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Samantha Harvey's Orbital leads Booker shortlist sales surge
Orbital by British author Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape) remains the sales leader among the six books shortlisted for the Booker Prize, shifting almost 29,000 copies this year. The winner of a prize worth £50,000—among a list dominated by the highest number of women in the prize’s 55-year history—will be announced tomorow night (12th November).
Sales of Harvey’s novel, which follows six astronauts aboard the International Space Station as they orbit Earth, increased 86% from the almost 3,500 copies sold prior to her Booker shortlisting, with nearly 2,000 copies sold last week alone, according to Nielsen Bookscan data. The book, originally published in November 2023 with its second format launched in June, is the one of the two Booker sextet available in paperback; nearly 26,000 copies of Orbital has come form its mass market edition.
The next biggest seller is American author Percival Everett, the only man on the shortlist, who secured the first nomination for Pan Macmillan’s imprint Mantle with his novel, James, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn. His title has sold a little over 21,000 copies in the UK, 5,400 units of which have come in the shortlisting period.
Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep (Viking)—van der Wouden is the first Dutch writer to be shortlisted for the Booker and the only debut on the list—also saw a considerable bump thanks to the shortlisting, with sales of the novel, which is set in a rural Dutch province in the 1950s, having reached almost 10,000 units. Prior to the September shortlisting, sold a little more than 4,700 copies.
Held by Canadian writer Anne Michaels (Bloomsbury Publishing) shifted just over 2,100 units in hardback since its release last November. But the mass market paperback of her family saga told across four generations, launched a week after the shortlist announcement, has added an another 8,500 copies for a total across all print editions of nearly 11,000.
American author Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake (Jonathan Cape) has sold 8,300 copies, though the title was only released on 5th September, after it had been longlisted. It has averaged 923 units sold per week since launch.
Australian novelist Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (Sceptre) is the shortlist’s slowest seller on 4,000 units. But the Booker has given her a massive bump. The novel has earned 60% of its volume sales in the shortlist period, 84% since being longlisted. In the week prior to its longlisting, Stone Yard Devotional sold just four copies through BookScan.
All told, the shortlist has moved 87,380 copies through BookScan, 49% (42,791 units) of which has been generated since the shortlist was announced on 14th September; 71% of the sextet’s sales have come since the longlisting phase, which began on 30th July.
The Booker Prize 2024 will be awarded tomorrow night during a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London.
The Bookseller’s books editor Alice O’Keeffe said: “What an excellent shortlist it is this year. I’m particularly pleased to note that The Bookseller picked out two of the now-shortlisted novels and interviewed the authors well before publication: Rachel Kushner on Creation Lake, and Yael van der Wouden, who was selected as one of our Debuts of 2024.
“Percival Everett’s James was something of a dead cert for the shortlist and is surely hotly tipped for the win. And, as a long-term admirer of Samantha Harvey, one of our most original and ambitious writers, I’m thrilled that she’s finally getting the big-prize shortlist recognition she has long deserved. The judges have a difficult decision ahead.”
The judges chose the final six novels from 13 longlisted titles—the Booker Dozen—which were selected from 156 books published between 1st October 2023 and 30th September 2024 and submitted to the prize by publishers. Each of the shortlisted authors receives £2,500 and a bespoke bound edition of their book.
Bookscan analysis by Alex Call
