the same period last year. The AAP chart embedded above shows how the different young adult and children’s categories were affected from January to April 2013. The children’s YA category saw a 37 percent drop in hardcover and a nearly 44 percent drop in eBooks. If you exclude those expected declines in YA and children’s publishing, total trade sales were up 12 percent compared to the same period last year. Below, we’ve collected the overall totals for all trade formats. This Stat Shot report used data collected from 1,193 publishers.