Sales of dropped Man Booker longlistees outstrip finalists

The Man Booker Prize will be awarded tonight (16th October), but sales of titles dropped at longlist stage have significantly outsold its shortlist, according to Nielsen Bookscan, with Belinda Bauer's Snap (Bantam) shifting almost three times the total of the entire shortlist's sales.

Of the prize's 2018 finalists, Anna Burns' Milkman (Faber & Faber) enjoyed the biggest Booker Bump since its shortlisting. As the only title whose paperback has already been released, its sales have risen 1,103% in the three weeks since the shortlist announcement in comparison to the preceding three weeks, selling 4,573 copies across editions.

Robin Robertson's The Long Take (Pan Macmillan, Picador) is up 340%, seeing sales of 2,488 in hardback in the 'Poetry Non-fiction' category, thanks to its genre-defying characteristics as the Man Booker's first novel in verse ever shortlisted.

The bookies' favourite, 27-year-old Daisy Johnson, has seen an uplift of 275% for her novel Everything Under (Vintage, Jonathan Cape), selling 5,241 copies to date; sales of The Mars Room (Vintage, Jonathan Cape) and 500+ page novel The Overstory, by US authors Rachel Kushner and Richard Powers, are up 144% at 4,214 copies sold and 72% at 3,996 copies sold, respectively; and Canadian author Esi Edugyan's Washington Black (Serpent's Tail) is up 104% at 3,710 copies sold.

By way of contrast, whereas the total shortlist has sold a total of 23,000 copies, the longlisted titles that failed to make the final cut have sold a combined 127,260 copies. Bauer's Snap (Bantam) shifted 59,599 copies, Sally Rooney's Normal People (Faber & Faber) 24,860 copies and Michael Ondaatje's Warlight (Jonathan Cape) 13,199, the latter two both in hardback. Graphic novel Sabrina (Granta) has sold 6,667 copies, again more than any title on the shortlist.

Looking back to five years ago, the 2013 longlist sold 90,030 copies in total, but the shortlist (without winner The Luminaries (Granta)) sold 200,413 copies in total.

Predicting the outcome at this evening's Man Booker Prize ceremony, Ladbrokes made the prize's youngest shortlistee, Johnson, the 9/4 favourite to win with Everything Under, while Powers was given odds of 5/2, Edugyan odds of 7/2, Robertson of 5/1, Burns of 6/1, and Kushner of 7/1.

An hour-long documentary chronicling the Man Booker Prize’s 50-year history aired on BBC Four last night, featuring founder Tom Maschler, past winners John Banville, Eleanor Catton, Anne Enright, Penelope Lively and Ben Okri, and 2018’s chair of judges Kwame Anthony Appiah.

With reference to the decision to open up the Prize in 2014 to all nationalities including Americans, Golden Man Booker Prize judge Robert McCrum defended the decision in the documentary, saying, “If you are going to have the world’s number one English-language prize and you don’t include the world’s number one English market place, America, it’s slightly ludicrous.” But former judge and journalist Alex Clark posited the rule change had “made it hard to focus on this particular literary culture”.