Health & Fitness

By Andrew Grabois - May 14 , 2007

At a time when people are living longer, better, and with more disposable income, it is not surprising that the market for Health & Fitness books is so large—especially now that the self-aware Baby Boom generation is nearing retirement. According to the annual report Business of Consumer Publishing 2006 published by Simba Information (a Bowker company), the Health & Fitness category of new books generated $530 million dollars in 2006, which was good enough to rank fifth out of the nineteen categories tracked by Simba last year.

Estimated 2006 revenues showed an increase of 3.9% over 2004, and more than 10% over 2002. Consumer dollars spent on Health & Fitness books in 2006 accounted for 8.4% of all consumer dollars spent on books last year. The top six revenue-generating publishers accounted for 43% of all category revenues. In both Cooking and Health, Rodale Press (publisher of The South Beach Diet) more than held its own against the trade giants like Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, and Penguin Group.

According to Bowker’s Books In Print database, there are 41,838 books with the Health & Fitness classification still in print. In 2006, 3,548 new titles & editions were published in the Health & Fitness category. Like all 2006 totals, this one is preliminary. By the time Bowker stops counting, we can expect that the final total for 2006 will exceed 2005, but be down from the peak category output of 4,343 reached in 2004. Since 1995, the number of new books in this category has increased by more than 60%. Category output for publication years 2002-2006 is graphically represented below:

The stars of the Health & Fitness category, and the mega hits of book publishing in general, are diet books. While a few popular diet books have been published before the twentieth century (“Letter on Corpulence” by William Banting in 1860’s, and “New Glutton” by Horace Fletcher in the 1890’s), the bestselling weight reduction diet book as a regular mass market phenomenon is very much the creature of mid-twentieth century America.

The first diet book to make the Publishers Weekly nonfiction bestsellers list was Dr. Lulu Hunt Peter’s Diet & Health with Key to the Calories in 1922. It stayed on the list until 1926, making number one in both 1924 and 1925. After 1926, however, there was not another diet book on the PW nonfiction list until 1961, when Dr. Herman Taller’s Calories Don’t Count took the country by storm. Taller was followed by Dr. Erwin Stillman (Doctor’s Quick Weight Loss Diet) in 1968, Dr. Robert Atkins (Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution) in 1972, Dr. David Reuben (The Save Your Life Diet) in 1975, and, in 1979, Dr. Herman Tarnower (The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet) and Nathan Pritikin (The Pritikin Program for Diet and Exercise). Thus, the modern mass market diet book was born.

The annual output of new diet books (including but not limited to weight loss) has been a dynamic growth engine for the Health & Fitness category. Between 1995 and 2005, output of new diet books increased 263%. Below is a bar graph representing publication of new diet books over the last five years:

Talking about Health & Fitness bestsellers can be tricky because they sometimes blend into other categories like Cooking, Medicine, Body, Mind & Spirit (New Age), Self-Help, and even Business. Amazon describes the category as “Health, Mind & Body”, while Barnes & Noble uses “Diet & Health”. For purposes of this analysis, we won’t include titles like Rhonda Byrne’s Secret, Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek, Malcom Gladwell’s Tipping Point, and Jerome Groopman’s How Doctors Think in our round-up of Health & Fitness bestsellers.

As of May 15th, the hot titles in Health & Fitness are Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, The Best Life Diet by Bob Greene, Volumetrics Eating Plan by Barbara Rolls, Extreme Fat Smash Diet by Ian Smith, The Weight Loss Cure “They” Don’t Want You to Know About by Kevin Trudeau, You On A Diet: The Owners Manual for Waist Management by Michael Roizen & Mehmet Oz, and the new edition of the perennial bestseller What To Expect When You’re Expecting by Heidi Murkoff et al.

The new title to watch is Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by novelist Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver examines the issues, benefits and challenges faced by her and her family as they try to eat only what they grow on an ecologically sound farm. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle debuted at number 4 on the NY Times Hardcover Nonfiction list and is currently # 17 on Amazon.com (Amazon has it in their Home & Garden category), #32 on Barnes & Noble and #17 on Borders. The book received a very good review by Janet Maslin of the NY Times, a starred review by Publishers Weekly, and was awarded an average of five stars by Amazon.com users.

And, finally, according to Michael Cader’s deals database on PublishersMarketplace.com, we can look forward to the following new Health & Fitness titles in the next couple of years:

• Bipolar And Pregnant: How to Manage and Succeed in Planning and Parenting While Suffering With Mental Illness

• Size Matters: The Hard Facts Every Woman Should Know About Male Sexuality,

• The Venus Week: Discover the Secret of Hormonal Balance

• Fat Families, Thin Families: How to Save Your Family from the Obesity Trap & Become a Healthy Family for Life

• Feed Muscle, Shrink Fat: 6 Weeks to the Best Shape of Your Life

• Hot Flashes With A Cool Beat

• A Mom’s Guide To PMS

• Shut Up And Live (You Know How)

• The Most Decadent Diet Ever

• The Up Day Down Day Diet

• The Wine Diet