According to an article by Andrew Grabois on BeneaththeCover.com, a web site that deals with the book industry,
…[W]e find, not surprisingly, that baseball is still king. With its rich history, sacred pantheon of heroes and records, and endless statistics, baseball should remain the anchor of the category for the foreseeable future.
Nevertheless, in the grand scale of things, baseball — and sports books in general — are way down in the pack. According to the most recent Business of Consumer Book Publishing, the sports and recreation genre ranks 18 out of 19 categories. There were 4,435 new sports titles released in 2006 (out of a total of more than 55,700 total books). Hardcover sports/rec titles making it to one of the major best seller lists tracked by a major industry resource totaled 22, six less than the previous year. Another telling figure about the importance of sports book in the eyes listing decision-makers: the number of books reviewed by major outlets declined from 450 to 311.
An accounting of baseball titles since 1985
| 1985 | 1995 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 |
| 116 | 310 | 436 | 474 | 506 | 555 | 459 |
Other items of interest:
- The average SRP for sports books were $27.09 for hardcover, $16.20 for adult trade paperbakcs, and $8.56 for mass-market paperbacks, all lower the general non-fiction titles.
- No sports titles appeared on the USA Today 150 best selling list; only two — Opening Day, by Jonathan Eig, and Big Papi, by David Ortiz, made the NYTimes‘ best-seler list that appeared on the publication’s Web site (not the print edition)
- Five of the top 12 bestselling sports books on Amazon.com and six of the top 10 on Barnes and Noble were baseball titles.
- Visit my previous entry on bestselling baseball titles, as deemed by The New York Times.
is available on Amazon.com,
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My book BASEBALL TEAM NAMES is being published by McFarland (July 30, 2012). What other baseball and sports themes are you, dear readers, do you like? Thanks!
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