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Review of the Year – A certain romance: Fiction soars, with romantasy and love stories leading the way
Six of the 14 Fiction sub-categories posted record returns last year, as the genre’s annual haul surpassed its previous record by more than £50m.
In our Reviews of 2024, we have discussed Fiction’s blistering 12 months, with an all-time high of £552.7m through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM), nearly £50m up on the genre’s previous record, in 2023. Often in years with massive uplifts in Fiction revenue, the spikes come from just one or two categories, with the oxygen going out elsewhere. Not so in 2024, when just two of BookScan’s 14 Fiction sub-categories contracted.
Six of those sub-categories bagged records, led by Science Fiction & Fantasy’s TikTok/romantasy-aided 41.3% leap. Most of the sub-genres that did not nab their TCM apogee were still in fine fettle: the largest, General & Literary Fiction, hit £163.1m, its best return since 2011; second-placed Crime, Thriller & Adventure’s £143.2m haul was its biggest in 14 years.
Romance & Sagas’ swoonworthy £69.1m pipped even its Fifty Shades-led 2012 (£68.3m), which for a long time seemed an outlier: in 19 of the first 20 years of full-market BookScan data, Romance & Sagas consistently returned TCM values in the £20m-£25m range. Then BookTok hit, and the past three years have seen £50m-plus totals. The top of the chart in 2024 is replete with TikTok fan-faves, including Colleen Hoover (£6.8m of her £8.5m came from the category), Ana Huang (£3.5m) and Hannah Grace (£2m), plus breakouts such as Emily Henry (+50% to £1.7m), Elsie Silver (+358% to £2.9m) and Laurie Gilmore (+509% to £2.3m).
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The category’s rise may be aided by something slightly nerdier: product classification codes. A longstanding argument from folk in the romance game was that in those £20m–£25m years, the sector was actually far bigger, as many love stories were bunged by the publishers responsible for the metadata into General & Literary Fiction. We all know why: to try to avoid the gendered, classist snobbery of being lumped into “chick lit”, enable better placement in shops and – maybe – even get reviewed in the media.
But in the past couple of years commercial women’s fiction now has pride of place at many retailers where it previously nary got a look in (*cough* Waterstones *cough*), with many of those titles coded in Romance & Sagas. The third-bestseller by value in the category in 2024 was Jojo Moyes’ Someone Else’s Shoes (Penguin, £1.5m), her first outing to be classified as Romance & Sagas. Further down the line there are a number of entries that, pre-TikTok, likely would have been in General & Literary Fiction, including Alice Winn’s In Memoriam, Paige Toon’s Seven Summers and Melanie Cantor’s The F**k It! List.
Scream king
With sales just above £8m, Horror & Ghost Stories slashed its way to a best-ever result through the TCM, 9.4% higher than its previous record. There has been much hoo-ha over the past 12 months about how hot the genre is, but is it really?
No question, Horror is on the up: 2024’s total was around twice as much as the category earned annually from 2008 to 2022. But it remains a small slice of Fiction (Hoover alone eclipsed the entire horror sector last year) and there were no big hits: the mass-market paperback of Stephen King’s Holly was top in Horror & Ghost Stories on 64,000 units, the 222nd-bestselling book of the year. No other Horror & Ghost Stories title sold more than 20,000 copies; only nine shifted more than 10,000.
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King dominates, responsible for a quarter of Horror & Ghost Stories’ TCM value. And it is a category that has deep, interred-under-a-cursed-ancient-burial-ground level of backlist: of the top 20 books in the category last year, 10 were originally released before the 21st century; seven are more than 40 years old; and two were first published in the 19th century.
Saying that, there are a number of new and early(ish) career authors bubbling under – and many on tap for 2025 – to suggest that the category will continue to rise. ML Rio moved to the sector from her TikTok-boosted dark academia space (and from Titan to Wildfire) with Graveyard Shift (£103,000); Grady Hendrix’s titles shifted £164,000, led by How to Sell a Haunted House (Titan); and the trend for literary horror inspired by Latin and South American folklore and culture grew, including Mexico City-born Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrilio (Dead Ink) and International Booker shortlistee Mariana Enriquez’s A Sunny Place for Shady People (Granta, translated by Megan McDowell).
