Ross proves the top draw in 2017 illustrator chart

Tony Ross has topped The Bookseller’s year-end illustrator chart for a third year in a row, after his books earned more than £16m in 2017—£7.3m more than his closest competitor, Axel Scheffler.

This year The Bookseller widened the breadth of data used to compile the chart, looking at the top 1,000 books from three categories (Children’s Fiction, Picture Books & Pre-School and Children’s Non-fiction) on Nielsen BookScan, instead of the top 500, as was the case in previous years. If the illustrator was missing on Nielsen, their name was added manually to the chart. Looking at the extended data set, Ross was strongly ahead of the pack in value terms, with sales of £16.8m. His volume sales were more than a million units ahead of Scheffler’s, totalling 3,166,605, and his bestselling book of 2017 was Bad Dad, written by David Walliams and published by HarperCollins Children’s Books in November.

Scheffler and Jeff Kinney were respectively the second and third biggest-selling illustrators of last year, as they were in 2016. Scheffler had value sales of £9.5m and volume sales of 2,118,159, and he had twice as many books as Ross in the top 1,000 (60, compared to Ross’ 30), reflecting how consistently well his titles sell. Scheffler’s biggest hit in 2017 was Postman Bear (Macmillan Children’s Books), a collaboration with Julia Donaldson. Incidentally, Scheffler and Donaldson scored a number one of a different kind, topping the Children’s Pre-school chart for nine weeks in a row in the autumn, with The Ugly Five and then Zog and the Flying Doctors (Alison Green/Scholastic).

Kinney, who features in the chart with his Wimpy Kid series (Penguin Random House Children’s), had 15 books in the chart, with a value of more than £5.8m and volume sales in excess of one million units.

After the top three slots, Liz Pichon (in fifth last year) leapfrogged Quentin Blake to take fourth position, with value sales of £4.2m, ahead of Blake’s £3m. Her most popular title was 2017’s Tom Gates: Family, Friends and Furry Creatures (Scholastic). Blake’s bestseller was a slightly older book: Roald Dahl’s Matilda (PRH Children’s), first published in 1988.

Jim Field is again in sixth place, with value sales of £2.9m, and he is followed by Lydia Monks, Rachel Wells, Nick Sharratt and then Rachel Renée Russell, a new entrant in the chart thanks to Dork Diaries: Crush Catastrophe (S&S Children’s), which sold 46,074 copies in 2017.

Another new entry is Martin Handford, who released a Where’s Wally? World Book Day title in 2017, lifting his entire backlist. He came in 12th position, with sales of £745,625, or 223,552 in volume. Handford trails Field and Shane Devries, in 11th place. Jim Kay, in 16th, would place fifth in value terms with sales of his illustrated Harry Potter editions for Bloomsbury nearing £2.9m, a result of their £30 r.r.p.

Also trailing Handford are Rod Campbell, Simon Rickerty, Janet Ahlberg, Ben Cort, Sara Ogilvie, Eric Carle and Oliver Jeffers. Judith Kerr fell out of the chart this year, as did Paul Linnet (who creates picture books with his partner Sue Hendra), Helen Oxenbury, Anita Jeram and Garry Parsons.

It is important to note that the illustrator chart reflects how much their books have earned in retail terms, and not how much the artist themselves earned from sales of those books. Ross is paid a flat fee for his work with Walliams and does not receive royalties, as is Devries, the illustrator behind celebrity author Tom Fletcher’s The Christmasaurus (PRH Children’s). Last year Fletcher defended his sole ownership of copyright, saying he needed “the freedom” to take his projects “to the stage, the screen and beyond”.