Researched by: BookDao New Publishing Research Institute and BookDao Book Influence Data Project Team

Published by: BookDao.com and BookDao Learning

Introduction

The biggest difference between the BookDao Most Recommended Book’s List and other book lists is that it is a big data compilation of recommended books. The BookDao’s book list is the result of the BookDao's monitoring and tracking of over 2,500 book evaluation and recommendation institutions, as well as the nearly 130,000 book reviewers and recommenders who collectively weave together nearly 4,000 recommendation sources. These recommendation sources include not only award-winning and authoritative media that evaluate social benefits, but also a wider range of socially influential multimedia platforms, as well as cultural celebrities, social figures, experts, scholars, and reading enthusiasts who promote reading through social media. Nowadays, book recommendations are widespread in the online world, and these various recommendation forces with different degrees of influence are tracked and formed into a dissemination chain by the BookDao Book Influence Data Platform. By tracking the book dissemination chain and aggregating the reading wisdom of various recommendation forces in society, good books can be identified with reference to data, book selection can be based on evidence, and sources can be traced, in order to clearly outline the efforts made by different publishers in discovering good books of the mass book market.

Principles and Methods

Firstly, the book selection principles and research methods for the "H1 2023 BookDao Book Influence Data Analysis Report" have two main characteristics. By tracking the book dissemination chain and aggregating the wisdom of various recommendation forces in society and digitizing it to form a recommendation chain, book selection can be based on evidence and sources can be traced.

The "H1 2023 BookDao Book Influence Data Analysis Report" was created by using the convenience of platforms, data, and tools to aggregate the power of social resources that contribute to promoting reading for all. It benefits from Internet and mobile Internet technologies, which enable fragmented recommendations to be aggregated, making it possible to discover and promote good books on such a large scale, and provide practical reference data and analysis for publishing colleagues to promote reading, publishing planning, marketing communications, market sales, and book influence presentation analysis.

Secondly, these various recommendation forces with different degrees of influence are tracked and formed into a dissemination chain by the BookDao Book Influence Data Platform. The tracking of the dissemination chain helps publishers to proactively attract consumers' attention, generate interest, create a desire to purchase, deepen memory, create purchases, generate associated purchases, and share other purchase behaviors in their daily marketing and promotion work. In other words, publishers can generate explosive promotional power through active promotion in the short term, quickly accumulate energy, influence channels and C-end readers, and then further spread through consumer or key opinion leaders' (KOL) spontaneous or guided word-of-mouth communication, creating multiple peaks of dissemination and forming sustained dissemination power.

Limitations

There are three points that need to be specially noted in this report, especially concerning the limitations of the "H1 2023 BookDao Book Influence Data Analysis Report", which readers of this report should be aware of:

Firstly, the "H1 2023 BookDao Book Influence Data Analysis Report" is sorted by average weight by theme and content group. The so-called average weight refers to the total weight of the book divided by the number of months since its release, which ensures that books with a late release date but with a peak influence value in the short term also have a fair chance of being presented.

Secondly, this report mainly targets the general public, so some educational books aimed at the school market may not be included in the list. This also means that some professional or educational publishing institutions with high brand reputation and strong capabilities, and even with considerable prestige in the global publishing market, may not be included in the rankings or may rank lower in the rankings generated based on the selected books. Therefore, this report specifically points out the limitations of the BookDao Most Recommended Book List category setting and apologizes to the above-mentioned publishing institutions for any inconvenience caused.

Thirdly, this report does not intend to rank publishers. This report only includes BookDao Book Influence Data for the first half of 2023, and does not analyze all published books on the BookDao Book Influence Data Platform as the basis for the data analysis. Therefore, when listing the names of publishing houses, there is no ranking indicated, only the number of selected books from each publishing house is listed.

Revival of Children's Books and Chinese Stories: Two Key Trends

As of June 30, 2023, BookDao's Book Influence Database had a total of 3.69 million titles, of which 56,000 new titles were published from January 1 to June 30, 2023. Through searching recommendation sources, BookDao found that only 6,100 of the new titles had at least one recommendation source, accounting for 10.9% of the new titles. This means that many new titles have not received media attention or effective recommendations, and the marketing efforts and breadth of publishing institutions have not been fully utilized.

In order to analyze the BookDao's Book Influence Data for the first half of this year more efficiently, BookDao conducted book influence statistics and analysis on titles with at least one recommendation source, and ultimately formed the BookDao Most Recommended Book Lists for the first half of 2023. The selected books are all published from January 1 to June 30, 2023.

Due to space limitations, this report only presents the top 100 books on the list. The books are sorted by average weight.

Utilizing Social Hot Topics

In the first half of 2023, the non-fiction works on the BookDao Most Recommended Book List rose very quickly. The top four works were all from Guangxi Normal University Press, namely "A Portrait of the Scholar-Official in Song China: The Literati in Surviving Letters," "The Chinese Typewriter: A History," "Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China," and "Animal Archaeology: Discovering China in the Chinese Zodiac." This reversed the trend of the top three works being occupied by literary works in the 2022 BookDao Most Recommended Book List, and also reflected from one side that it is becoming increasingly difficult for fictional literary works to gain recognition from readers and the media, and the requirements are getting higher. Currently, in a climate where literary works are struggling to make ends meet, high-quality works are hard to come by. Meanwhile, non-fiction works in the humanities and social sciences that draw upon real historical events, humanities, and socio-economics are becoming more accessible to readers and are gaining popularity.

