Beyond Revenue

Revenue is holding steady, but fewer copies are selling. I look at how to separate volume and price effects, and why reprint decisions also depend on sales rates and stock levels.

An article in the September issue of Book Industry¹ magazine reviewing the Russian book market in the first half of 2026 includes three figures worth looking at together: sales at physical bookstores fell by 15.8% in copies and 5.1% in rubles, while the average selling price of a book rose by 12.7%. The Association of Book Distributors reports the same figures (in Russian).

These figures describe sales through physical bookstores. But what should a publisher do if its own reports tell a similar story: revenue is almost unchanged, while fewer copies are selling? Should it reduce its next print runs?

I would start by looking at what produced the result. The same revenue trend can reflect situations that call for different decisions.

Where exactly are sales falling?

Industry data can provide context, but it cannot replace an analysis of your own list. Especially when the data covers only one sales channel.

For example, at an industry conference during the Moscow International Book Fair, Wildberries reported (in Russian) growth in book sales over the first seven months of 2026: 18% in rubles and 23% in copies.

The marketplace’s figures cannot be compared directly with those from Book Industry: the periods, coverage and probably the calculation methods differ. But they give publishers a good reason to check how sales are distributed. A title can sell fewer copies through physical bookstores and more through a marketplace

A publisher’s shipment does not necessarily mean a reader has bought a book, either. A trading partner that reduces its orders may be drawing down existing stock. One that increases them may be preparing for a promotion. Where possible, it is worth looking at both sales to readers and partners’ stock levels.

Split the list into comparable groups

The average selling price does not change only when list prices go up. Discounts, channels, and the sales mix all affect it. Higher-priced new releases might support revenue while lower-priced backlist titles lose sales.

I would begin an analysis of my own list with three breakdowns:

1. The same editions in the same channels. What happened to copies sold, the actual selling price and earnings per copy? Returns, promotions and availability all matter here. If a title was out of stock for a month, lower sales do not necessarily mean lower demand.
2. New releases separately from the backlist. New releases are better compared at the same point after publication: over their first eight weeks on sale, for example. Otherwise, it is easy to mistake a later release date for a change in demand.
3. Formats and price bands. Mass-market paperbacks and gift editions can move in different directions. An average across the list will hide those differences.

This gives me a basis for discussing what actually happened: whether existing titles sold fewer copies, higher-priced editions accounted for a larger share of sales, or sales shifted between channels.

What explains the change in revenue?

Once we have identified comparable editions and channels, we can calculate what contributed to the change in revenue. Revenue from a book, $R$, is the number of copies sold, $Q$, multiplied by the actual average selling price, $P$.

Let $Q_0$ and $P_0$ represent quantity and price in the previous period, and $Q_1$ and $P_1$ those in the current period. The change in revenue can then be broken down exactly into two components:

The first is the volume effect: how much revenue the change in copies sold added or removed at the previous price. The second is the price effect: how the change in the actual selling price affected revenue at the current quantity.

Take a hypothetical book. Last year, it sold 10,000 copies at 300 rubles each. This year, it sold 8,000 at 375 rubles. Revenue was 3 million rubles in both cases.

We can now see a pair of opposing effects behind the unchanged revenue. The reduction in copies sold lowered calculated revenue by 600,000 rubles, while the higher actual selling price offset that amount.

The formula does not prove that copies sold decreased because the price increased. It describes the change in revenue. The causes still need to be investigated through availability, promotions, demand, and the terms of doing business in each channel.

Two series with the same revenue

This breakdown helps explain the financial result, but it is not enough to decide how many copies to print.

Warning

All the figures below are hypothetical and illustrate the reasoning behind a decision. They are not data from actual publishers.

In the first half of last year, a publisher sold 100,000 copies across the titles in each of two series, generating 30 million rubles in revenue per series. In the first half of this year, sales of each series fell to 80,000 copies, while revenue remained unchanged.

At the series level, the maths is identical: a volume effect of −6 million rubles and an average price effect of +6 million. At this level, the average price effect also includes changes in the sales mix, such as a higher share of more expensive books. To separate this from a change in the price of an individual edition, we need to return to calculations by book and channel.

Now, let’s add available stock at the end of the half-year and average weekly sales over its final eight weeks. For simplicity, assume that no further print runs are due to arrive.

Series A has maintained its revenue, but there are thirty weeks’ worth of stock in the warehouse. If the slowdown is confirmed for individual books in the series and no seasonal peak is approaching, some reprints may be worth postponing. The next question is which titles account for the excess stock.

Series B has less than four weeks of stock, and its current sales rate is higher than Series A’s. If printing and delivering a reprint to the warehouse takes six weeks, some popular titles could run out before it arrives. Cutting every print run by 20% in line with the overall decline in copies sold would be a poor decision for this series.

In practice, a publisher can be holding a year’s worth of stock for some books while running out of others. Stock cover therefore needs to be calculated for each edition. The quantities needed also have to be weighed against printing economics: a larger run can reduce the production cost per copy, but requires more money upfront. It is easy to overestimate the savings without considering how long the stock will take to sell.

Almost unchanged revenue is not, on its own, a reason to reduce print runs. First, it is worth finding out what supported the revenue figure, then checking each book’s sales rate and stock against its replenishment lead time. The question “should we print fewer copies?” then becomes more specific: which editions should we reprint now, which can wait, and how much money will each option require?