Poetry Text & Anthologies 2024 — Poetic justice is meted out

In 2023, the Poetry Text & Poetry Anthologies category of Nielsen Bookscan’s Total Consumer Market had a bumper year, topping out at £14.5m – thanks to a slight increase in volume and an extra 57p on the a.s.p. – but 2024 looks set to beat that, with current sales on track for a full-year result of £15.3m.

In the 46 weeks up to the 16th November, £11.8m has been spent across the category – a growth of 5.9% against the same period in 2023. As with the previous year, this is down to an increase of volume of 2%, plus a higher a.s.p. – currently at £11.26, 42p higher than 2023.

The bestselling title of 2024 so far is Donna Ashworth’s Wild Hope – marking a second year at the top of the category for the Instagram poet. So far in 2024, the volume has sold 33,472 copies, more than twice that of second place Wendy Cope with The Orange and Other Poems – and 122% more than its own performance in 2023, when it was first published at the end of September.

This performance has helped Ashworth secure a total increase of 20%, taking value sales to £586,499 for the year so far and helping to deliver £100,000 of the category’s total growth. Despite this excellent performance, Ashworth’s domination of the top of the market has eased somewhat, and the Scottish poet has to settle for just one title in the top four, down from three last year.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, classics poet Homer was just £1,000 behind Donna Ashworth in 2023, but while he has retained his second place, he has conceded a £50,000 gap. Still, it’s not a complete tragedy with the Greek’s sales rising by 9.9%, driven largely by a boost in popularity for The Odyssey.

The Orange and Other Poems was first published at the beginning of November in 2023 – right at the end of the like-for-like period we are using – but has continued to sell well into 2024, delivering a poetic £145,145 and taking Cope to a total of £225,589, the fifth-highest value for an individual author so far this year. That increase for Cope is helped by her 2024 release of Collected Poems—which, with a £20 r.r.p., has raised £52,869 since publication in September.

While Ashworth, Homer and Cope can all lay claim to having had good years, perhaps the biggest winner this year is John Cooper Clarke whose sales have jumped 700% to £196,670, thanks to his new collection WHAT, released in February 2024.

Other big releases for 2024 include Blossomise for Simon Armitage – the third best-selling title of the year to date helps the Poet Laureate to an extra £117,028 this year and boosting him firmly into fourth place of the bestselling-poet list – though they take third and fifth spots respectively when ranked by volume.

National treasure Pam Ayres has also had a bumper year with her comprehensive collection Doggedly On, published in October and helping her past the £200,000 mark.

It is not all good news for the nation’s poets, though – perennial bestseller Rupi Kaur has seen her sales drop by 46%, taking her from third on the overall list of bestsellers down to ninth. At first glance, it has also been a shocker for social-media star Brian Bilston, whose sales in the category are down £100,000 – but that is due to the paperback edition of 2022’s Days Like These being moved categories into Humour this year, where it has found sales of £75,509.

Following his death in December 2023, Benjamin Zephaniah’s poetry collections published by Bloodaxe Books have all seen modest increases, taking his overall sales to £22,920 in 2024, up over £20,000 compared with 2023.