THIS WEEK


sales collective up the league table, while romantasy and rom-coms


boost Bloomsbury and Hachette


Tom Tivnan @tomtivnan


T


he Independent Alliance (IA) has scored a best-ever first-half performance, with its £38.9m sold through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market so far in 2024, pushing it above one of the Big Four publishers for the first time.


Since the IA formed in 2005, The Bookseller has not given the Faber-led group an official place on our year-end and midway- point TCM publisher league tables, as the sales collective is not under a single ownership. But we have always noted where it would fall in the top 20, and in the initial 26 weeks of this year it edged past Pan Macmillan (£38.5m) with a nearly 8% jump in TCM sales and earning a market share above 5% for the first time. The IA’s largest house,


Faber, put in a decent shiſt (+1.5% to just under £10m) but the growth engine has been fuelled by Profile—crowned the Publisher of the Year at this May’s Nibbies—which continued its scintillating Murdle-led run of 2023 as sales leapt 16.8% to bag a TCM half-year record of £6.8m. Another record, too, for the IA’s biggest grower David Fickling Books (DFB), whose TCM haul rose a whopping 67.8% to £3.8m,


08 12th July 2024


The Lead Story Half-year review


Top 20 publishers The Indie Alliance surges to make the Big Four a Big Five Profile pushes the


PROFILE BOOKS’ M.D. REBECCA GRAY AT THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS THIS YEAR


Publisher


1 Penguin Random House 2 Hachette


3 HarperCollins Independent Alliance


4 Pan Macmillan 5 Bloomsbury


6 Simon & Schuster 7 Bonnier Books UK 8 Scholastic 9CGP 10 DK


11 OUP


12 Usborne 13 Faber 14 Viz


15 Profile 16 Quarto


17 John Wiley 18 Walker


19 Lonely Planet 20 Pearson


Value


£151,597,054 £105,456,817 £68,365,159 £38,892,637 £38,499,593 £31,128,554 £18,318,330 £15,773,353 £12,421,847 £11,751,511 £11,216,740 £11,015,116 £10,898,848 £9,991,553 £7,637,679 £6,324,986 £6,080,408 £5,611,716 £4,899,104 £4,878,030 £4,802,887


Nielsen BookScan 26 weeks ending 29th June 2024 Chg


-0.9% 4.2% 0.9% 7.9% 3.2%


12.2% -13.6% -0.3% 8.5% 2.4%


-2.6% -6.9% -3.4% 1.5%


-2.7% 16.8% 3.3%


-9.0% -3.3% 4.6%


-14.7%


Share 19.7% 13.7% 8.9% 5.1% 5.0% 4.1% 2.4% 2.1% 1.6% 1.5% 1.5% 1.4% 1.4% 1.3% 1.0% 0.8% 0.8% 0.7% 0.6% 0.6% 0.6%


74% of which was generated by Jamie Smart. The comics crea- tor—this year’s Illustrator of the Year Nibbie-winner—was not just DFB’s star: Smart has authored nine of the top 20 books in 2024 from the 18 publishers in the IA. The IA’s rise is not down to Pan Mac contraction, as the later had a very strong first-half, up 3.2% against a 2023 that was its second-best return since records began. The indomitable Julia Donaldson led the charge—£4.1m of her market-leading £6.7m has been Pan Mac-published—while Pinch of Nommers Kay and Kate Allinson chipped in £1.7m, Kate Morton’s Homecoming has been the (non-World Book Day) chart-topper and Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Geoffrey Trousselot- translated Before the Coffee Gets Cold series continued its slow- burn success. Up at the top of the table,


Penguin Random House was down less than 1%, a positive result given it compares against the first half of 2023’s Prince Harry bonanza. PRH’s overall 19.7% market share is even greater at the summit, as it claimed the top four bestsellers of 2024, seven of the top 10 and 21 of the top 50. A PRH book has been the overall UK number one for 17 of the first 26 weeks of the year, six of which came from Richard Osman’s The Last Devil to Die (Penguin). Hachete had its strongest first half since the Twilight-fuelled late Noughties/early 2010s, hiting £105m and a 13.7% share. Its two largest divisions, Litle, Brown (£25.2m) and Hodder (£18.3m), were big gainers, up 18.2% and 24.3%, respectively. L,B has mined the BookTok romance/ romantasy end of the market, with standout turns from Rebecca Yarros, Ana Huang and Elsie Silver. Hodder’s top earners were


© David Parry


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