Review of 2018: Fry reigns, Peterson gains and Potter remains as audio embraces market boom

Stephen Fry tends to top the Audible end-of-year chart even without writing a book—Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: The Definitive Collection, narrated by Fry, was 2017’s number one, followed closely by Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, also narrated by Fry, in second place. But in 2018, he claimed the number one as both author and narrator with Mythos. Re-telling the Greek myths, Mythos spent four non-consecutive months atop the monthly Audio Download Chart in 2018, adding to the one pole it scored on publication in November 2017.

Fry’s follow-up to Mythos, Heroes, was released a year later but failed to claim the audio number one in its first month. It had to settle for second place, clashing as it did with the publication of Michelle Obama’s block-buster memoir Becoming. However, despite only being available for a month and a half of 2018, Heroes still charted 26th in the Audible top 50 for the year, gifting Fry—armed with Greek myths, Victorian detective stories and tales of a boy wizard—a whopping 10 narration nods in the chart.

Jordan B Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life scored second place for 2018 as a whole, with Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F *ck just below, in fourth. While the latter held onto the fourth place it claimed in 2017, last year was truly the year Peterson broke into the mainstream. The sales journey of 12 Rules for Life is strangely similar to that of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens which, after its phenomenal 2017 across formats, still charted sixth in audio in 2018. In Peterson’s case, audio led and print followed. 12 Rules for Life first topped the Audio Download Chart in February, after the Canadian professor was interviewed by “Channel 4 News” host Cathy Newman, and YouTuber PewDiePie—whose subscriber count greatly exceeds that of the population of the UK—named it as his book of the month. It would take another three months, and a visit to the UK by Peterson himself, for the hardback edition to claim the Hardback Non-fiction number one.

Boy story
Nielsen Book research has identified young, urban men as the biggest consumers of audio downloads—as opposed to middle-aged women, which Nielsen reckons buy the most e-books—the audio download editions of 12 Rules for Life, The Subtle Art..., and Ant Middleton’s First Man In, which hit 22nd place in the 2018 chart, are perhaps appealing to a demographic looking for guidance on the role of men in the post-#MeToo, Gillette-ad era. (Peterson recently tweeted that audience breakdowns for his YouTube videos skewed 90% male, a statistic he appeared baffled by.)

On the other side of the coin, the rise of Harari’s Sapiens in 2017—and continued strong sales, of more than 300,000 paperback copies, in 2018—indicate a similar need for reassurance and guidance from a different demographic feeling insecure about a changing world: metropolitan liberals shocked by Brexit and Trump. (The paperback of Sapiens charted in just one UK region’s top 10 in mid-2018: London.)

Once again, the Audible chart was awash with non-fiction, with 24 such titles in the top 50. While the two print non-fiction bestsellers of the year, Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt and Michelle Obama’s Becoming, posted high chart rankings, a haul of classic self-help also featured: Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and Steven R Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People performed strongly. Children’s, once again, was represented solely by the seven Harry Potter titles, plus Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights—no doubt Millennials hungry for nostalgia were the ones clicking buy, rather than modern-day kids sidelining David Walliams in favour of titles from 20 years ago.

The Audible Audio Download Chart

The Audible Audio Download Chart uses data which is provided to The Bookseller by Audible, and reproduced with the company’s permission. Date Range 1st January–31st December 2018.