Children’s titles continue to outperform market

The children’s book market is continuing to outperform other sectors, with sales of children’s titles up 4.3% so far this year, against the wider print market that is slowing down.

The children’s sector is the only major category ahead in volume terms, up 1.1%, while there’s a comparatively stellar rise in value of 4.3%. But after a bumptious two years of growth, the general print market is plateauing. In value terms, 2017 is just nosing past 2016 across the same period—by 1.7%—but the market is marginally down in volume, by 0.9%. Book-buyers are paying an average of 21p more per book, but they’re buying slightly fewer titles. Non-fiction has posted a 3.5% drop in volume, with adult fiction faring better, scraping in just behind 2016 (–0.2%). In value, both categories just inch ahead of 2016—by 0.5% for non-fiction and 1.5% for fiction.

Children’s Fiction is always the safest of safe bets, and 2017 has been no different; it’s up 6.6% in value for the year to date. The 20th anniversary of World Book Day meant the £1 children’s titles had a particularly good year, with all 10 charting in the overall top 10 for two weeks running. But really, Children’s Fiction should think about changing its name to the David Walliams Category. The author is already up 24% on 2016 (when he pulled in nearly £14m for the full year) and he has spent 17 weeks as the Children’s number one so far this year. His World Book Day title Blob (HarperCollins Children’s) is the highest selling Children’s title (and overall title) this year, with The World’s Worst Children 2 swiftly climbing the charts in recent weeks to nestle behind it, in second place.

Picture Books, the bread and butter of the print market, suffered a 2.5% drop in volume but grew 0.9% in value. Over the past 10 years, the category’s value has grown 63%—and even if growth continues at a rate of 0.9% for the entirety of 2017, Picture Books will still rack up its second-best year since records began.

YA Fiction has been declining in both volume and value for years, coming off the heights of The Hunger Games series (Scholastic) and John Green’s backlist bounce after the success of The Fault in Our Stars (Penguin) in the early part of the decade. For YA, 2016 was a particularly bruising year, with an 8% drop in both volume and value. But 2017 seems to have turned it all around, with YA posting an 8.5% boost in volume and a 6% jump in value for the year to date.

Noticeably, almost the entire YA top 10 for the year to date is occupied by either film and TV tie-ins or World Book Day titles, with only Zoe Sugg’s Girl Online: Going Solo (Penguin) bucking the trend in ninth place. David Almond’s WBD title Island (Hodder Children’s) is top, with 56,572 copies sold, but Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Hollow City and Library of Souls (Quirk) all chart in the top 10, alongside Nicola Yoon’s Everything, Everything (Corgi Children’s) and Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why (Puffin), in fifth and seventh place respectively.

Textbooks continue to defy the odds in an increasingly digital world. The sector as whole is heading for an eighth successive year of growth—it is up 11% in volume for the year to date, and ahead 12.8% in value.