Review of the Year: On and on to the break of Don – Children’s titan tops the pile and bags TCM record

Nerds rule

There is a bit of extra spiciness at the business end of the Author Top 50 as Sarah J Maas climbed 11 places, surging 171% to £13.2m, cracking into the top five for the first time and, in doing so, becoming 2024’s bestselling adult author. The romantasy superstar kicked off her year in January with a bang as the third in the Crescent City series, House of Flame and Shadow (Bloomsbury), bagged the UK number one with a 45,000-copy launch-week return. During 2024, Maas had five titles chalk up over £1m through the TCM, more than any other author (Richard Osman was next on three).

Maas was also responsible for Bloomsbury’s top five sellers of the year by volume, led by A Court of Thorns and Roses’ 314,000 copies. That first ACOTAR book (the series is now five-strong) was originally published in 2015, but this edition – and 18 of Maas’ top 20 sellers last year – is part of Bloomsbury’s, ahem, Maas-ive rebranding project that began in 2020.

Maas leads a tranche from the Science Fiction & Fantasy (SFF) sector, which even if you merely glanced at any of The Bookseller’s charts coverage over the course of 2024, you would know is having a moment. Just over £83.8m was sold through BookScan’s SFF category last year, 41% up on a 2023 that was in itself a record year. Last year’s total was an astounding £53m greater than where the genre was at five years ago.

Old reliable JRR Tolkien is the next SFF writer in the Top 50, his 21% jump to £4.2m no doubt due to furious fans going back to the source material after sitting through the calamity of the latest The Rings of Power series on Amazon Prime. (Don’t get me started.) Dragon-wrangler and 2024 Nibbie winner Rebecca Yarros sits behind Tolkien in 17th place, while Rebecca F/RF Kuang slots in at 31st, though £1m of the latter’s £3.3m stems from her fantasy titles, with the bulk coming from General & Literary Fiction-coded Yellowface (The Borough Press). Kuang’s sales will undoubtedly shift back to a majority SFF in 2025 when Katabasis (HarperVoyager) is launched in August. Somewhat surprisingly, this is Brandon Sanderson’s first appearance in an annual Author Top 50, on a 2024 driven by his much-anticipated fifth Stormlight Archive outing, Wind and Truth. Gollancz also rejacketed no less than 13 Sanderson backlist titles across the year, a baker’s dozen which collectively shifted £818,000.

The 2010 mass-market paperback of David Nicholls’ One Day has now burst into the top 20 of the bestselling Fiction titles since records began

There are also a number of SFF authors – and ones that bridge the adult and Young Adult divide – just outside the Top 50, many of whom sit in the romantasy/BookTok/early career space. (Or early career in the UK, as many have been previously published in the US.) Stephanie Garber built on a breakout 2023, with her sales jumping a chunky 21% to £1.7m; the Californian had eight titles shift more than £100,000. Former self-published author turned Tor’s dark romantasy star Carissa Broadbent had a huge 2024, with three new hardbacks in her Crowns of Nyaxia series powering her TCM take up 711% year on year, to £1.3m. Sarah A Parker was a rare non-American to enter romantasy bestsellerdom; the Kiwi’s When the Moon Hatched (HarperVoyager) shifted just over £1m in hardback since June.

As has been the case in the BookTok era, the “F” remained the far bigger partner in the category with SF making up just a fraction of sales. Frank Herbert wormed his way up the charts, but was the sole space-opera practitioner to TCM over six figures (£2.1m), much of that return due to the release of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two film and, to a lesser extent, the streaming series Dune: Prophecy, shown in the UK on Sky Atlantic. Only two other SF authors shifted over £500,000: Adrian Tchaikovsky (£688,000) and Cixin Liu (£657,000), the latter boosted by the Netflix adaptation his The Three-Body Problem (Head of Zeus).

New to us

There are a 11 first-timers in this Top 50, led by thriller star Freida McFadden, down to 48th-placed small-town romance specialist Laurie Gilmore. Asako Yuzuki is the only entry in the top 50 not previously published in the UK, but she can hardly be classed a debut: Butter (Fourth Estate, translated by Polly Barton) is the Tokyo-born author’s eighth book, with an original Japan release by Shinchosha in 2017. Butter was the slow-burn indie-supported hit that built up to a Waterstones Book of the Year win; it is perhaps fitting, given its sales patterns, that it was the last Official UK Top 50 number one of 2024, some nine months after publication.

