Going into the holiday season which normally accounts for up to a quarter of the annual turnover, German booksellers were harbouring hopes of finishing 2024 on a high. But a slow start in the first half of December with sales only slightly up year-on-year across all channels put a dampener on the positive mood.
The Christmas season in Germany is traditionally defined by the four weekends before Christmas Eve. Booksellers are now pinning their hope on a shopping frenzy during the remaining four and a half shopping days – shops are closed in Germany on Sundays and retailers are required by law to close at 2pm on Christmas Eve.
Despite the slow start, optimism among booksellers is still there, mainly for the following reasons: books reliably rank among the most popular last minutes gifts; sales figures for 2024 have been holding up throughout the year; and the supply chain has been working well, apart from a few problems with Zeitfracht.
According to the newsletter Branchen-Monitor Buch (BMB), sales were up between January and end-November by 1.1% across all channels, which comprise stationary bookshops, book chains, e-commerce, railway station bookshops, department stores and electrical stores/drugstores. In the run-up to the holiday season, stationary bookshops did especially well with sales up 5.7% and 5.3% respectively in October and November.
Among categories, fiction and non-fiction have been doing well for some time – the latter partly driven by former chancellor Angela Merkel’s long-awaited biography Freiheit, published simultaneously in the English-language edition as Freedom by Macmillan on 26th November. Her German publisher Kiepenheuer & Witsch reported sales of more than 200,000 copies in the first week of sales and demand is still going strongly with Freiheit atop all bestsellers lists.
