The book market in France rebounded slightly in 2023, while publishers slowed down their pace of publishing new products, their professional organization indicated on Thursday. The National Publishing Union (SNE) noted a “slight increase in activity”, with total turnover for the sector up 1.2% last year, to 2.995 billion euros . In 2022, sales fell by 5.4%, after a year 2021 described as “extraordinary”.
Literature is doing well
In volume terms, the number of copies sold fell last year, decreasing by 2%, to 439.7 million. The overall book market suffered, among other things, from the contraction of that of comics (-4.4%), after an exceptional year 2021 and a very good year 2022. Comics account for a sixth of the sales volume.
The largest segment, literature (22.5% of sales), is doing well, with turnover up 5%. Among the literary genres which experienced the best growth in 2023 include the dark and detective novel, “where French, Anglo-Saxon or Nordic headliners remain sure values”, science fiction and the imaginary, and finally romance, which represented 2% of the French book market last year, according to the SNE’s annual report “Les Chiffres de l’édition”.
Publishers published less in 2023. They printed 104,364 different titles, of which 36,819 were new releases. Although this figure fell by 5%, it still represents 147 new releases per working day, compared to 153 the previous year. In five years, “the production of new releases has fallen by 18%” and “the number of copies printed is down by 7.5%”, underlines the SNE. The organization highlighted “the desire of publishers to better manage their editorial policy in order to contain the increase in titles and not saturate the market”. Measured over two years, the rate of books shredded (destroyed so that the paper can be recycled) was 13.0% in 2021-2022, compared to a high of 15.3% in 2016-2017.
