Coincidentally, Data Guy also supplied some data on mysteries:
http://www.thepassivevoice.com/2016/...comment-363068
Quote:
For print Adult Mystery/Detective Fiction and Thriller/Suspense Fiction, the most reliable industry data on print sales tabulates a total of roughly 33.5 million hardcover, trade paperback, & MMPB units sold in the US in 2015. (That’s for adult fiction; for children’s books, they don’t break out M/T/S separately as a category). We can add maybe 5-6 million more print units for library sales, author-direct and publisher-direct sales, and other print outlets not covered by Bookscan. So rounding up, we can call it approximately 40 million US Mystery, Thriller, & Suspense print sales in 2015. (That makes M/T/S roughly 24% of Adult print fiction sales in the US, and 5.3% of *all* US trade print sales including trade nonfiction).
For ebook Adult Mystery, Thriller & Suspense, our AE data shows a run rate of about 83 million sales a year on Amazon.com, making M/T/S roughly 21% of all US Kindle sales. 46 million of those sales are of M/T/S titles not in Kindle Unlimited, while 37 million are a mix of direct retail sales + KU full-read pagecount equivalents for M/T/S titles that are in KU. To that we can add another 29 million units or so at iBooks, Kobo, Nook, and Google, for a total of approximately 112 million US Mystery, Thriller, & Suspense ebook sales in 2015.
So Mystery, Thriller & Suspense is a little less digitally-skewed than Romance:
About 73% of US Mystery, Thriller & Suspense unit sales are ebooks, while 27% are print.
When we hear traditional-industry e-versus-p ratios quoted, what skews those ratios so heavily toward print is the inclusion of nonfiction and children’s books. Nonfiction makes up more than half of all US print sales, but only a small percentage of US ebook sales even for traditional publishers. And of the remaining less-than-half of trade print sales that are fiction, more than half of *those* sales are books categorized as children’s books. And of course the industry’s inability to track and account for indie sales, which are overwhelmingly ebook fiction, skew the traditional stats even further toward print.
But for adult fiction — particularly adult genre fiction — the majority of books being purchased in the US are digital today. Even for Mystery/Thriller/Suspense.
Here’s a breakdown by publisher type of Amazon.com Kindle Mystery/Thriller/Suspense sales — which make up 74% or so of all US ebook sales:
– Units:
— 32% Indie (Self-Published)
— 12% Small/Medium Publisher
— 17% Amazon Imprint (Thomas & Mercer, mostly)
— 33% Big Five
— 6% Uncategorized
|
More at the source.