Comics are the literary genre that grew the least in sales in Spain in 2023, with a turnover of 66.87 million euros, 3.1% less than in 2022. Comics barely represent 2.3% of the income of the book market, which last year was led by non-fiction, with 29.7% of sales, followed by non-university educational texts (27.9%), fiction (21.8%) and youth and children’s books (17.4%). This is indicated by the annual report of the Federation of Publishers’ Guilds of Spain, presented this Wednesday, which highlights the uninterrupted growth of the book trade since the pandemic.
“Rather than a drop, I would say that there has not been significant growth,” said Óscar Chicharro, from the consultancy Conecta, which carried out the study, regarding the number of comics sold. The data for 2023 cut the consecutive rise that comics had been registering since 2020: a year-on-year increase of 3% in 2021 and 2% in 2022. The president of the Federation, Daniel Fernández, hypothesized that the reason for the fall may have been the bursting of the manga bubble, which in 2022 accounted for half of the comics sold in Spain. The figures overlap with those presented in January by the Spanish Comic Sector Association, which already indicated that 51% of Spanish comic book authors earn less than 20,000 euros per year.
It is also true that comics are the genre that launched the fewest paper titles last year: 1,926. At the other end of the spectrum are non-fiction titles (which include scientific texts, general dissemination texts, dictionaries and encyclopedias) with almost 24,000 published works. Fernández contrasted this figure with the turnover recorded in digital comics, 5.7% more than in 2022. “Before, buying virtual comics was unthinkable.”
On the other hand, the purchase of children’s and young adult literature is the one that has grown the most, with an increase of 5.9% compared to 2022. An increase above the other segments that is also replicated in the balance of the last four years: it has increased its turnover by 36% since 2020, above fiction (23%), non-fiction (19%) and non-university texts (4%).
Audiobook purchases grow by 95%
In terms of formats, audiobooks generated revenues of €6.70 million last year, a growth of no less than 95% compared to 2022. Meanwhile, revenues from digital books have grown the least (€144 million, 3.4% more than in the last report) and paper continues to dominate sales with revenues of €2.7 billion, a year-on-year increase of 5.1%.
Bookshops are the main channel for selling physical books; 37.8% of sales are made through this channel, followed by 20.3% by chains (FNAC, Casa del Libro, El Corte Inglés…) and far behind by hypermarkets (8.6%). As regards titles published in languages, Galician and Basque are at the bottom (2.5% of the total each), behind others (5.6%), Catalan (13.9%) and Castilian (76%). “The book is not dying out, as we thought at the beginning of the 2000s; the Spanish book is still functioning. It is true that some difficulties arise in places like Galicia, where it is growing, but not with the same vitality in terms of published copies,” Fernández stressed.
The coronavirus pandemic has significantly boosted the purchase and consumption of books in Spain. The average revenue of the publishing sector has gone from 40.69 million euros per year between 2014 and 2019, to an average of 139.01 million per year in the period 2020-2023. Last year there was a growth of 5.1%. “It is a bit cynical to think that the best way to reach European reading standards was the pandemic and locking down Spaniards, but it is happening and growth is continuous,” said Fernández.
Although the increase has been occurring for 10 years, the most significant leaps have occurred since 2020. Fernández clarified that “not all is good news” and pointed out that almost a third of the Spanish population does not buy books for leisure: “This statistic tells us that they are the same people who never set foot in a museum, do not enter a library and hardly go to stage shows. On the other hand, there is a third of Spaniards who are above the European average and buy a minimum of 10 books a year, and in the last third are those who buy about five per year.”
Since 2019, Mexico is the country to which the most books are exported from Spain. A title that historically belonged to France, which is in second place, and Argentina is in third place.
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