Debut fiction did well in pandemic-hit 2020

Debut novelists performed solidly last year, despite widespread fears that they would lose out to more established authors due to 2020's pandemic-hit publishing schedules.

In fact, there is a good argument that débuts fared better last year than 2019: of the top 150 fiction titles published in their original format in 2020 through BookScan’s ranked full-year chart which has no volume or value data, 11 were by début novelists, compared to 10 of the top 150 in the previous year. And even comparing 2020’s truncated data—BookScan had only 36 weeks of full figures last year—against 2019’s complete 52 weeks, the top 10 débutants in 2020 outsold 2019’s tranche by a whopping 151% (829,000 units to 329,000).

That is largely due to Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club (Viking) which, at just over 593,000 units, alone outsold the 2019 top 10 first-time novelists (in fact, he outsold the top 35 hardback débutants in 2019). But even removing Osman from the top 10 below, the remaining nine authors shifted a respectable 234,000 units—and with 17 weeks of missing data. Four débutants sold more than 30,000 copies in 2020, the same as in 2019. Again, on 17 fewer weeks of data.

This is counter to the received wisdom that as the pandemic rolled on, with publication schedules changing and marketing/publicity budgets shrinking, that emerging writers would suffer greatly, squeezed out by the readers flocking to the big brands in a crowded marketplace, deprived of the often vital backing of physical bookshops, which were shuttered by and large. Yet on a top-line basis, the reverse seems to have been the case, in that (with many pandemic qualifiers) début fiction did fairly well in 2020.

Sure, Osman is one of those first-time novelists who benefited from scads of marketing spend, as did Dolly Alderton (pictured) in her switch from non-fiction with her novel Ghosts (Fig Tree). But most of these débutants—with the exception of children’s star Kiran Millwood Hargrave, another genre-switcher—were relative unknowns until this year.

The-full year list of top 2020 débutants would be slightly different to the 36-week chart below. For example, My Dark Vanessa (4th Estate), US author Kate Elizabeth Russell’s controversial story of a 15-year-old girl and her sexual relationship with her English teacher, just misses out on this chart. The novel shifted 7,218 copies through the TCM, but it was published on 31st March, shortly after the first UK lockdown was kicking into gear.