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Print Book Sales Rebound, Spotify Adds Author Tools, And Taylor Swift’s Self-Published Success: The Self-Publishing News Podcast With Dan Holloway

Print Book Sales Rebound, Spotify Adds Author Tools, and Taylor Swift’s Self-Published Success: The Self-Publishing News Podcast with Dan Holloway

On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway explores new data showing a resurgence in print book sales, with adult fiction leading the growth and young adult fiction seeing a decline. He also highlights Spotify’s new Wrapped feature for authors, providing audiobook creators with detailed insights into their listeners’ habits. Plus, Dan reflects on the impact of Taylor Swift’s self-published Eras Tour Book, which sold over 1.2 million copies, showcasing the power of self-publishing on a massive scale.

Listen to Self-Publishing News: Print Book Sales Rebound

On the Self-Publishing News Podcast, @agnieszkasshoes discusses the rebound in print book sales, Spotify’s new Wrapped feature for authors, and Taylor Swift’s self-published Eras Tour book success. Share on X

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About the Host

Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.

Read the Transcripts

Dan Holloway: Welcome to another Self-Publishing News podcast. The news has really properly picked up in January, and apologies in advance, this is going to be a podcast of two halves.

As I record, we are still waiting for the outcome of the Supreme Court's deliberations, about TikTok, which I had hoped they would give before I record this.

Needless to say, I couldn't postpone any longer. It would have been far too mean of me to Howard to expect him to wait on the Supreme Court for me to actually give my podcast for the week. So, there may well be a little bit tacked on after I had spent all last Friday listening to fascinating court hearings where many cases were put forward around the value of TikTok to creators, the alleged dangers, and various arguments around First Amendment rights.

But most important to us, as creators, were the arguments about what alternatives would be available for us were TikTok not to be allowed to continue in the United States, and what the long-term ramifications as well as the short-term ramifications would be.

I will talk about all of those within one little bit of news as and when that news comes.

But there have been some interesting figures released. So, the closest thing we get to an allegedly complete picture of what people are buying from bookshops in the United States came out, and what matters about this is that this is a really interesting insight into the fate of print.

We've spent a lot of time over the last few years talking about whether print books are on the rise or on the decline. There were all sorts of feeling at the start of the pandemic that print was actually resurgent. Then that turned out to be a false dawn.

But then over the past year we have been talking a lot about the popularity of print and speculating as to whether social media is driving this trend, sending people into bookshops, are they actually buying there, and are the people actually reading the things that they like to take pictures of themselves, or videos of themselves, thumbing through on social media? Is this actually a resurgence of the reading of physical books, or is it just an aesthetic trend that isn't actually leading either to sales or to readers?

It seems that from the figures we have, and these figures are incomplete, they always are when it comes to official sales figures. So, these ones are returned by bookstores, so it's rather like the singles charts or the albums charts, how they are compiled. But for the first time in three years, in 2024, there was a year-on-year growth in print sales. Not a large growth, but a 1 percent growth, but a growth nonetheless, reversing three years of decline. That is actually still a pretty significant achievement.

What this amounted to was a unit sales total of 782 million. So, that is more than two books per year per human being in the United States, and that's not nothing.

How are these figures broken down? It's really interesting if you look. The best sellers’ charts aren't surprising. Sarah J. Maas is there twice. Rebecca Yaros is there twice. Colleen Hoover is there twice. This will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone.

What is a surprise, certainly was a surprise to me, is that young adult fiction is one of the areas that's actually seen a decrease in sales. So, actually the largest negative change of any category that we have listings for was young adult fiction, which saw a 4.3 percent fall in sales, whereas young adult nonfiction saw a 4.6 percent rise. These are admittedly from different size bases. So, we still have 30 million young adult fiction books sold, whereas it's only 4.7 million for nonfiction, but it's still interesting to see which way the trend's going.

The biggest rise, however, came with adult fiction, and that has seen a rise of 4.8 percent up to 200 million. The largest category overall remains Adult Nonfiction at 292 million units, though this saw a slight decline.

I am tempted to say that's because there aren't, although Atomic Habits is still up there in the shifting units, it wasn't published, I think, in 2024. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Call me an idiot. Call me whatever you want. I should know. But that was such a standout hit.

It is interesting, though, that one of the books that gets a large mention in the report for having sold 1.2 million copies is actually technically a self-published book. Admittedly published by Taylor Swift, so probably bound to not be 100 percent representative of self-published titles, but technically the ERA's book tour, or the ERA's tour book, was a self-published title and sold 1.2 million copies. So, yay, go self-publishing.

That's actually quite exciting, and it's also a sign that self-publishing really is something that is now a universal.

What else has happened? Spotify has added yet another tool to its suite for authors. If you're like me, your social media feeds over the last few weeks will have been full of people giving their Wrapped, their story of their Spotify year, provided by Spotify, of the things that they listen to most.

So, this is where everyone likes to do their, oh, look at how amazing my curated listening is. Haven't I got such great taste? Or, oh, my guilty pleasure is blah blah blah.

I don't have a Spotify. If I did, then goodness only knows what it would say about me and my reading or my listening.

But it's not just people who consume content who have been given a Wrapped. Spotify has introduced a Wrapped for Authors, which tells authors whose audiobooks appear on Spotify who has been listening to their works.

So, it's really interesting stuff. There is demographic information, location information, also really interesting stuff like the time of day when people are most likely to listen to their work. It's the kind of information that makes marketing and communication and engagement with our audiences much easier because we know much more about the audience that we're speaking to.

We know what they might be doing when they're listening to our work. Is it that it looks like they're listening to our books when they're on the commute to work? Or is it that they settle down with them of an evening? And that might impact how we then go about communicating or thinking about engaging with our audiences.

Spotify clearly are very much still in the audiobook market. They very much clearly want to make themselves friends with authors as well as with readers, and they are determined to give more and more tools. So, it seems every week at the moment I'm reporting on a new tool that they are providing for creatives, and that feels like an exciting development.

So, with that, I will sort of leave you. I may append something, or I may prefix something about the Supreme Court's ruling on TikTok. Either way, actually, by the time you hear next week's podcast, the die will have been cast because whatever happens, if there is no ruling then TikTok will be no longer with anyone in the U. S. by this time next week. And if there is a ruling, then it will just be continuing on as normal, if there is a ruling in its favor.

So, things will be sorted by the time you hear next week's podcast. So, I will definitely have news for you then, although it will be not so much news as reporting on something that feels like it happened an age ago, but I will bring you the breaking if it does indeed break. With that, I will wish you a very continuing Happy New Year from a very frosty Oxford.

Thank you.

Author: Dan Holloway

Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, which has appeared at festivals and fringes from Manchester to Stoke Newington. In 2010 he was the winner of the 100th episode of the international spoken prose event Literary Death Match, and earlier this year he competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available for Kindle at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Transparency-Sutures-Dan-Holloway-ebook/dp/B01A6YAA40

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