Summer paperback fiction 2024

While Chappell Roan, Taylor Swift and Charli XCX’s “Brat Summer” took over pop music in the past few months, a strong paperback Fiction market was also led by a trio of women: Colleen Hoover, Freida McFadden and Sarah J Maas.

More than 14 million paperbacks were sold in the 12 weeks from 30th June through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market Fiction category – up over a million copies (or 9.8%) against the same period last year. Value sales, meanwhile, surged 10.1% to £101.7m. The average selling price rose slightly as well – from £7.14 to £7.17 – suggesting that the surge has been driven by higher footfall rather than any price discounting.

With Hoover’s It Ends with Us spending nine weeks inside the top 10 in the period we’re looking at – including two weeks at number one, helped by its film adaptation being released in cinemas – it’s no surprise to see that she is the author with the biggest volume sales, at over half a million units (552,635). What may be surprising is that this is actually down 15% when compared to her standout performance in the summer of 2023. Despite robust results from It Ends with Us and its sequel It Starts wth Us – up 31% against 2023 – sales of Hoover’s backlist have dropped 97,000 copies, down from her BookTok-driven previous summer.

If Colleen Hoover isn’t responsible for 2024’s bumper paperback summer, who is? Claire Douglas, for one, who gave us the summer’s bestselling individual title, The Wrong Sister, which shifted nearly 50,000 more copies in the period against her 2023 thriller The Woman Who Lied (Penguin).

But arguably the star was Freida McFadden whose sales soared from 47,426 units in 2023 to a whopping 471,658 in 2024 – up nearly 900% and accounting for a full third of 2024’s increase on the previous summer. McFadden has five books inside the top 50 bestsellers of the season this year, tied with Sarah J Maas who appears with each title in her A Court of Thorn and Roses series. The quintet helped Maas achieve sales of 350,644, a quarter of a million more than in 2023.

Between them, Douglas, McFadden and Maas’ individual year-on-year performances account for 56.7% of 2024’s summer bump, but some of their sales are merely covering the absence of some of 2023’s bestsellers—including Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow and Lessons in Chemistry. These two big-hitters together shifted 62,599 copies in summer 2024 – impressively still some of the most popular books of the summer – but are massively down on their standout 2023 performance (combined unit sales of 317,589).

In fact, the top 50 paperbacks of the past 12 weeks achieved a little under three million copies sold, just 1.6% more than 2023, meaning that while these titles account for 20% of the total paperback sales for the summer, the rest of the market is providing the increase.

Outside of the top 50 the Crime, Thriller & Adventure sub-category has grown by 14.6%, driven in part by established authors such as Lee (and Andrew) Child, Karin Slaughter and Patricia Cornwell who all see spikes in their backlist. However, the biggest success story here – setting aside McFadden’s massive achievement – is L J Ross whose mystery novels have grown 49.8%, a climb of over 30,000 copies.

The biggest area of growth, though, is the Romance & Sagas category where sales outside the Top 50 titles have mushroomed by 32.1% (over half a million books). This huge growth is due in part to new authors such as Chloe Walsh (64,063 copies), Stephanie Archer (52,738) and Shain Rose (41,655), but also because of good showings for some more established authors.

Elsie Silver takes gold in Romance & Sagas with sales of 158,909 copies – nearly 100,000 more than 2023 – while Emily Henry’s sales rise by just over 21,000 units to 59,643. It’s not just about the new talent though: backlist promotions from their publishers mean that members of the old guard such as Josephine Cox and Anna Jacobs also enjoyed 2024’s “brat summer”.