A year in review: Rowling, Wicks and Hawkins help TCM maintain growth

It was a happy festive finish for the UK trade with £277.2m worth of books sold in the four weeks up to the 24th December through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market, an 8.1% rise over the same Christmas period in 2015.   

The final charge was led by J K Rowling, Paula Hawkins and Joe Wicks who all had titles eclipse the million-copy mark by the end of 2016, making it the first time three different authors have achieved a seven-figure unit haul in a calendar year since BookScan records began.

Add last week’s TCM total of £24.2m and the market in 2016 hit £1.591bn from 195.1 million units, annual rises of 4.9% and 2.3% respectively. It is the second consecutive year of growth, and the market’s best total in value terms since 2010—and the upswing came against a 2015 which had 53 BookScan weeks. Excluding 2015’s “53rd week”, 2016 in value terms was up by an even more robust 7%.

The year was dominated by Rowling, Hawkins and Wicks, plus the ongong rise of David Walliams and the nostalgia trend. 

Rowling's boy wizard appears in the full-year top 50 in four different guises, led by Harry Potter and the Cursed Child which topped the overall UK chart by some 350,000 units. It has sold almost £16m through the TCM on 1.46 milllion units—847,866 of which came in its few week on sale. She also scored with the bestselling screenplay of all time (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them), a colouring book, and the Johnny Duddle-designed 2014 paperback edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. 

Paula Hawkins followed her record-setting 2015 with a dominant year in the Mass-Market Fiction chart. Since the paperback of The Girl on the Train was published in May, it has claimed the list’s number one in 29 out of the 35 available weeks, shifting 1.1 million copies. The film tie-in version sold an addtional 322,671 units.  

Wicks was 2016’s king of non-fiction. His Lean in 15 was the only title to appear in all 52 Official UK Top 50 charts this year, selling a smidgeon over 1 million copies in the calendar year (it also shifted nearly 78,000 copies in the last week of 2015). Wicks earned the overall number one 12 times, with three different titles; and he led the Paperback Non-Fiction chart a stunning 43 times throughout the year.

Walliams continued his ascent, with The Midnight Gang chalking up seven consecutive overall number ones in the autumn—including the Christmas Number One. He has two books in the top five for the year, five in the top 50 and his £13.8m in sales through the TCM in 2016 represent a 27% rise on a strong 2015. 

Nostalgia was another key theme, with Quercus’ Enid Blyton pastiches following on from Michael Joseph’s Ladybirds for Grown-Ups triumphs. Bruno Vincent’s Five on Brexit Island won the retro crown, earning £1.9m in the autumn, but Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris’ Ladybird parodies sold strongly in 2016—seven appear in the annual top 50, and the whole series shifted 2.6 million units for £12.8m.

Date range 52 weeks to 31st December 2016
Unless otherwise stated, charts use data from Nielsen BookScan Total Consumer Market, representing print book sales through around 6,500 retailers. Any title discounted by more than 74.5% is ineligible for inclusion