First half of 2021 sees strong sales and growth for Adult Fiction and Children’s

The year to date has seen a third national lockdown, three-and-a-half months of closed bookshops and 10 weeks of missing Nielsen BookScan sales data but, throughout the (touch wood) final few months of the pandemic, the print market has held steady. From 14th March, when Nielsen began reporting sales numbers again, up to 3rd July, 54.4 million books were sold for £456m, for an increase of 8% in both volume and value against 2019’s equivalent weeks. Many of the comparative weeks in 2020 were during Lockdown 1.0, and therefore no year-on-year data is available.

Kay Featherstone and Kate Allinson’s Pinch of Nom Quick & Easy, which spent the first five weeks of the year in the overall number one spot, tops the ranked top 50 for the year to date, up to 3rd July. Charlie Mackesy’s irrepressible The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse joins it in the top two, continuing its steady gallop across the chart top spots after swiping the annual pole for 2020. The illustrated title, published in 2019, is now becoming as much of a staple to the chart as Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar or The Official Highway Code.

However, while the top two and Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club in hardback (which scored fifth place) spent the first five weekly charts of 2021 dominating the top three, Trade Non-Fiction is the only Nielsen category to drop in volume compared to 2019—it slid 2%, though rose 2% in value terms. However, spring 2019 was an unusually blockbuster period for non-fiction, with Featherstone and Allinson’s original Pinch of Nom title and influencer Mrs Hinch’s Hinch Yourself Happy each notching up the two single biggest launch weeks in the category.

In contrast, both Adult Fiction and Children’s registered double-digit growth on the same period two years ago. Of the top 50 bestsellers, 29 were fiction titles, with The Thursday Murder Club’s paperback and hardback editions both charting in the top five. The Adult Fiction category—which in 2020 posted a 9.8% bump in volume against the year before across the 36 weeks of available data, and a 10.7% jump in value— rocketed 15% in both volume and value from 12th March to the half year. Authors such as Matt Haig, with the category’s highest-ranking title The Midnight Library, and Maggie O’Farrell have hit the weekly overall number one for the first time in their careers, and Booker winner Douglas Stuart only just missed out on the top spot by a handful of copies.

Getting away
Escapism was still the key for the UK’s quarantined book buyers, with crime and psychological thrillers in abundance—but romance more than held its own. Dilly Court, who hit the Mass-Market Fiction number one with three separate titles across 2020, charted 23rd. Of course, Netflix’s “Bridgerton” juggernaut made its presence felt, with Julia Quinn’s The Duke and I in 24th. Last year’s lockdown hits prevailed, with Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing and Christy Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppo also charting. Naturally, E L James’ latest Fifty Shades of Grey title Freed scored highly, though it wasn’t as dominating as it had been in the early to mid-2010s.

Literary fiction has benefited from the lockdown leap too. In 2020, Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker winner Girl, Woman, Other became the second-bestselling paperback fiction title of the year. Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, which also hit the annual 2020 top 50 in hardback, has already sold more than 130,000 copies in paperback since its release in April. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, the first Original Fiction number one of the year that wasn’t The Thursday Murder Club, is a handful of copies away from becoming the author’s biggest-selling hardback—and that’s only since Nielsen began reporting sales figures again, missing out the title’s first two weeks on the shelves. Ishiguro was one of 15 authors to earn more than £1m through the TCM across the spring, with his average selling price of £13.16 by far the highest in the chart.

Following in the hoofprints of The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, many of the non-fiction hits were mental health-focused. Stacey Solomon’s therapeutic cleaning guide Tap to Tidy, Vex King’s lockdown hit Good Vibes, Good Life, Philippa Perry’s parenting manual The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read and even the Christmas 2018 Number One, Michelle Obama’s inspirational memoir Becoming, hit the Top 50.

Both Adult Fiction and Children’s values rose above £100m over the spring period, with Children’s posting a bounce of 13% in volume and a 12% leap in value against 2019. Unlike Adult Fiction, there wasn’t a blanket domination of Children’s titles in the chart—especially with the absence of a spring David Walliams title. The World Book Day 2021 tranche showed up and showed out, with Tom Fletcher and Greg Abbott’s There’s a Wolf in My Book! the highest-charting kids’ title, in 21st place. Adam Silvera’s TikTok-boosted hit They Both Die at the End also charted 27th.

However, it was clear that the kids’ market growth was through its strength in depth. Julia Donaldson topped the 2021 author chart with just under a million books sold for £4.5m—a whopping 23% up on her 2019 value for the same period, and already nearly halfway to her standard £10m threshold in just over three months of sales. Of course, “The Don” managed to comfortably hit that benchmark across 2020, even without the missing lockdown figures. Despite a longer than usual gap in his publishing schedule, Walliams claimed second place, making £2.7m through just his backlist and November 2020’s Code Name Bananas, which scored 32nd place overall.