Zoella is top of the vloggers

Twelve vloggers have collectively racked up sales of more than £15m in the UK in just 18 months, according to figures from Nielsen BookScan.

Between September 2014 (when the first book in the table below, Alfie Deyes’ The Pointless Book, was released by Blink) and April 2016, Zoella (Zoe Sugg), Alfie Deyes, Dan & Phil (the combined pen name of Dan Howell and Phil Lester), Joe Sugg, Louise Pentland, Tanya Burr, PewDewPie (Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg) KSI (Olajide J J Olatunji), Marcus Butler, Carrie Hope Fletcher and Fleur de Force have combined value sales of £15,031,891. Their combined volume sales total 2,125,800.

Zoella is the biggest selling vlogger from the list, with value sales of £5.6m from two books: Girl Online and Girl Online: On Tour (Penguin Random House), followed by her boyfriend Deyes, whose value sales from five titles, including The Pointless Book (Blink Publishing), come to £3.3m.

Of the 11 authors, Zoella has one of the highest number of subscribers to her main YouTube channel (10.4 million), while Deyes has five million, fewer than Dan & Phil, who have combined subscriber numbers of 9.1 million. However, Dan & Phil have sold fewer books: their sole title, The Amazing Book is Not on Fire (Ebury), has racked up sales of £1.4m since publication in October last year.

Joe Sugg is the fourth biggest selling vlogger, as the graphic novel he put his name to, Username: Evie (Hodder & Stoughton), has so far achieved UK sales of £1.2m. He has 6.4 million subscribers to his YouTube channel. Louise Pentland has fewer YouTube followers (2.4 million) but nearly as many book sales (£1.2m) thanks to her deals with Simon & Schuster (for Life with a Sprinkle of Glitter) and Faber & Faber (Sprinkle of Glitter 2016 Diary).

Many vloggers in the list topped various bestseller charts: Deyes and Zoella both claimed an Official UK Top 50 number one (Zoella also held the Children’s chart number one), while Joe Sugg took the Original Fiction top spot. Dan & Phil, Pentland, Burr, Butler and Hope Fletcher all had Hardback Non-Fiction number ones, and PewDiePie had a Paperback Non-Fiction number one.

However, sales of PewDiePie’s This Book Loves You, published by Penguin in October 2015, did not match his enormous subscriber numbers. The vlogger has a massive 43.4 million fans (more than four times as many as Zoella) but his book only achieved value sales of £425,325. KSI also has a large number of subscribers (12.5 million) and similar sales figures (£471,759).

At the foot of the chart is Fleur de Force, whose The Glam Guide (Headline, February 2015) has recorded sales worth a total of £209,149 from 22,360 units sold.

Here to stay

Vlogger titles are “here to stay” but publishers must ensure the books are “real and interesting” in order to reach an audience beyond the core fans, according to industry commentators.

John McLay, literary scout and artistic director of the Bath Children’s Literature Festival, said some titles by vloggers are “insubstantial with no real content of interest [to anyone] beyond a small number of dedicated followers”. However, he added: “If acquired with an eye for longevity, not short-term opportunity, some of those vloggers do stand a good chance of establishing themselves.”

(From left) Zoella, Alfie Deyes and Joe Sugg.

Helen Boyle, consultant and literary scout, said vloggers aren’t going anywhere because they are such a part of visual culture. “They are like the new TV/film tie-in, where publishers tap into an existing fanbase and provide a book product that fans might want to buy. Like any brand or licensing publishing, it can be hit and miss and there will be winners and losers.”

Waterstones YA buyer Kate McHale said the industry was probably publishing the “highest concentration” of vlogger titles currently but agreed that they show no sign of disappearing. “The change will be in how we see and talk about those books. It’s a different kind of fame than we’ve seen before, but with internet media increasingly sitting alongside or, particularly for younger people, taking the place of TV and radio, in a few years we won’t be thinking so much about ‘vlogger books’ but seeing them alongside other celebrity media-driven titles.”

For Shannon Cullen, Zoella’s publisher at Penguin, it is “too early to tell” if vloggers’ success is helping other authors, but she said “Girl Online is being read by teenagers who say they never read books, so if they can be encouraged to get into the reading habit it will definitely trickle down”. Cullen added that publishers would start to look beyond YouTube to find content. “We will see talent start to come from other platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, and whatever is around the corner. When you consider that YouTube was only created in 2005, and now attracts over 15 billion visits a month, it will be about finding interesting and distinctive personalities who people are engaging with.”