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Review of the Year: Toshikazu Kawaguchi tops 2024’s Fiction Heatseekers
Tom Tivnan is the managing editor of The Bookseller.
Tom Tivnan is the managing editor of The Bookseller.
For the second year in a row, Toshikazu Kawaguchi has claimed the number one spot in our annual Fiction Heatseekers chart, leading a list filled with Japanese and Korean novels and BookTok-boosted romance and romantasy.
The Fiction Heatseekers – run in The Bookseller’s weekly charts coverage – are the bestselling titles by authors who have never hit the overall UK Official Top 50. The list tends to lean towards early-career and emerging writers, but often also includes below-the-radar literary novelists (particularly after a prize win or shortlisting) and digital-first writers with a widening print footprint, along with a smattering of classic authors whose heyday preceded the launch of Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market in 1998.
While the main fiction bestseller lists tend to focus on juggernauts like Richard Osman and Colleen Hoover, it is worth noting that those who operate outside the Top 50 contribute mightily to the market. In 2024, 37% (or a meaty £205m) of Fiction’s TCM record value sales came from authors who have never graced the Top 50.
Kawaguchi grabs the summit with his Before the Coffee Gets Cold (translated by Geoffrey Trousselot), shifting nearly 81,000 copies, a nearly identical volume total to the title’s performance in 2023. The Osaka-born writer’s book was first published in the UK in 2019 and is the standard-bearer for the current Japanese and East Asian cosy fantasy/magical realist vogue, a trend that tends to feature some combination of cats, bookstores or coffee shops. Before the Coffee Gets Cold’s weekly sales pattern has been remarkably consistent for the last three years, normally selling between 1,200 to 1,600 units with the occasional spike; in 2024 that zenith was a 3,405 unit-haul in the seven-day period before Christmas. This steady pace brings results: Kawaguchi has earned £4.6m through the TCM since 2019 for Before the Coffee Gets Cold and its four series follow-ups, £2.9m of which stems from his UK debut.
Two of Kawaguchi’s compatriots with novels roughly in the same cosy space hit the Heatseekers top five, with Michiko Aoyama’s What You are Looking For is in the Library (translated by Alison Watts) in fourth on 52,835 copies, followed by Eric Ozawa’s translation of Satoshi Yagisawa’s Days at the Morisaki Bookshop with its 50,171-unit haul. Meanwhile, Shanna Tan’s translation of Korean author Hwang Bo-reum’s Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop slotted in at 14th with almost 37,000 units sold.
Kawaguchi leads but Geneva Lee grabs one out of every five entries in the Heatseekers Top 20 with her BookTok-boosted “spicy Twilight meets Gossip Girl” Filthy Rich Vampires series. All told, the American writer sold nearly 170,000 units through BookScan in 2024, though that was aided by deep discounting, with her four books here skirting The Bookseller’s 74.5% off RRP threshold for inclusion in our charts.
The main driver of at least half the 2024 Heatseekers Top 20 has been TikTok; seven of the novels actually have the words “TikTok” or “BookTok” in their title’s metadata. These include the obvious entries like Liz Tomforde’s ice hockey enemies-to-lovers-themed Mile High and Lyla Sage’s “steamy” cowboy romance Done and Dusted (kudos to Sage’s UK publisher Quercus for keeping Dial Press US’s clever retro and genre-busting cover treatments).
Then there are the less obvious BookTok beneficiaries, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky. We first noted this in our 2023 Review of the Year, but the great Russian author’s White Nights has been taken to the platform’s heart over the last two years. Users have extolled the novella’s tragic love story on the platform, but book-buyers were undoubtedly also drawn to the Penguin Little Black Classics’ £3 price point, with the Ronald Meyer-translated edition shifting over 54,000 units last year. This BookTok burst lifted Dostoevsky out of his usual reading list-driven circa £500,000 to £750,000 annual total, with his TCM sales exceeding £1m in 2024 for the first time since records began.
BookTok also discovered Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, the late Belgian author’s post-apocalyptic dystopia, originally published in 1995. Vintage’s newest edition, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, was released in 2019 and has had TCM sales of 60,730 copies since, 71% of which was generated in 2024, nearly 90% in the last 18 months.
Review of the Year: 2024's Top 20 Fiction Heatseekers
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Source: Nielsen BookScan, 52 weeks ending 28th December 2024
