Review of 2018: Specialist Publishers

We investigate how specialist children's, illustrated/comic and academic/educational publishers fared last year in our Review of 2018.

Specialist Children’s: Usborne leads the way with yet more growth

The specialist children’s publisher top 10 is topped by Usborne for the fourth consecutive year. Only once since records began has the family-run firm ever had a year-on-year decline in TCM annual returns (in 2016, when it dropped 2.3% to £21.1m), and last year’s haul is a record. As per usual, author/publishing director Fiona Watt and her team of illustrators—notably Rachel Wells, her frequent That’s Not My... series collaborator—led the way. Watt and company accounted for 27.5% of Usborne’s sales.

Egmont was the last non-Usborne publisher to top this chart, back in Minecraft-boosted 2014. Unhappy tidings in 2018, though, after a 22% drop. Only 52 Egmont titles topped 10,000 units in 2018, compared to 71 in the previous 12 months. Nosy Crow continues its remarkable upwards trajectory, cracking the £5m mark for the first time and muscling into the top five. There is a lot to caw about: in four of the past five years, the publisher has featured in our High Risers charts.

Some of Walker’s 8.8% drop is in the differential for Where’s Wally?, after a huge spike in sales in 2017, its 30th anniversary year. The big hit, however, was Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give (£437,000), boosted by the film adaptation and its Nibbie for Children’s Book of the Year. The evergreens keep chugging along, led by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (£581,000 in all editions in 2018).

Illustrated/comic: Hardy Hardie posts record year; DK stutters

Though DK is still very much owned by Bertelsmann, we have separated it from the rest of PRH for the past couple of years as it is run as a discrete entity under boss Ian Hudson. DK’s strength is its international sales, and a good chunk of its business is in the tricky travel sector, so 2018’s 1.7% drop in the TCM is a half-way decent result. Still, £26.2m does represent its worst BookScan showing since 2010.

It was a bruising year in the boardroom for Quarto, and a flat one in the TCM. The Frances Lincoln imprint excelled, though, particularly with its Rebel Girls-esque Big Dreams series.

Hardie Grant had a record TCM year, soaring 15.4% to £6.6m. Leading the way was a non-illustrated title: the memoir from “Scary Spice” Mel B, which earned £443,000. Rising cookery star Dan “The Curry Guy” Toombs chipped in £359,000.

The UK’s biggest home-grown comics publisher Titan is benefiting from its growing crime list, with M L Rio’s If We Were Villains its top earner (£163,000). Viz Media has a stranglehold on the Manga market: it published an astonishing 48 of the 50 top-selling books in the sector through BookScan last year, and 19 of the top 20.

Academic/educational: TCM only part of the picture for STM giants

We start, as we do most years, underscoring that sales through BookScan are not the academic market’s wheelhouse any longer, though revenue has held up in some areas, particularly the humanities, which still seem more print-friendly. Yet few academic publishers will have individual titles that sell more than 10,000 TCM units—and that is a feat even rarer in the science subjects. Elsevier, for example, is the biggest Science, Technical and Medical publisher in the world, but its TCM sales are a modest £5.4m. In 2018, its top TCM title was the 7,800 copies sold by a new edition of textbook Ross & Wilson Anatomy and Physiology in Health and Illness.

OUP is tops here, but that is down to its education and dictionaries businesses. Its top 18 books through BookScan last year were all study guides or dictionaries, with Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (on 9,606 units) its first university-level book.

Pearson earned £22.4m, its worst-ever annual BookScan total, an unwanted title it has now claimed for nine consecutive years. But it does have a jewel with Heinemann reading-list staple J B Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, which sold 56,000 copies last year, by far the top-selling book from our top 10 Academic/Education firms.

With its Capstone business list and For Dummies guides, John Wiley used to have a significant trade presence. But it has reined that back, and 2018’s haul was its all-time TCM nadir.

Read our Review of 2018: The Big Four Publishers here and our Review of 2018: Independent Alliance here.