Half Year Review 2015: Genre

A resurgent hardback fiction sector, led by the record-breaking Paula Hawkins, helped the TCM Top 5,000 to half-year growth after seven lean years.

The last seven of our Reviews of the Half Year have been sobering reading, chronicles of an unremitting decline in the overall print book market. Dear reader, you would be forgiven for approaching these pages with trepidation.

But fear not. This is 2015, and all is changed. After a 2014 in which the industry declined by just 1.3% through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market, this year has started even better. For the first time in seven years, value sales through the TCM at the half-way point of the year are up, rising 3.9% to £589.8m.

Three of the four major BookScan categories have experienced rises in value sales, including Fiction (+2.8%) and Adult Non-Fiction: Trade (+3.5%), both of which are experiencing half-year sales jumps for the first time since 2008. Children’s, meanwhile, climbed 3.1%—an impressive result on the back of a first half in 2014 which itself had a category-record 9% growth year on year. Only Adult Non-Fiction: Specialist—which contains the bulk of academic and professional publishing—had a drop in sales, down 1.9%.

It has not been all doom and gloom in the past few years in the trade, as digital sales have ameliorated the print sales decline. But it does feel as though the industry has entered a new phase. Publishers and booksellers have seemingly worked out which books work best in which formats and sales channels. More intangibly, there seems to be a feeling of hope and optimism in the air in 2015— certainly in comparison to recent years. It must be down to all of the stress-busting adult colouring books we’ve been using.

Off the grey scale

A brief explanatory note before we proceed: at the time of writing, full-market (all print sales, as opposed to the TCM’s Top 5,000 titles) Nielsen “cube” data—figures covering genre, publisher and author performance—is available for the first 24 weeks of the year, owing to how BookScan periods are reported. Twenty-six- week information is used where available, in any book charts such as the Top 50 (below) and in the aforementioned full-market figure of £589.8m.

However, this will cause some slight discrepancies, most notably with E L James. Grey (Arrow) was released in the 25th week of the year, so the Fifty Shades creator does not appear in our 24-week author chart, but we are able to capture her sales in the Top 50 (for 26 weeks).

Grey may not have reached the heights of James’ Fifty Shades predecessors, but it will undoubtedly be the bestselling book of 2015. In just two weeks it has outsold the year’s next-bestselling book by an astonishing 400,000 units, and is one of only two books thus far this year to generate more than £2m through the TCM.

The other title to shift more than £2m is the runaway express that is Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train (Doubleday), which last week recorded a record 20th Original Fiction number one. Hawkins’ novel leads this year’s spate of female- led (and written) psychological thrillers—others in the Top 50 include Emma Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing (Penguin) and the book that started the current craze, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (Orion), which was helped by the release of the DVD of David Fincher’s film adaptation back in January.

Hawkins is partially responsible for another trend for the first half of 2015: the resurgence of Hardback Fiction. Paperback Fiction has had a rise year on year, up a marginal 1% to £106.9m, yet fiction has shone in hardback: the sector is up a whopping 12.5%, to £21.7m.

The difference is at the top. Last year the top seller by value in Hardback Fiction was Jeffrey Archer’s Be Careful What You Wish For (Macmillan), which earned £483,000. This year, three titles eclipsed that: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (Faber, £495,000), the consistent Archer’s Mightier Than the Sword (Macmillan, £500,000) and The Girl on the Train (£2.1m). Two trends have greatly aided Adult Non-Fiction: Trade’s boost: the aforementioned adult colouring books craze—led by Millie Marotta’s Animal Kingdom (Pavilion)—and healthy eating.

Blogger Ella Woodward has been the out-of-nowhere breakout. Deliciously Ella (Yellow Kite) earned nearly £2m through the tills, accounting for 24% of revenue in BookScan’s Health, Dieting & Wholefood Cookery category. Yet it is not just Woodward.

She is joined in the 2015 Top 50 by Davina McCall’s Davina’s 5 Weeks to Sugar-Free (Orion) and Amelia Freer’s Eat. Nourish. Glow (HarperCollins). There were also healthy sales for sisters Jasmine and Melissa Hemsley’s The Art of Eating Well (Ebury, £628,000), Dave Myers and Si King’s Hairy Dieters: The Good Eating (Weidenfeld, £428,000) and Madeleine Shaw’s Get the Glow (Weidenfeld, £331,000).