Checking them twice: festive-themed children’s book sales soar

The children’s book market—perhaps more than any other part of Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM) – is particularly responsive to the changing seasons, with special editions of many big-brand authors and characters rising into the list of top sellers at various points throughout the year, including Easter, Halloween and, of course, Christmas.

In the week ending 30th November, there were 286 identifiably festive titles in the TCM’s Top 5,000 list – that is an eighth of the total number of children’s books, but they account for 21.1% of all children’s sales. For full transparency, there is no easy way of categorising these titles in the TCM data. Instead, we have noted all the books that feature festive words in their titles – from the obvious ones such as “Christmas” and “Nativity” to the more thematic such as “snow” and “jingle bells”. It is these titles upon which this analysis is based, but it is possible some of the more esoteric titles have been missed.

In the latest week of data, these Christmas titles were worth a collective £1.75m – perhaps unsurprisingly accounting for 20% of their sales for the year to date. In fact, in the eight weeks across October and November these books have delivered £7.2m through the TCM – 81% of their 2024 total so far.

Anyone who has worked in a bookshop will be able to tell you that children are less respectful of the calendar than their adult counterparts, so it is also not a huge surprise to see that sales of festive-themed titles for the younger market are steady throughout the year, with £10,000 spent on them regularly each week.

One surprising blip in 2024, though, came at the beginning of June when sales jumped 174% to £25,264 for a week before settling back down. Closer inspection reveals this jump was due to three titles – We’re Going on a Sleigh Ride by Martha Mumford and Cherie Zamazing; What the Ladybird Heard at Christmas by Julia Donaldson and Lydia Monks; and Dear Santa by Rod Campbell – all of which saw their average selling prices drop to just over £1 for the week.

Anyone who has worked in a bookshop will be able to tell you that children are less repectful of the calendar than their adult counterparts

For the former, this seems to have been a clearance exercise ahead of a new edition released this autumn, but the other two titles have continued to sell well in the latter part of 2024 on their existing ISBNs, both appearing inside the overall top 10 for the year so far.

With sales of just over 40,000 copies, June’s clearance sale has helped What the Ladybird Heard fly into third place on the list of bestselling Christmas titles, but it is still not the bestselling title from Donaldson whose Acorn Wood collaboration with Axel Scheffler, The Squirrel’s Snowman, is proving the most popular with children.

Both titles help Donaldson take the biggest slice of the Christmas cake when divided up by author, with sales of £664,985 – although Tom Fletcher is not far behind, shifting £609,920 when you account for his various collaborations with fellow McFly bandmate Dougie Pointer, as well as his solo-penned Christmasaurus series. 

With the last weeks of the year left to be accounted for, it is likely that sales of Christmas-themed books are yet to peak, but one sub-category that may have had its time already is the advent calendar collections.

These collections – often featuring 24 small versions of picture books – account for 9.2% of the category’s total volume but, with relatively high price points, one in every five pounds spent on Christmas titles this year has found its way towards an advent calendar. With lower levels of interest anticipated from 1st December, stock of these collections is held pretty tightly, so the £240,000 notched by these titles in the last week of November is likely to be the annual peak.