Religious titles drop..

Just read this in Publishers Lunch, and think maybe readers may be getting tired of the hard religious push that rolled in with BushCo. Veddy interesting!

More Books, More Adjectives
We're pretty much running out of appropriate descriptive words for the continuously scaling abundance of new books published every year. According to the latest preliminary estimates released by R.R. Bowker, title output increased 14 percent last year, to a new high of 195,000. (That's up from 135,000 titles only three years ago, though the latest increase is less than last year's 19 percent jump.)

The extra titles come from...pretty much everywhere. The 12 largest trade houses grew their lists by over 5 percent, comprising 24,159 titles. Of course a handful of the largest POD self-publishers accounted for approximately 20,000 titles on their own, almost matching the top traditional publishers.

University presses were up to 14,484 titles, up more than 12 percent. (In previous years Bowker has broken out just the top 55 U. presses; now the totals reflect 125 presses.)
Bowker says that one "catalyst for growth" in 2004 was adult fiction, which jumped by 43 percent to 25,184 new titles. All of that increase and more came from the genres, as literary fiction actually declined 5.6 percent over 2003. Poetry and drama titles also increased by over 40 percent. But these increases came from smaller publishers; among just the top 12 houses, poetry, literary fiction and religious titles all fell, as business, juvenile, law, sociology, and travel titles rose the most.

One closely-watched category--books translated into English from other languages--continued to fall, by more than 8 percent. The total for 2004 was 4,040 books (including 864 works of fiction).

Following previous trends, the average retail price of adult hardcovers fell 10 cents, to $27.52, as the average price for adult trade paperbacks rose 7 percent to $15.76.
Wrap...