With all major categories reporting declines, sales at the 1,325 publishers that report results to the Association of American Publishers’ StatShot program dropped 7.5% in May compared to a year ago.
Sales of adult books dropped 9.6% in the month, with fiction sales off 8.3% and nonfiction falling 11.3%. For the first five months of 2025 adult book sales were down 4%, with fiction falling 4.9% and nonfiction down 2.7%.
For May, fiction hardcover sales fell 11.8% and trade paperback sales dropped 12.6%. Digital audio helped to offset some of the loss in print, with sales up 11.2%. E-book sales dipped 2.3%.
Print sales were particularly soft in adult nonfiction, with hardcover and trade paperback falling 5.6% and 21.7%, respectively. Digital audio, on the other hand, had a good month with sales up 7.8%, while e-book sales increased 3%.
Sales in the children’s/young adult segment fell 5.8% in May, with the decline coming entirely in the fiction category where sales dropped 11.1%. Similar to the adult category, weakness in print was the primary reason for the decline, with hardcover sales down 18.8% and paperback falling 11.9%. And similar to adult sales, the digital formats did better, with audio rising 28.2% and e-books up 9.6%.
The decline in fiction offset a strong May for the much smaller children’s/YA nonfiction segment, where sales rose 20.9% driven by 24.7% increase in paperback sales. Hardcover sales fared fairly well, slipping only 0.4%.
Sales for the children’s/YA segment through May were down 0.4%.
The religious book segment, which had a good start to the year, had another soft month with May sales down 3.1%. For the first five months of 2025, sales dipped 0.2%.
For the other remaining categories, May sales of higher education course materials fell 1.6%, while sales of professional books declined 15.1%. Sales in the university press segment inched up 0.1%.
For the first five months of 2025, sales of all reporting publishers were down 1.8%
