Normal People and abnormal times: fiction helps Irish market weather Covid-19

Despite the coronavirus crisis and a national lockdown closing bookshops, Ireland’s print market is holding up remarkably well year on year—so far, 2020 trails 2019 by just 1.8% in volume and 1.9% in value. To date this year, 4.62 million books have been sold for €53.95m, a drop of 86,014 units and just over €1.05m compared to the year before. Across the 11 weeks of Ireland’s lockdown, print dipped 15.7% in volume and 17.3% in value year on year, but sales have recovered strongly since, with weekly value yet to dip against the year before from the point bookshops reopened.

If you can bear to, cast your mind back to those fraught weeks of early March when neither Ireland or the UK had officially locked down, but the prospect loomed large. Two weeks before Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar announced the restrictions, print volume jumped 12.8% in volume year on year, and then 14.4% the week after. A similar rush for books was seen in the UK market, with fiction in particular benefiting: the Adult Fiction category through Nielsen BookScan UK jumped 32% week on week. Of course, it makes sense that book buyers on both sides of the Irish Sea would want to stock up on reading material ahead of an unknown length of time spent isolated at home—and later, Nielsen research would bear this out, with a survey reporting that 25% of people claimed to be reading more under lockdown. In Ireland, Adult Fiction went into the pandemic in a remarkably strong position, posting 19% growth in value year on year up to week 12, when the “Covid curtain” fell. Children’s was up 9% over the same period, with Adult Non-Fiction improving 3%.

Bookshop closures hit the Irish market hard, with volume dropping 43% week on week in the first week of lockdown, and a further 24% the week after. That week (the first week of April) saw volume dip to 83,100 books sold and €875,824 earned. (For context, in the leanest week of 2019, 147,492 books were sold for €1.7m.) Year on year, that week represented a 49% drop in volume and a 54% decline in value. But that was the worst it got: from then on, print recovered steadily week after week. Of particular note is the week ending 16th May, which saw value clamber back over the €2m mark, posting a rise of 28% in volume week on week to record a value that was 17.6% up against its non-locked-down 2019 equivalent.

Rooney rules
This mid-lockdown spike can be attributed to literary Ireland’s shining light Sally Rooney, whose Normal People, adapted by the BBC into a beautifully anguished 12-part series, became something of a lockdown phenomenon. While its May 2019-published paperback hit the Official UK Top 50 number one spot twice during the adaptation’s run, it shattered records on home turf. Having barely left the Irish charts since publication, Normal People became one of two titles to surpass 30,000 copies sold in the year to date—which no other book had done since 2009.

Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing, Ireland’s bestseller for the year to date, was the other 30,000-plus title, pipping Normal People to the post by just over 1,000 copies.Marian Keyes’ Grown Ups, released in the before-times in February, claimed third with 21,289 copies sold. Adult Fiction, already up year on year heading into lockdown, weathered the Covid-19 storm well, bouncing back 10% year on year in the three weeks post-lockdown. All in all, it’s currently 3% up for the year to date. Sub-category General Fiction posted a 9% rise year on year.

Gina and Karol Daly’s The Daly Dish, billed as the “Irish Pinch of Nom”, helped to buffet Adult Non-Fiction. The food blog-turned-cookbook became one of the fastest-selling titles since Irish records began in 2013 on its publication in March. With 6,416 copies sold in its launch week, it notched up the biggest first-week sale since J K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in August 2016 (which sold 35,000 copies). It also became the second fastest-selling non-fiction title of all time, with only Roy Keane’s memoir The Second Half shifting more, with 10,742 copies sold in its first week of October 2014. The Daly Dish boosted the Food & Drink category to a 33% bump year on year, and though Adult Non-Fiction has declined 2% for the year to date, its post-lockdown sales are up 20%.

Children’s also endured, with a pre- lockdown rise of 9% year on year. School Textbooks & Study Guides was among the hardest-hit sub-categories—down 40% year on year to €1.7m—with the usually stalwart Grow in Love workbook series greatly affected by the school shutdown. On the other hand, the Reference & Home Learning category spiked in the first week of lockdown, and largely maintained its form thereafter. With the School Textbooks & Study Guides category included, Children’s posted a 5% decline for the year to date—but with the category stripped out, it rose 3%. Children’s & Young Adult Fiction was especially strong, up 15%.