Incidentally, though we don’t note it in the chart for space reasons, Yuzuki technically has by the far the biggest year-on-year growth in the annual Author Top 50 since we started running the list a decade and a half ago. Her sales rose by more than 15 million per cent, due to a British bookshop selling one copy of the Spanish-language edition of Butter in April 2023. Planeta imprint Temas de Hoy’s version is called La Gula, or “gluttony”, an interesting swerve for the Spanish market as Yuzuki’s Japanese original title is, like the English, simply the word for butter.

Top 50 newcomer Samantha Harvey enjoyed a transformative Booker bounce, with sales up by more than 4,000% year on year. In November her Orbital (Cape) became the first Booker winner to grab the Official UK Top 50 number one after snagging the award (Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments took the top spot at launch, before jointly claiming the prize a few weeks later). Harvey’s £2.4m last year was three and a half times what the author had previously generated through the TCM since she was first published in 2009. Her take was no doubt aided by Orbital being available in mass-market paperback since June – thus for entire judging period, longlist to ceremony. The Booker also boosted Harvey’s backlist: her excellent 2018 novel The Western Wind (Cape) sold 3,183 copies in 2024, up from 624 units in 2023.

Continues…

Don’t call it a comeback

Six authors return to the Top 50, led by Sally Rooney’s £3.5m, which is the Irish star’s top annual TCM result – just ahead of her monster 2019 – though we are missing data from 2020, when the Normal People adaptation aired on the BBC and the main topic of conversation outside of pandemic-related matters seemed to be protagonist Connell’s chain. Rooney’s Intermezzo hit the overall number one at launch in September, bumping the mighty Richard Osman from the summit. Rooney and her fellow Irish novelist Claire Keegan (£1.5m) were responsible for £1 in every £5 of Faber’s TCM takings last year.

David Nicholls had an even more dramatic return, up 5,384% year on year to £3.4m thanks to both his first novel in five years, You Are Here (Hodder), and the Netflix adaptation of One Day, the streamer’s most-watched series globally in February 2024. Nicholls was responsible for three of Hodder’s top five titles by volume: You Are Here was second to John Grisham’s The Exchange, on 116,000 units, while two editions of One Day combined to shift 162,000 copies. With last year’s push, the 2010 mass-market paperback of One Day has now sold nearly 1.4 million copies via BookScan and it has burst into the top 20 of the bestselling Fiction titles since records began – in fact, moving up to 16th, just ahead of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (Phoenix) and Paula Hawkins The Girl on the Train (Black Swan).

Returning like Banquo at the feast is William Shakespeare in 50th place. The Sweet Swan of Avon of course benefits from reading-list staple status, plus the joys of being in the public domain as 1,205 different Shakespeare ISBNs recorded sales through BookScan last year. His inclusion is somewhat unfair on living authors as his total incorporates ancillary editions, such as study guides and workbooks, as long as the Shakespeare name is in the author field. For the record, then, the Bard edges out Robert Harris and Mick Herron, both of whom were on the circa £2.1m mark.

Kids stuff

With 16, the Children’s sector has two more entries than in the 2023 Authors Top 50, though that might have more to do with a weak Non-Fiction market (of which more later). With the extra two spots these 16 kids’ authors generated £85.8m, a 3.3% lift on the 2023 cohort, or £2.8m. Not a bad result given the children’s market overall was down 0.6%, but it would have been better were it not for some deep reductions in two of the market’s biggest brands.

JK Rowling’s children’s sales dropped a quarter to £7.5m (her overall £9m includes Adult Fiction, and its greater 30% dip is down to the lack of a new hardback under her Robert Galbraith pseudonym). Rowling’s kids’ contraction has much to do with Bloomsbury’s newest Harry Potter brand extension jiggery-pokery not working quite as well as in the previous year: the Ziyi Gao-illustrated Christmas at Hogwarts and the MinaLima Box Set 1-3 (at a heart-stopping £120 RRP) combined to shift £497,000 in 2024; in 2023, The Harry Potter Wizarding Almanac and the MinaLima edition of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban moved £1.9m.

