Michael Hyatt, the President and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, has
provided a list of the top ten trade publishers in America. One might think that this is commonly available information, but he says of his new monthly list, "As far as I know, we are the only publisher in world who has this information." Their numbers were collected over the last few months and are "a proprietary database made up of various point-of-sale databases."
Here's the top 10 publishers and their shares:
1) Random House (17.2%)
2) HarperCollins* (13.3%)
3) Simon & Schuster (9.2%)
4) Penguin (8.7%)
5) Hachette (5.9%)
6) Thomas Nelson (4.8%)
7) St. Martin’s (3.2%)
8) Tyndale (1.9%)
9) John Wiley & Sons (1.7%)
10) Scholastic (1.6%)
Total Top Ten: 67.5%
*Includes Zondervan
Thomas Nelson Publishers is the largest Christian publishing company, and so they also compiled a separate list aimed at the top ten Christian publishers. That list is also available at Michael Hyatt's blog, which also has other interesting articles such as
this post on how top sellers remain at the top for shorter durations than in previous decades.