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Despite the focus on politics driven by the general election, sales of political books have remained relatively flat, according to the latest data.
Nielsen BookScan’s Politics and Government category stood at £1.5m, a marginal (1.7%) rise over the same period in 2023, since Rishi Sunak called the election on 22nd May.
Sales of political books typically go down in the run-up to a general election, however. So while this election cycle has not led to a surge in people buying political titles, it is bucking a downward trend.
During the 2019 general election, sales of books about politics and government were £3.9m, 9.3% down on the same period the previous year. The category shrank year-on-year during the general elections of 2017 (-3.1%), 2010 (-6.1%) and 2005 (-1.2%).
Only the campaign season of 2015 saw a surge in appetite for political books, with Nielsen’s Politics and Government data rising 73% on the previous year led by two runaway bestsellers: Owen Jones’ The Establishment (Penguin) and a £3 Penguin Little Black Classics edition of The Communist Manifesto. Though that left-leaning tilt at the tills did not reflect what happened in the voting booths, as the Tories secured a second premiership for David Cameron in 2015.
During an election in which Keir Starmer secured a landslide victory for Labour after 14 years of Conservative government, the biggest political bestsellers reveal a less distinct political skew.
The paperback of former Conservative MP and candidate for party leader Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge (Vintage) memoir shifted 49,011 copies —Stewart’s title is in Autobiography: Historical, Political and Military, however. Meanwhile, the paperback of James O’Brien’s How They Broke Britain (W H Allen), which examines how politicians Nigel Farage, David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, as well as media bosses and investors, “broke Britain”, sold 25,998 copies.