Top 50 drops but range pushes market into growth

The last year has been a challenging one, as the book trade did not benefit from many massive bestsellers or genre-busting trends. Yet, what do you know, 2017 ended in growth, though by the barest of margins. The £1.592bn of print books sold through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market in 2017 beat 2016’s haul by just £1.4m, or 0.09%. This was a consequence of rising average selling prices (up 23p to £8.39) rather than selling more books: volume sales dropped 2.7%, to 189.8 million units.

The miniscule value rise was certainly not driven by the very top of the bestseller lists. Three books in 2016 shifted over a million units, while only Jamie Oliver’s 5 Ingredients and David Walliams and Tony Ross’ Bad Dad crossed the half a million-copies mark in 2017. Last year’s top 50 (see below) collectively earned £83.7m, 19.8% down from the £104m churned out by 2016’s top 50 books.

Some big-brand authors’ titles did not quite match previous outings. By normal measures, Dan Brown’s Origin was a triumph: the number three-bestseller of the year, it notched up a six-figure unit sale in its début week and outsold 2017’s next-bestselling adult fiction hardback (Lee Child’s The Midnight Line) by £2.3m. Yet Origin’s £4.4m in its 12 weeks on sale was some 20% down on the near £5.4m the writer’s Inferno earned during a similar timeframe in 2013. Similarly, E L James’ Darker shifted 205,000 units in the month since its publiction, while 2015’s Grey sold 887,000 copies in its first four weeks.

If there is an emblematic book of 2017, it may be Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography. Championed by booksellers, it was a breakout in 2016, earning £1.2m through the TCM. Last year matched 2016, but in solid, unspectacular fashion. The 35th-bestselling book of 2017, Prisoners of Geography only hit the Official UK Top 50 twice, but it was always hovering around the top 200, shifting between 2,500 and 3,000 copies week in, week out.

Of course, 2017 has not been bereft of hits. Writer Walliams and illustrator Ross’ Bad Dad is the first of nine titles the duo has in 2017’s top 50; no one (or pair) has ever had more than six books chart in a year-end top 50 since records began. And, as we have noted over the course of the autumn, Oliver was back on song. 5 Ingredients might have missed out on cracking the £10m mark by a whisker, but it was easily 2017’s volume and value leader.

Though there were no huge new trends, several feminist-themed titles stormed the charts in 2017’s #MeToo climate. Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo’s Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls was a Christmas hit, and has spawned a raft of imitators. Naomi Alderman’s The Power became just the third Women’s Prize for Fiction winner to hit the Official UK Top 50 in the year of its win since accurate records began—Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty accomplished the feat in 2007 and 2006, respectively. Meanwhile, five editions of Margaret Atwood’s TV-boosted A Handmaid’s Tale combined to sell almost 270,000 copies for £1.8m, with the Channel 4 tie-in and 1996 Vintage Contemporary Classics editions both surpassing 100,000 units.

The Official UK Top 50: 52 weeks (2017)