Busy bookshops see range of Christmas hits

Booksellers have reported positive sales going into the final week of the Christmas rush, with Chris Hadfield’s You Are Here (Macmillan) breaking through as a last-minute favourite. However the leading celebrity memoirs are not racking up individual totals as substantial as they did last year, with sales in the genre more spread out across a range of titles.

Foyles said sales were up as much as 6.9% across its stores for the same week last year and at Blackwell’s flagship store in Oxford, sales were up 15% this week year-on-year. Online retailer Wordery and indies including The Chorleywood Bookshop and The Edinburgh Bookshop also reported that sales were up in a buoyant week.

However while fiction sales are strong – with Blackwell’s Oxford seeing a 25% increase in the category year-on-year - some have noticed that the big celebrity autobiographies are less of a force to be reckoned with this year, with Patrick Neale, owner of Jaffe and Neale’s bookshop in Chipping Norton suggesting “the bubble has finally burst.”

Neale said: “I have always asked when the bubble is going to burst on celebrity titles and to date I have been proved wrong, but actually this might be the year it has finally happened. Sales of Stephen Fry and Michael Palin books have been low, which is surprising. Hopefully it is not a problem for us because we do not rely on those kinds of titles.” Michael Neil, books director at WH Smith High Street, a key seller of that genre, said: “I don’t think people are losing interest, there are just fewer big names with something new to say.”

Nielsen BookScan total market data for the year to date (period ending 1st November) for Biographies & Autobiographies reveals that the market is worth £50.6m, down 3.78%, but if one were to remove super-selling Sir Alex Ferguson from the equation, sales are slightly ahead of 2013 at £49.8m. Sales are also more spread out across a range of titles: only five books in the category – Lynda Bellingham, Guy Martin, Roy Keane, Eric Lomax and James Bowen - have sold 100,000 copies or more in comparison to seven in 2013. The bestselling autobiography of the year to date is Lynda Bellingham's There's Something I've Been Dying to tell You (Coronet), at 265,263 copies, but this would only have put her in third place last year, behind both Fergie and David Jason, which had sold 296,472 at the same point last year.

Meanwhile WH Smith has sold high volumes of Zoella’s novel Girl Online (Penguin) but its highest-selling book this week has been Guinness World Records 2015.

Foyles’ top seller, by contrast, is The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide (Picador), followed closely by The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami (Harvill Secker). Sam Husain, Foyles c.e.o, said: “Sales are encouraging as we seem to be outperforming the industry in our retail shops. Nielsen's records of sales through UK tills suggest that the industry as a whole is about 2.4% down on last year. In contrast, we were 6.9% ahead of last year on a like-for-like basis last week (week ending 14th Dec) in our retail shops (excluding St Pancras, which closed and new store Waterloo) and similarly up 7.6% up for the month to date. The last few days are trending similarly.”

Euan Hirst, academic manager for Blackwell’s Oxford, said footfall and sales were just as encouraging in Oxford. “Footfall is brilliant, we are still trading up on the corresponding week last year by around 15%, which is fantastic,” he said. “I think it is because of a growing spirit  in the past two years of people feeling like the best place they can find a book, something different they wouldn’t have thought of, is by browsing.” He added: “Fiction is the strongest, we are up 25% there, Richard Flanagan (Chatto) is selling well, along with Marilynne Robinson’s Lila (Virago). Chris Hadfield’s You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes (Macmillan) we are doing a lot of, along with H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald (Cape) and What If by Randall Munroe (John Murray)."
 
Sheryl Shurville, co-owner of Chorleywood Bookshop, also named Chris Hadfield’s You Are Here as her top seller, helped by having a lot of signed stock to sell following a recent event at her shop. “It is a phenomenon,” she said. Ian Poulter’s autobiography No Limits (Quercus) was shifting in high volumes for her, along with Graham Norton’s  autobiography (Hodder & Stoughton), she said. However, Shurville said parcel collections and deliveries from over-stretched courier Yodel were still “terrible,” putting a burden on the business at an already bustling time of year. “Yodel are an absolute nightmare,” she said. “We are waiting here until 8pm sometimes for them to be collected and the courier says he’s working until 11pm at night. Everything is delayed.”

However, Marie Moser said deliveries had improved at The Edinburgh Bookshop. “There has been a remarkable improvement,” she said. “They had improved by Tuesday or Wednesday – they had been terrible.” She too said Munroe’s What If was shifting in bucket loads, along with Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story (British Library Classics). “It feels like sales are up, but you can never say until it’s over,” Moser said. “We are happy, anyway.”

Meanwhile Patrick Neale, co-owner of Jaffe & Neale Bookshop in Chipping Norton, said he was selling “an awful lot” of Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. “For ones just under the radar, All That is Solid Melts Into Air by Darragh McKeon (Viking) and we are also selling a lot of Kate Tempest (Picador),” he recommended. “David Mitchell’s book (The Bone Clocks, Sceptre) is also doing well.”

Sales were not only looking promising on the high street, but for new online retailers too. Will Jones, founder and managing director of Wordery, said: “Christmas trading remains excellent, well above our forecasted plan and significantly larger than last year. Our service delivery continues to be excellent and our customer feedback reflects this. Our highlights would be back to back million pound turnover weeks and the considerable growth in wordery.com, which are real milestones for the business."