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Publisher diversity remains key in a chart which potentially shows the next generation of bestsellers.
The Fiction Heatseekers – with its blend of up-and-coming early career authors; print versions of digital first novels; and week-in and week-out solid-selling evergreens that have never quite hit the upper echelons – might be my favourite of The Bookseller charts.
Its criteria is the bestselling fiction titles whose authors have never hit the UK Official Top 50, and every week we run the charts – or when we examine a longer period like this 2023 year-to-date top 20 – there is always a little double-take when you find yourself asking things like: “Has Toshikazu Kawaguchi really never cracked the top 50?”
Turns out no, despite Kawaguchi’s Geoffrey Trousselot-translated Before the Coffee Gets Cold series earning a hefty £2.7m through Nielsen BookScan since first being published in the UK four years ago. Kawaguchi’s biggest-ever seven-day period was the series opener shifting 4,589 copies in December 2019, but as that was a week before Christmas it was only good enough for 187th place. But Before the Coffee Gets Cold has been remarkably consistent: in the nearly 100 weeks since the start of 2022 it has mostly hovered around the 1,200 units mark, only once selling fewer than 750 copies.
While the Heatseekers is hardly an egalitarian playground with the little guys on equal footing with the conglomerates, it does have more publisher diversity than the big boys-dominated overall charts
Katy Brent’s Heatseekers number one, How to Kill Men and Get Away with It, is one of those digital smashes turned print earner. The novel – with a subject matter, title and cover treatment that ape Bella Mackie in what must be the damnedest of coincidences – was a hit in e-book by HQ Digital on its release in October 2022, and has absolutely ruled the 2023 Heatseekers with 25 consecutive appearances in our weekly top 10 beginning in March, and six times at the pole position.
While the Heatseekers is hardly an egalitarian playground with the little guys on equal footing with the conglomerates, it does have more publisher diversity than the big boys-dominated overall charts.
Of the top 200 Fiction titles thus far in 2023, 78% have come from one of the Big Four publishers with just 10 books (5%) released by an independent, six of which are from Faber. By contrast a Heatseekers top 200 for the same period has a slimmer 61% Big Four share while a little over a quarter of spots are claimed by Indies – and some smaller indies that rarely hit the Top 50 such as Canelo, Birlinn and Influx. But there is that “feeder club” curse of having a Heatseekers hit – Influx’s title in that top 200, 2022 Booker shortlistee Percival Everett’s Dr No, was subsequently sold to Picador as part of an eight-book backlist deal.
Manga has become a very “Heatseek-able” category in recent years, with its huge spike in overall sales and a model of consistent but relatively modest weekly returns across massive series backlist. Manga has earned 12.6% of all Heatseekers value sales thus far in 2023, compared the category’s 5% share of the overall Fiction market. Seven Manga creators appear on the top 20 of bestselling Heatseekers authors of the year by value, with the late Kentaro Miura topping the list by some distance, while fellow Manga author/illustrators Koyoharu Gotouge and Junji Ito join him in the top five.