Case study · Market and audience research
A seasonal illustrated series was pitched to a national publisher. The category was assumed to be a niche — pleasant, small, not worth a multi-volume commitment. The pitch was going nowhere on enthusiasm alone. So the question became a research question: how big is this actually, and who is already paying attention?
Halloween is measured every year by the National Retail Federation, which surveys around eight thousand consumers. The numbers are public, and nobody in publishing appears to look at them.
Total US Halloween spending, 2022–2025
The 2024 dip is real and worth noting rather than hiding — spending fell from the 2023 record before recovering sharply. A category that can drop a year and then set a record is behaving like a healthy consumer market, not a fad.
Source: National Retail Federation annual survey, conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics.
Where the money goes
Decorations are the surprise. More people buy them than buy costumes, and they spend more on them than on candy — $4.2 billion, which is $1.6 billion more than in 2019. Decoration is a display behavior, and display behavior is driven by looking at pictures of other people’s displays.
Spending tells you the size. Activity tells you whether there is a subject worth writing about.
Participation by activity
Two thirds hand out candy, half dress up, half decorate, and nearly half carve a pumpkin. A quarter visit a haunted house. These are not passive purchases — they are practices, with history behind every one of them. That is what a book about the subject is for.
When the season really starts
Half of all Halloween shopping happens before October. For a publisher this is a scheduling finding as much as a marketing one.
This is the finding that mattered most, and it is one line in the NRF survey that nobody quotes.
Leading source of Halloween inspiration
Online search is the single largest source of Halloween inspiration — ahead of walking into a store, and well ahead of friends and family. People go looking. They type questions. They want to know where this came from and why we do it.
A category where the primary demand behavior is searching for information is a category that wants reference material. The audience is not waiting to be sold a book — it is already asking the questions the book answers.
The market data establishes that the category is large. It does not establish that anyone is paying attention to the specific subject. So the second half of the research was a census: find every social property dedicated to Halloween history, film and culture, and size it.
The assumed audience against the measured one
Four hundred and eighty-four platforms, counted and sized individually. Not an estimate and not a projection — a count of what already existed.
Put the two halves together and the argument writes itself. A $13.1 billion category. Nearly three quarters of the country participating. The largest single source of inspiration is online search. And 247 million people already following accounts devoted to the subject.
None of that is a niche.
The conversation with the editor changed the moment the figures appeared. It stopped being a discussion about whether people like the subject and became a discussion about a measurable audience the category had simply never counted.
| Before the research | After |
|---|---|
| “A pleasant niche subject” | A $13.1 billion category with 73% participation |
| Audience assumed, never measured | 247 million followers across 484 counted platforms |
| Demand assumed to be impulse at retail | 37% of demand begins with a search |
| One speculative volume | A six-volume commission |
A six-volume contract with a national publisher, scheduled from 2027 through 2032. The research did not make the books better. It made the case that the books should exist.
Every figure on this page came from published survey data and a platform-by-platform count. No proprietary access, no privileged information, nothing that any publisher could not have looked up.
They did not look it up. That is usually the finding.
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