Books in the Media: Children's books account for 4.9% of review space

Children's books account for just 4.9% of review space, despite making up a third of the market, according to data from Books in the Media. 

Since Books in the Media launched in November 2018, 5,613 different reviews have been posted, across 1,860 different books. The most-reviewed genre through Books in the Media was General & Literary Fiction—1,275 of the reviews in the last ten months were for the (admittedly loosely-defined) genre, 22% of all reviews, with Biography & Memoir taking another huge slice of the review space, with 1,199 reviews.

By contrast contrast, children’s books—the equivalent of a third of the market in sales terms—were reviewed 278 times, 4.9% of the total.

History books earned 471 reviews, with 458 reviews for titles on current affairs. Crime fiction earned 479, and romance 94, with poetry books scoring 52. The relatively tiny category of erotic fiction accounted for 17 reviews, though all of them were for Leila Slimani’s Adele (Faber), which earned a 3.74 rating.

However, though children’s books were given less space, those that did break through earned near-universal praise: of the 22 books that scored a perfect five-star weighted average score, nine were children’s books, including Hilary McKay’s Costa winner The Skylarks’ War (Macmillan Children's), Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give (Walker), Catherine Fisher’s The Clockwork Crow (Firefly) and Frann Preston-Gannon’s I Am the Seed that Grew the Tree (Nosy Crow).

Sally Rooney’s Normal People (Faber) is still the most-reviewed title on the site, with 20 different reviews and a 4.52 weighted average score. The title, named Waterstones’ Book of the Year for 2018, was by far the most-recommended title in the broadsheets’ end-of-year reviews, which helped to up its total. Booker and Costa nominations (and a Nibbies Book of the Year win) boosted it further.

However, several literary hits of the summer have almost caught up with the juggernaut that is Normal People. Marlon James’ Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Hamish Hamilton) has earned 19 reviews, with David Nicholls’ Sweet Sorrow (Hodder), released just weeks ago in mid-July, also hitting 19. They racked up near-identical weighted average scores too, with Sweet Sorrow on 3.84 and Black Leopard, Red Wolf on 3.73.

Michelle Obama's Becoming (Viking), on 17 reviews, was the highest-rated non-fiction title, while forensic pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd's memoir Unnatural Causes (Penguin) was among the few non-fiction titles to score a perfect five-star score.

The Sunday Times and the Times contributed the most amount of reviews to Books in the Media, with 1,203 between them—though the Guardian and the Observer ran a close second with a combined 1,139. Pleasingly, literary magazines held their own, with 572 reviews from the Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Literary Review and The Bookseller.