Middleton and Martin make gains in Wales as region enjoys healthy growth

The Office of National Statistics may have reported that Wales had the slowest growing economy of any country in the UK at the end of 2018, but this isn’t reflected in its book industry—sales in the region jumped upwards year on year, dramatically outpacing the rest of the UK in both volume and value.

Let’s get the small print out of the way first. It’s quite difficult to define the print market in Wales. Nielsen BookScan data is divided along television regional designations and, as a result, its Wales and the West category includes several parts of south-west England, including Bristol and parts of Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire as well as Wales itself. Of the five million people living in this region, around 62% are from Wales, so while we can’t forensically determine exactly what is tickling book-buyers’ leeks from Swansea to Bangor, the data can give us a rough outline.

Wales and the West sold just 6,813 copies short of 14 million books through the TCM in 2018, for a value of £115.2m. This was a 1.2% rise in volume year on year, and an even more impressive 3.9% rise in value. Compare that with the UK market as a whole—in 2018 volume squeaked into growth, by 0.3%, and value was up 2.1%. As a result, Wales and the West’s share of the UK print market increased from 6.96% in 2017 to 7.08% in value terms, and an even heftier 7.33% in volume.

Like Scotland, book-buyers in the region are buying proportionately more books, and for cheaper prices. Without casting aspersions on the spending habits of our regional countrymen in any way, this is most likely down to higher prices in London and the South East, and a heavier concentration of independent bookshops there, skewing value upwards for the rest of the UK. Welsh residents paid an average of £8.24 per print book in 2018, way up on 2017’s £8.02—but a snip compared to the wider market’s £8.53.

Much of the region’s 2018 bestseller chart is similar to that of the UK-wide chart. In fact, only Noel Fitzpatrick’s Listening to the Animals appears in the Wales and the West list (in 20th) and not the UK chart—it displaced John Grisham’s The Rooster Bar. The 2018 overall bestseller, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, may have over-indexed in Gail Honeyman’s native Scotland, but its Welsh volume share was almost exactly that of the market’s overall volume share, with 62,401 copies sold, or 7.2% of its 866,200 volume sales. David Walliams’ three books in the top 20—The Ice Monster in second, The World’s Worst Children 3 in ninth and The Midnight Gang in 15th—all shifted more copies proportionately in Wales than the wider market, with The Ice Monster in particular scoring a 7.98% share.

The big winner in Wales and the West was Ant Middleton’s First Man In, which rose from 20th in the UK-wide chart to 16th, and racked up 9.4% of its total sales for the year in the region. The author’s Channel 4 show “SAS: Who Dares Wins” is partly filmed in a remote location on the south-west Wales coast. The first episode even featured a 13-mile circuit of Pen Y Fan, the highest point in the Brecon Beacons.

Interestingly, the only two titles in the Wales and the West chart to shift fewer than 7% of their UK volume in the region were Michelle Obama’s Becoming and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. Obama’s blockbuster memoir skated under the 7% mark by just 0.2%, but Sapiens dropped a place compared to the UK-wide top 20 and sold just 6.44% of its total volume in Wales. While the Israeli author’s début has sold nearly 900,000 copies in the UK to date, and over 300,000 in 2018 alone, a hefty proportion of its sales come in London. Last year, 44% of Sapiens’ copies sold were bought in the capital.

Home grown

Welsh publishing’s strength and depth is much better represented in the Welsh-published chart, which features only Wales-based independents. For 2018, Crown House titles score nine of the top 20 places, with Paul Dix’s When the Adults Change, Everything Changes swiping the number one slot. Though Jason Vale and his juicing oeuvre has been the publisher’s lynchpin over the past few years, Dix’s guide for teachers has leapfrogged him, selling 18,815 copies. Vale’s Kick the Drink... Easily!, savvily re-packaged by Crown House after a disappointing start in 2011, is still going strong seven years on, holding fourth place and shifting 3,884 copies.

John Martin’s A Raid Over Berlin (Parthian) took a strong second place, with 14,176 copies sold. The 96-year-old author and former RAF airman (pictured), who still lives in Tanygroes, west Wales, saw sales of his memoir leap 3,044% in volume week on week, after being featured on “The One Show”.

Children’s publisher Firefly also features four times in the Welsh-published top 20, with Robert Munch and Sheila McGraw’s Love You Forever in third, Catherine Fisher’s The Clockwork Crow in seventh, Jennifer Killick’s Alex Sparrow and the Really Big Stink in 18th and Eloise Williams’ Seaglass in 20th. Newport-born Fisher’s Christmas-themed book was adorned with critical acclaim, with Nicolette Jones in the Sunday Times naming it
among her books of the year.

This piece is part of The Bookseller's country focus on Wales. For more in the series, click here.