Children’s titles for 2024 — Making sure the kids are all right

When we looked at the Non-Fiction performance in the market across the summer, it was down over £13m on last year, but the Total Consumer Market according to Nielsen Bookscan was only down £1.5m for the same period.

We already know that Fiction paperbacks enjoyed a stellar bump thanks to a boost in the romantic fiction backlist, but with such a big decline in value in Non-Fiction, could it be the kids who’ve come to save the day and help claw back some of that difference?

In short, yes, but not much. Nielsen’s Children’s categories—excluding Education—was worth £77.3m in the 12 weeks to the end of September, up just 1% on the same period in 2023. Interestingly, despite the rise in value, volume has fallen 5%, meaning that the average selling price in kid’s books has increased from £6.15 to £6.45.

The value change—a positive swing of £476,038—can almost be entirely explained by one author: Jamie Smart’s Bunny vs Monkey and Looshkin series were worth £1.2m in the summer of 2024, up 57% against last summer and equating for 95% of the year-on-year rise. Units for Smart’s series—all published by David Fickling—were up 60%, but the illustrator-author is not responsible for the change in a.s.p.

Instead, it seems that there have been average selling price increases across the board, with all of Nielsen’s children’s categories showing rises apart from the relatively small—at this point of the year—Children’s Annuals and Children’s Dictionaries.

While the first assumption may be that retailers and publishers are increasing prices, a widespread growth in the a.s.p. may also indicate that as the cost-of-living pressures continue to mount, more families are shying away from the backlist multibuys promoted by chain retailers at this time of year. This theory is further strengthened when looking at the average r.r.p. of paperbacks, which has decreased by a penny, while the a.s.p. has risen by 11 pence.

Smart isn’t the only author enjoying bigger sales this summer, with the perennial chart topper Julia Donaldson managing to shift nearly 600,000 copies—up 16%, thanks in part to the Axel Scheffler-illustrated Jonty Gentoo (Alison Green) which, though released in mid-September, is the author’s top-selling title for the three-month period we’re looking at.

While Donaldson maintains the top spot in the author top five, there are two notable drop-outs. First up, Alice Oseman has experienced a decline of nearly 80% with her Heartstopper series—a mix of graphic novels and chapter books—achieving sales of 30,357 and dropping from fourth place in 2023 to 45th in the summer of ‘24. This could just be a case of delayed gratification though, with season three of the Heartstopper Netflix series starting two months later than the second did in 2023.

A less dramatic drop, but perhaps more noticeable, is for David Walliams, who falls out of the top five, moving from second to seventh place. While there’s a phasing issue here as well—Walliams’ 2023 title The World’s Worst Monsters (HarperCollins) was released in the summer, compared with a late May release for 2024’s Astrochimp—the backlist has nearly halved, dropping to just over 100,000 books.

Walliams and Oseman are replaced in the top five by Smart and Jeff Kinney, while Lauren Roberts takes sixth position—a huge rise of more than 70 places. Roberts appears in the overall top 10 three times, with book two in the Powerless series Reckless (Simon & Schuster) taking the top spot and helping the Young Adult Fiction category to a value growth of 3.2%.