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Review of the Year, Non-Fiction – Nonplussed: market charts leanest period in almost a decade
Despite some Non-Fiction categories having decent years, generally speaking the market endured a forgettable 12 months.
The throughline of our Reviews of the Year has been that 2024 was unsurpassed for Fiction and a slog in Non-Fiction. How much of a slog depends on which part of the market. For Nielsen BookScan’s Adult Non-Fiction: Specialist category – where most academic and professional titles sit – it was an all-time nadir through the Total Consumer Market, its £107.9m down 15% on what was the previous rock-bottom. Adult Non-Fiction: Trade had some wins, but quite a few losses, and its £724.1m was the lowest haul in six years; the categories combined to endure a roughest 12 months since 2015.
The lifestyle, wellness and some entertainment sectors broadly fared better. Health, Dieting & Wholefood Cookery’s 23% climb to £23.3m was its third-best TCM year, with the air fryer and slow cooker trend still sizzling and fine years from Emily English (£1.6m), Tim Spector (£2.7m) and Pinch of Nommers Kay and Kate Allinson (£4.3m). This helped the overall Food & Drink category step up 2.6% to £92.4m, a result topped only by the £96.7m chalked up in 2019.
Handicrafts, Arts & Crafts posted a third-best TCM return of £23.4m, eclipsed only by the Laurence King/Johanna Basford-led adult colouring book trend of 2015 and 2016. Colouring books also drove 2024’s surge, but at the cutesy end that skirts between kids’ and adults, mainly self-published brands Vivi Tinta and Coco Wyo; the duo combined to shift £1.7m and claim seven of the sub-genre’s top 10.
An autumn tie-in to a hit game show propelled Trivia & Quiz Books to by far its TCM record of £5.7m; in fact, The 1% Club’s (Bantam) £1.1m was more than the entire category’s annual take in eight previous years. Puzzles also earned a TCM best (+0.6% to £12.4m), a decent achievement as it came off 2023’s Murdle breakthrough. GT Karber led again, with three of the top four titles part of his mystery-solving series.
Poetry Texts & Poetry Anthologies squeezed over its 2023 total by £250,000 to £14.7m, and thus (barring lockdown data blackouts) the category posted its eighth consecutive all-time high. Donna Ashworth shifted just under £827,000, making her the UK’s bestselling living poet for the third consecutive year. The Scottish writer’s Wild Hope and Growing Brave (both Black & White) topped the category in volume terms and ran just behind Pam Ayres’ Doggedly Onward (Ebury Spotlight) in value. Among all poets past and present, Ashworth lost out for the third straight year to Homer – 40% of the classical poet’s £871,000 was derived from Emily Wilson’s lauded recent translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey (WW Norton).
One of the biggest falls came in Biographies & Autobiographies, with the genre plunging 21%, wiping £25m off of 2023’s £110m. Prince Harry’s Spare (Bantam) had a part in this – Autobiography: Royalty was down 97.2% on 2023 – but the celebrity market, which has been difficult of late, stuttered again, with Autobiography: The Arts losing a quarter of its value year on year. Miranda Hart’s I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest with You (£2.1m, Michael Joseph) was the only real hit; Jeremy Clarkson’s latest Diddly Squat title, Home to Roost (Michael Joseph), did its bit (£1.3m, a slight bump on 2023’s Pigs Might Fly); but most celeb outings hardly set the tills afire. Going into the autumn, you probably would not have bet that Cher’s memoir would shift fewer than 50,000 units, nor that Sir Michael Caine and Alison Steadman’s would combine to sell a meagre 34,000.
Still, it was not all bad in this area, as Autobiography: Historical, Political & Military posted a near-record £8.1m, thanks to Boris Johnson’s Unleashed (William Collins, £2.4m) and a nice bit of publishing from The Bodley Head of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny’s posthumous Patriot (£764,000).
It was a difficult year for nature writing and environmental issues, with all three Natural History sub-categories, Travel Writing and Popular Science – which have shone as readers’ attentions turned to the climate crisis – enduring double-digit percentage drops in their TCM value. Sport’s £19m was a dip of 4% on 2023 and its worst performance in two decades. Mind, Body, Spirit took a 7.1% hit down to £18.2m, though that is still £5-£10m better than what the category earned in any year during the 2010s. The more, er, woo-woo end suffered here, with double-digit percentage contractions for Alternative Therapies & Health, The Occult & Mythology, Astrology & Fortune-telling and Psychic Powers & Parapsychology. Now who saw that coming?
