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Review of the Year, Children's – Comic timing, pre-school and Young Adult keep Children’s purring
Last year dipped slightly for Children’s, with a just-under-1% fall to £433.4m through Nielsen BookScan’s TCM. But it can be seen as an overall win for the kids’ sector, as it still represents the third-best TCM haul since records began – and all three of those years have come in the last 36 months. If you are a glass half-empty kind of person, though, 2024’s result marks the second straight annual fall and is a £12m decline from 2022’s heights.
The biggest gainer across the kids’ BookScan sub-categories was Children’s Comic Strip Fiction & Graphic Novels, which notched up its third consecutive best-ever year with a £19.8m – almost four times what the category was earning before the pandemic. We noted in our Review of the Year: Authors (issue 6,093, 17th January) that Children’s Comic Strip Fiction is bossed by Dav Pilkey, Jamie Smart and Alice Oseman, who were responsible for 81% of the genre’s revenue and its top 29 bestsellers by value. John Patrick Green, with his Macmillan Children’s-issued Investigators and the spin-off Agents of S.U.I.T series, is closest on the trio’s heels, earning £1m last year, helped by the World Book Day High-Rise Hijinks outing (in collaboration with Christopher Hastings and Pat Lewis).
Pre-school & Early Learning jumped nearly 14% to a near-TCM record, helping the overall Pre-School & Picture Books category grow marginally to £163.1m, a mark it only beat with 2022’s £167.4m. That was also despite both Picture Books (-0.6% to £69.5m) and Novelty & Activity (-1.8% to £75.6m) slipping. This marks was the fourth straight year Pre-School & Picture Books eclipsed Children’s & Young Adult Fiction (£155.5m), with books for the youngest of readers having previously been the junior category since BookScan records began. It is an interesting turn, given that we are in the middle of a BookTok-fed Young Adult (YA) resurgence.
The likes of the mighty Julia Donaldson (£17.1m), Fiona Watt (£7.7m) and heritage/licensed brands – Eric Carle, Judith Kerr, Rod Campbell, Bluey, Beatrix Potter and so on – stormed Pre-School & Picture Books. And there was another excellent return from Martha Mumford (£1.5m), who has solidified herself in the picture book/novelty pantheon with her seasonal outings; her and illustrator Laura Hughes’ Easter perennial, We’re Going on an Egg Hunt (Bloomsbury Children’s), was tops, with its nearly 63,000 units up 6% on 2023’s take. Mumford has now shifted £6.3m through the TCM since first being published in 2013, half of which has come in the past two years.
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YA-aas, kween
It was contrasting fortunes for older readers in the kids’ sector. YA Fiction is booming, with a third consecutive £35m-plus TCM haul, though this trails the circa-£50m years of 2009 and 2010. Homegrown Holly Jackson (£3.5m) and American Lauren Roberts (£2.8m) led the way, but there were a host of up-and-comers including June CL Tan, Hafsah Faizal and Kristen Ciccarelli.
Volume sales were largely flat in YA Fiction but the top titles made more money: 24 editions sold more than £250,000 last year, earning a total of £10.9m; in 2023 it was 20 for just more than £9m. This is partially attributable to the special editions trend as YA hardback sales jumped nearly 10% (to £9.8m), representing 26% of sales in a category which historically tends to be 80% to 85% paperback.
Those in the middle-grade market may be slightly worried as Children’s Fiction slumped 4.8% to £99.2m. Barring the two pandemic years with their data blackouts, this is the first time the category has had a sub-£100m 12-month period in 11 years. True, some big brands did not do their usual damage – the category’s circa-£5m drop year on year is almost exactly the shrinkage of David Walliams and JK Rowling’s sales – but there just weren’t the hits, either.
In 2024, one Children’s Fiction title, Jeff Kinney’s Hot Mess (Puffin), exceeded the £1m threshold, the fewest seven-figure titles for 11 years; in 2023, the category had seven £1m-plus books.
It was a decent year in the trade-related end of non-fiction, as Children’s Annuals, Young Adult General Interest & Leisure, and Children’s General Interest & Leisure were on the up, with the latter posting a record return. Tay-tay helped, as Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara and illustrator Borghild Fallberg’s Little People, Big Dreams: Taylor Swift (Frances Lincoln) was by some £400,000 the bestselling kids’ non-fiction of 2024, and there were further Swiftie-related hits like 100% Unofficial Taylor Swift Annual 2025 (Farshore) and Lucy Doncaster’s Swiftle (Puffin).
