Walliams wows as Kerridge’s sales fatten in first half

It has been a year of milestones for David Walliams. He eclipsed 10 million units sold through BookScan UK in March and this week notched his 100th non-consecutive week as the Children’s number one (J K Rowling and Stephenie Meyer, at 77 and 76 top spots respectively, trail in his wake).

And now he tops a half-year author chart for the very first time. He has done this by being spectacularly consistent, with year-on-year TCM sales rises of 20%–30% since he launched as a children’s author in 2008. Walliams also tends to generate about 60%–65% of his TCM sales in the second half of the year, and is thus on track to earn over £17m in 2017. So chances are he will be atop the author pile by year’s end, too.

Julia Donaldson’s growth curve is less steep than Walliams’, but she has, of course, been at it for far longer. If Walliams has been spectacularly consistent, Donaldson has been solidly spectacular, growing sales a few percentage points each year.

J K Rowling’s TCM value is just a smidgeon under £6m, almost 50% up on this point last year, buoyed by the raft of coverage around the 20th anniversary of the first Harry Potter and Bloomsbury’s various repackagings of the boy wizard. The eight different Hogwarts House editions of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone released on 1st June, for example, collectively shifted almost 83,000 units for £792,000. For those keeping score, the two Gryffindor editions lead the way, each selling just over 14,000 units. The Hufflepuff paperback comes dead last, on 7,515 copies.

What goes up

Joe Wicks was the bestselling author of the half-year 2016 (a lean £7.1m), and is still tops for non-fiction, though he is 41% down on last year’s haul. The Body Coach’s year-on-year drop, and the overall clean-eating trend going off the boil a bit, is reflected by the Health, Diet & Wholefood Cook- ery category losing a third of its value, slipping to £11.5m—albeit from a record high. Only five other categories had a deeper drop.

Incidentally, the BookScan genre plummeting most? That would be EU Law: Textbooks and Study Guides, down 69.8%.

The newest star in the healthy eating firmament is former carbs and booze-loving chef Tom Kerridge, whose Dopamine Diet (Absolute) was the basis for his own remarkable 12-stone weight loss. Dopamine Diet sold £1.3m through the TCM; only one other cookery hardback—Mary Berry’s Mary Berry Everyday (BBC, £2.1m)—passed the seven-figure mark.

Perhaps the most surprising name on the authors top 20 is Yuval Noah Harari. The Israeli historian’s Sapiens (Vintage) had previously been a decent, if not hugely spectacular hit. Yet Harari has moved through the gears thanks to help from the usual places (a Waterstones Book of the Month nod, overwhelmingly good reviews for his 2017 release Homo Deus) and the not so usual (he was championed by Chris Evans on the DJ’s Radio 2 show). At almost £900,000, Sapiens is the top-selling title in translation—by £423,000.

The Ladybird Books for Grown-ups team of Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris suffered the biggest decline of our top 20 authors, down 55%. This is partially due the lessening of the nostalgia fad, but the trend’s drop is perhaps not as precipitous as at first glance. Hazeley and Morris earned £3.6m in the first six months of 2016, but the Ladybird range had the market to itself. In 2017, there is other “me too” publishing: Bruno Vincent’s Enid Blyton pastiches, the Haynes Explains range, I-Spy for Grown-ups... add all those competing series, and the nostalgia market is a healthier £2.9m, although that still represents a drop of around 24% for the sector.

Danielle Steel enjoyed a 14% surge to hit the top 20. The jump is partially down to Transworld releasing three hardbacks in the first half of 2016 ahead of her move to Pan Macmillan. As a result, she has three new paperbacks out this winter/spring; she normally “only” publishes two.

Date range 26 weeks to 1st July 2017 Unless otherwise stated, charts use data from Nielsen BookScan Total Consumer Market, Author totals include figures from co-authored and/or pseudonymous titles.