Romantic Fiction tops the Christmas wish-list

When it comes to Christmas, there are only two types of fiction – festive-themed romance and murder under the mistletoe. But which comes out on top – and how well does festive fiction do anyway?

Unfortunately, Nielsen Bookscan doesn’t currently have a category that separates out Christmas titles from the rest of the fiction market, so we’ve taken the latest week of data from the Total Consumer Market and searched for terms such as ‘Christmas’ and ‘Snow’ to help whittle the titles down. 

There were 91 titles that made our list – though we acknowledge that, despite checking it twice, one or two titles may have been missed – which makes up about 7% of the 1,283 fiction titles that made it into the TCM’s Top 5,000 in the week ending 14th December. They slightly over-index when it comes to sales, though, stocking up 8.9% of all fiction books that went through the tills in the same period. 

To date in 2024, these 91 books have sold 1.1 million copies, with 92.6% of that coming unsurprisingly in the 11 weeks since the beginning of October. The bottom of the Christmas fiction market was the first week of June, with the latest week providing the peak. 

Nothing groundbreaking there, though it’s worth noting that the biggest single-week performance came in the first full week of October, when The Christmas Tree Farm by Laurie Gilmore (One More Chapter) – the third title in Gilmore’s popular Dream Harbor series – sold 14,720 in its first week of publication. 

Since publication, Gilmore’s romantic comedy has sold 81,848 copies, putting it comfortably at the top of the Christmas fiction chart and making it responsible for 7.3% of the total. This performance helps romantic fiction come out top in the battle of love versus death, delivering 69% of sales, while murder mysteries can muster only 24.8%.

The remaining slither of sales belongs to short-story compilations – such as The Penguin Book of Christmas Stories (Penguin Classics) and The Winter Spirits (Sphere) – and various editions of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. 

In fact, combined sales of A Christmas Carol – editions that are categorised under Fiction at least, rather than in the education categories – help put Dickens in the 20th spot in terms of bestselling fiction authors. 

Sarah Morgan comes out on top, though with two festive titles—this year’s The Christmas Cottage and 2023’s The Christmas Book Club (both HQ) – combining to bring in sales of 86,791, just a little way ahead of Gilmore. 

Dilly Court lands in third place on the list, while the biggest-selling crime writer is Alex Pine, whose DI James Walker series helps boost Pine into fourth place on the list, just ahead of Richard Coles.

Coles’ Murder Under the Mistletoe (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is the highest-selling individual crime title – and since the beginning of December has been the highest-selling festive fiction title of all. With sales of 46,888, some 40,000 less than Gilmore’s The Christmas Tree Farm, it’s unlikely that Coles will take the overall top spot, but he could overtake Pine at the top of the Crime fiction list.