Is Coronavirus Killing Book Sales?

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No. Coronavirus did not kill book sales, and the market has not collapsed since. US print unit sales rose 8.2% in 2020, to 750.9 million units from 693.7 million the year before (Publishers Weekly, 07-Jan-21). Today print sales are roughly flat: 762.4 million units in 2025, up 0.3% on 2024 (Publishers Weekly, 09-Jan-26). I wrote the rest of this post in April 2020, in the first lockdowns, and I have left it as a record of what I saw then.

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What did the numbers show for 2020?

Print units rose in all the main age and fiction or nonfiction groups the article lists, though not evenly, and some smaller categories fell. Young adult nonfiction was up 38.3%, juvenile nonfiction 23.1%, young adult fiction 21.4%, adult fiction 6% and adult nonfiction 4.8%. Travel was down 40.3% and action and adventure fiction down 14.9% (Publishers Weekly). Those figures are for print books only.

What did I see in April 2020?

All the major industries were getting hit hard. People were being laid off or furloughed. The question I received was how self-publishing sales were going, and I was watching Lulu, IngramSpark, Kindle, Amazon and ACX audiobooks closely.

My answer then was that my sales were going up. People were at home, in isolation or quarantine, looking for something to do or for hope, and some were picking up new hobbies. Audiobooks on ACX were part of that rise too, and that spring more people in Norway, where I live, were listening to audiobooks. Read how to get your audiobooks produced on ACX and staying motivated during isolation.

What do the numbers say now?

The 2021 peak was 839.7 million print units, so sales are below that. They have settled near 760 million a year. For the nine months to 03-Oct-26, units were down 0.1% on the same period of 2025, at 531.3 million (Publishers Weekly, 13-Oct-26). Categories swing more than the total. Self-help grew 14.7% in 2025, while biography and memoir fell 7% (Publishers Weekly, 09-Jan-26), yet self-help had the largest fall in the first nine months of 2026, down 23%. These figures cover print books sold through outlets that report to Circana BookScan, so they do not include ebooks or audiobooks. Neither report gives ebook or audiobook numbers.

My advice: treat the market as steady, not booming. Readers are still buying, and the categories that move are the ones to watch. Sales can also fall away for reasons that have nothing to do with the news, which I cover in will book sales dry up by the end of the year?

What happened to audiobooks?

I mentioned ACX above, so here is the wider picture. The Audio Publishers Association reported in its sales survey that audiobook revenue reached $2.43 billion in 2025, up 9% on the year before, and that active titles rose 43% to over 750,000 (infoDOCKET, 05-Jun-26). So the shift to listening I saw at home in 2020 did not fade. More titles also means more competition, which is why choosing a topic people already want matters. If a book of yours already sells in print or as an ebook, an audio edition is one more way to reach people who prefer to listen while they cook, walk or commute, and it costs you nothing to find out whether your readers want it.

Why is self-publishing different in a crisis?

Unlike many industries, a virus does not hit self-publishing the same way. People have less money, but books are cheap, and building an audience or getting listened to does not need a shop or an office. Self-publishing also lets you help people around the world: those looking for something to read or listen to. You can look at what people are interested in and the hobbies they are exploring, and ask what value you can add.

The lesson holds in any hard period: readers keep buying and listening. Read the best way to market a publication for free after self-publishing for the next step.

How are your sales going? Or are you just looking to get started? Leave a comment below.

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