That said, the core seven Harry Potters in the 2014 paperback editions sold 406,000 copies through the TCM last year, 104,000 fewer (-20%) than in 2023. It’s probably just a wobble; we are talking about a writer on a rarified, unprecedented plane, and despite the sales shrinkage Rowling was still the UK’s fourth-biggest author. Plus Bloomsbury has indicated much is afoot for the Boy Wizard in 2025, and an HBO series adaptation starts filming this summer.

David Walliams is the other big brand deep diver, with sales plummeting £4m (-44.8%) to £4.8m. Walliams has been a fixture in this chart’s Top 10, topping it three times. But he falls to his lowest position in a dozen years – though still at a level most authors would kill for. In his run in the Top 10, Walliams never had fewer than two titles earn over £1m through BookScan, and never fewer than a trio to have shifted over 100,000 units. In 2024, his and illustrator Adam Stower’s Astrochimp (HC Children’s) was the leader in both volume and value, with 90,984 sales for £714,554.

In amelioration there was a lighter Walliams publishing schedule in 2024, with two hardbacks compared to the previous year’s three. But even if an extra hardback in 2024 generated £1.3m (the TCM return for Walliams’ bestseller in 2023, The Blunders), his sales would be down a third – and he would still not make this Top 10.

More happily, there were plenty of children’s authors with stonking years. Comics creators Dav Pilkey and Jamie Smart were up 41% and 74%, respectively. The duo’s combined £14.4m was responsible for 75% of BookScan’s Children’s Comic Strip Fiction & Graphic Novel’s revenue, helping it to by far its record year (throw in the £1.3m Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper series earned, and the trio are responsible for 81% of the category’s sales). Jeff Kinney rose a leaner 11.8%, still an excellent result as the Wimpy Kid creator was coming from a high base and is very deep into the series with the 2024 outing, Hot Mess (Puffin), the 19th title.

No to Non-Fiction

In our previous Review of 2024 on the bestselling books of the year, we noted the shaky Non-Fiction market. The news won’t get any better as we look at the top authors from the sector. There are 10 entries in the Top 50 (which includes Shakespeare, as plays and poetry are Non-Fiction, according to classification codes), only one fewer than 2023. The problem is that 2024’s tranche did not hit as hard as in the previous year. The 10 Non-Fiction authors here shifted £30.8m, £20.5m down on 2023. Even if you strip out Prince Harry from 2023’s total, the 2024 cohort is still £9.6m behind. There are no Non-Fiction authors in the top 10 (there were two in 2023), with Nathan Anthony leading the line down in 13th place.

Five of these Non-Fiction authors are book-a-year (or even books) brands, and all but one had sales contractions in 2024 – and Jeremy Clarkson’s 1% bump could be termed, ahem, diddly squat. In most years, there will be several big “event” autumn Non-Fiction titles with enough joy at the tills to muscle a writer into the Author Top 50 – such as Britney Spears and (alas) Matthew Perry in 2023. Boris Johnson was the sole exception last year, with his Unleashed a Super Thursday hit. Miranda Hart (£2.1m) came within a whisker of hitting this chart, and there were some nice wins with celebs doing something more interesting, such as Gillian Anderson’s exploration of women’s sexuality, Want (Bloomsbury, £1.3m), and Stanley Tucci’s (£1.3m) foodie memoir. Sir Chris Hoy (£1m), meanwhile, had the top 2024-published autobiography in sport, though All that Matters was less about cycling and more about his inspiring response to his cancer diagnosis.

There were bright spots, though. Despite big hitters Nathan Anthony, Jamie Oliver and Mary Berry falling off year on year, Food & Drink overall had its second-best 12 months since records began (£93.2m), powered in particular by the healthy eating end. Tim Spector led the charge, with The Food for Life Cookbook (Cape) propelling him into the Author Top 50 for the first time. Further down the list, nutritionist-cum-influencer Emily English (£1.6m) had a smash with So Good (Seven Dials), while Hayley Dean (£1.4m) scored with three air fryer/slow cooker titles. One of the biggest year-on-year performances in this space is tinged with tragedy, though, as Dr Michael Mosley’s jumped 70% to £1.5m, much of the sales coming after the beloved author and TV presenter died while holidaying in Greece.