Children’s bestsellers are a no-brainer
As bookshops across the country recover from a bumper World Book Day (WBD) week – more than 400,000 £1 titles went through the tills in the seven days – the Children’s Fiction category is enjoying its best sales week of the year, according to data from Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market.
Just over £2.1m was spent on Children’s Fiction in the week up to Saturday (8th March), a 23.5% increase on the previous seven days, although that number is down from the £2.4m the category achieved in the same week in 2024. So far in 2025, £15.3m has been spent on Children’s Fiction – excluding the WBD titles – across 2,131,887 books – down 6.9% compared with the first 10 weeks of 2024 when the same category earned £1m more.
At the top of the chart this year is the 18th instalment of Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, the paperback edition of No Brainer, which has sold 38,643 copies since the beginning of January. Kinney also took the top spot in 2024 with the paperback of the 17th in the series – Diper Överlöde. In total, Kinney has sold 178,152 books in the first 10 weeks of 2025, down 8.1% against the beginning of 2014. That decline only accounts for £85,191 of the overall reduction in spend in the category’s total performance – and while it is a bigger percentage drop than the total, it is a performance large enough to keep Kinney as the bestselling Children’s Fiction author.
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In fact, the Wimpy Kid creator is the only author to hit six figures in volume performance, with second and third placed JK Rowling and David Walliams both dipping below 100,000 units, with contractions of 19.5% and 31.9% respectively. Combined, the two powerhouses of children’s fiction have lost a total of £450,000 – 40% of the category’s total decline.
Rowling manages to keep hold of second place on the author chart, but Walliams loses his third-place spot to Katie Kirby, who rises from sixth with a sales growth of 103.7%. In total, the Lottie Brooks author has achieved sales of 90,434 units, just behind Rowling’s 97,116 – thanks in part to three more titles this year than last, but also due to an increase in the popularity of Kirby’s backlist.
The first in the series – The Extremely Embarrassing Life of Lottie Brooks – is the bestselling title for Kirby so far in 2025, with 18,961 copies sold, up 63.7% vs 2024’s 11,584 units, and takes the fourth spot on the individual title chart. The paperback edition of The Majorly Awkward BFF Dramas of Lottie Brooks is due in May, and a new title – Lottie Brooks vs the Ultra Mean Girls – joins the series in July. This pair, alongside a new hardback edition of Lottie Brooks’ first outing, could see Kirby rise even further up the chart in 2025.
Kirby is not the only author to get off to a good start in 2025 – Rachel Renee Russell’s Dork Diaries series has helped deliver a 65.7% increase in sales, with the 16-strong list noting a total of 58,371 copies so far this year.
While they might move around the ranking a little, the top nine authors have not changed year-on-year. Between them, their sales are down 8.8%, but the nonet still account for just under a third of the category’s total sales.
There is one change in the top 10, though, with Peter Brown increasing his sales an impressive 708% to take the coveted space from Katherine Rundell. Brown’s The Wild Robot and its sequels have all enjoyed a boost thanks to the film adaptation of the same name, released in September 2024.