Social hotspots are still an important indicator for books on the list. For example, "AIGC: Artificial Intelligence Guided Creativity" from China Translation & Publishing House, "The Knockout" from Qingdao Publishing House, "Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology" from Zhejiang People's Publishing House, and "County Party Headquarters" from Hainan Publishing House are all representatives in this regard, either related to popular TV dramas or social and economic hotspots. Under the category of humanities and social sciences, the scope of history is slowly expanding. Books on the history of the Tang, Song, Ming, Qing dynasties, and the Republican Period have all been selected. Children's books quickly recovered in the first half of this year, with 13 works or series on the BookDao Most Recommended Book Overall Book List Top 100, including four titles from Jieli Publishing House and three titles from Anhui Children's Publishing House, showing outstanding performance.

In terms of original titles, they accounted for 61.6% of new releases in the first half of this year, which is slightly lower than the 68.11% in 2022. As the pandemic subsided, the exchange of Chinese and foreign publications gradually resumed, leading to an increase in the proportion of new titles being introduced. Notably, there was an increase in the number of imported books in the Children's, Arts, and New Knowledge categories, which to some extent reduced the proportion of original titles.

Publishing Groups Show Serious Disparity: The Strong Keep Getting Stronger

We compiled and summarized a list of publishing groups that were involved in the overall book list. Based on various factors such as the recommendation weight, number of recommendation sources, and number of selected book varieties, we created a comprehensive influence index for each publishing group.

During the first half of this year, China Publishing Group and Shanghai Century Publishing Group continued to rank among the top publishing groups due to their numerous publishing houses, strong brand recognition, and notable advantages in promoting books. Jiangsu Phoenix Publishing and Media Group, Zhejiang United Publishing Group, Central South Publishing & Media Group, Xinhua Winshare Publishing and Media Group, China Industry & Information Technology Publishing & Media Group, and China International Publishing Group are currently in the second tier. Jiangxi Publishing Group, Guangdong Publishing Group, Hubei Changjiang Publishing & Media Group, Beijing Publishing Group, Guangxi Publishing & Media Group, Shandong Publishing Group, Tianjin Publishing & Media Group, Anhui Publishing Group, and Central China Publishing Media belong to the third tier. China Science Publishing & Media, Hebei Publishing & Media Group, Shanxi Publishing Media Group, the Straits Publishing and Distribution Group, Guizhou Publishing Group, Shaanxi Xinhua Publishing & Media, Liaoning Publishing Group, Yunnan Publishing Group, China Education Publishing & Media Group, Jilin Publishing Group, Heilongjiang Publishing & Media, and Duzhe Publishing & Media are in the fourth tier.

197 Publishers Make Recommended List, But Few Dominate Selections

In the first half of 2023, a total of 197 publishing houses had titles selected in the top 1000 titles ranked by influence index. Among them, there was only one publishing house (CITIC Press Group) that had over 50 titles selected, 26 had between 10 to 50 titles, 98 had between 2 to 10 titles, and 72 had only one title selected. Looking at the number of selected titles from these publishing houses, several characteristics emerge:

1. Although the selected publishing houses were relatively dispersed, the number of selected titles was concentrated at the two extremes. Only 27 publishing houses had more than 10 titles selected, while 72 had only one title selected.

2. The number of selected titles does not always correspond to the total influence of each title. For instance, CITIC Press Group ranked first in the overall number of selected titles despite not performing well in the Overall Top 100 Book List, thanks to their extensive marketing and promotion efforts. Similarly, Guangxi Normal University Press had a relatively concentrated number of titles in the Overall Top 100 Book List, but their overall number of selected titles was slightly lower. For publishing institutions, both promoting individual bestsellers and having a comprehensive marketing plan for their products are crucial and cannot be overlooked. These factors play an essential role in the overall contribution of the brand.
3. Since this is the report for the first half of the year, publishers with more cyclical titles such as yearbooks and reports tend to have more titles selected. For example, Social Sciences Academic Press had 19 titles selected due to the publication of several industry reference books and annual reports at the beginning of the year.

Key Words Indicate a Shift toward More Diverse Reading

Through a word frequency analysis of the keywords in the Most Recommended Book List, ten words stood out: history, story, era, art, humanity, children, culture, society, universe, and economy. In terms of genre, the list covered a diverse range of types, and the selection direction of publishing institutions, the influence of media, and the reading preferences of readers are becoming increasingly diverse and personalized. Based on these classification words, there is still a significant focus on Chinese stories. At the same time, we have also observed that some new vocabulary, such as digital economy, is appearing more frequently in the word frequency analysis.

Fierce Competition for Top Spots, Lacking Standouts in Category Book Lists

Books in different categories have varying levels of coverage and influence in media recommendations and marketing promotions. It is challenging for the Overall Top 100 Book List to fully represent the performance of books in each category. Therefore, the next step is to analyze the top 100 books in each of the nine category lists (literature, social sciences, humanities, finance and economics, children's books, lifestyle, arts, new knowledge, and theme publishing) based on book influence index. All books on each list were published between January 1, 2023, and June 30, 2023, and the lists are sorted by average weight.

The analysis of category lists also revealed the same conclusion: Guangxi Normal University Press became the biggest winner in the book influence rankings for the first half of this year, taking the top spot in literature, social sciences, humanities, and arts categories. Meanwhile, CITIC Press Group once again missed out on the top spot.

Below are the details of the selected books in each of the nine category lists.

Note: Original article in Chinese: 百道网2023上半年图书影响力数据报告