Honeyman heads the half-year pack as print market inches up once again

The British print books market is once again going in the right direction but, as has been the case in the past couple of years, it is inching forward in baby steps. Value sales for the first 26 weeks of 2018 totalled a beastly £666.4m through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market, 2.12% up on the previous half-year.

But growth is growth and it is an improvement on the first half of 2017’s 1.2% value rise. This is the print market’s best first-six-month total since 2011 and the fourth straight half-year sales jump. Volume rose by the slightest of margins, up 0.8% to 80.99 million copies sold. This reverses a trend of recent vintage of value rises accompanied by unit-sale declines, with increasing average selling prices compensating for the fewer number of copies sold (although a.s.p. still rose—£8.22 this half-year versus £8.12 a year ago).

Our charts of the four major BookScan categories suggest there has been no huge breakout trends propelling the market. But there have been a few mini-fads—most in Adult Non-Fiction: Trade, which is the lead category in both volume and value growth—some of which are reflected in the half-year top 50 (see below).

BookScan’s Politics & Government category rose 57% to £9.2m, a little over a quarter of which (£2.4m) was generated by Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. It is the ninth bestselling book of 2018 by volume, but the third by value, and is one of four titles to have earned more than £2m. What was meant to be the other explosive Trump book of the spring, former FBI director James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty (Pan Mac), has taken a far slimmer £270,000.

Food & Drink had a solid 7.5% rise, to £31.8m. Sub-category Health, Diet & Wholefood Cookery only had a 0.6% value jump, but its £11.5m was its second best half-year through BookScan since records began. Tom Kerridge moved 382,356 copies of Lose Weight for Good, and he had help in the category from Joe Wicks, with Kerridge (£4.2m) and Wicks (£2.2m) combining to earn 56% of Health, Diet & Wholefood’s total.

Gail force wins
The chart is topped by Gail Honeyman’s Costa and British Book Award-winner Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, which outpaced its nearest competitor by 100,000 units and outsold the next bestselling fiction title by a factor of two to one. The book is the first début novel to top the half year chart since E L James’ Fifty Shades of Grey in 2012.

As it has for the past few years, the Children’s category claimed a bigger piece of the market than Adult Fiction, but it was the non-fiction side driving the growth in the kids’ sector. Children’s & Young Adult Non-Fiction rose 10.6% to £19m, and Textbooks & Study Guides jumped 5.4% to £25.9m, while Children’s & YA Fiction stuttered (–3.4% to £58.2m). But kids’ non-fiction is about range and depth, not huge bestsellers: barring WBD titles, the top children’s non- fiction title is Matthew Syed’s You Are Awesome (Hachette Children’s) in 125th place overall.

David Walliams stars in the top 50 with four titles; no other writer has more than two. But Walliams’ collaborator Tony Ross has five, as he teamed up with Clare Balding for the 26th-placed WBD tome The Girl Who Thought She Was a Dog. Walliams is the bestelling author thus far in 2018, though he is slightly off 2017’s pace: last year at this point he had six titles in the top 50, and his £6.2m in 2018 sales represents a 2.5% dip.