THIS WEEK
The Lead Story Review of 2019: The First Half
PRH, where children’s sales were worth 16% of the overall group’s value. Meanwhile, rising crime star Stuart MacBride’s sales jumped 17% year on year (to £582,000), Christina Dalcher’s dystopian VOX was a breakout, George R R Martin benefited from HBO’s “Game of Thrones” swansong, and the mass- market paperback of A J Finn’s Woman in the Window shiſted £750,000. The last was HC’s second bestselling novel of 2019, despite (or because of?) the New Yorker’s much-discussed hit piece on the author in February. The biggest gain in the publisher top 20, though, was Faber’s 36.6% leap—all the more impressive given that the indie stalwart is coming off its best ever TCM year. We have discussed across this Review of the Half Year how non-fiction has been driving the market gain, but fiction has fired Faber, specifically Irish fiction: Sally Rooney alone generated 21% of its TCM revenue; add Anna Burns, and the two daughters of Erin were responsible for 28% of the publisher’s take. The two next highest risers in the top 20 benefit from still-strong sales from 2018 hits. Scholastic is surfing on the viral sensation wave of Craig Smith and Katz Cowley’s The Wonky Donkey, which ended the first half of 2019 as it did the full year 2018, as by far the bestselling picture book of the year (133,000 units for £593,000 in 2019). The publisher also benefited from Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler (nine of the duo’s books are in Scholastic’s top 15 for the half-year), another fine return for Liz Pichon (£1.7m), and Dav Pilkey, whose sales surged 49% (to £1.3m). Bonnier had a huge 53% bump at the 2018 half-way point and, impressively, it keeps on growing. Up 21.1% on 2018, it was led by Heather Morris’ The Tattooist of Auschwitz, which generated 14% of its TCM total.
Publisher analysis Big jumpers
A serial killer helped Mirror Books top our High Risers. The Daily Mirror offshoot’s hit this spring was Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth’s Ted
Bundy: Conversations with a Killer—originally published by Penguin in the early 1990s—released to coincide with a Netflix documentary. Short makes its usual biennial appearance, with its sales tending to rocket when it publishes a new Michael Mosley. Tate and V&A’s performance is often decided by the success of exhibition tie- ins: V&A benefited from the blockbuster Christian Dior event; while Tate’s growth was linked to books on its Pierre Bonnard, Don McCullin and van Gogh shows. Rosie Greening’s Never Touch a... series earned 38% of Make Believe’s TCM haul.
High Risers (%) Top 10* Publisher
1 Mirror Books 2 Short
3 Tate Publishing
4 Make Believe Ideas 5 Pitch Publishing
6 National Geo... Kids 7 V&A Publishing 8 Barnes and Noble 9 Faber
10 Pan Macmillan £537,646
Value Growth 199.2%
£2,504,902 110.9% £1,560,467 86.7% £462,856 78.8% £343,616 61.8% £258,216 56.4% £962,297 52.3% £262,171 42.2% £9,294,741 36.6% £40,691,088 35.8%
*Minimum TCM value £250,000
Publisher analysis Deep droppers
Deep Droppers (%) Top 10* Publisher
£6,481,560 Value Growth
1 Royal Academy of Arts £262,357 –49.7% 2 Elliott & Thompson 3 Sweet & Maxwell 4 Createspace 5 Rough Guides 6 David Fickling
£1,132,179 –21.6% £270,760 –19.8%
7 Macmillan... Higher Ed £1,142,388 –19.2% 8 Random... Children’s £3,647,007 –18.7% 9 Little, Brown 10 Image Comics
£15,896,757 *Minimum TCM value £250,000 –18.5% £725,756 –18.3%
£702,507 –29.2% £598,765 –26.8% –22.2%
The Deep Droppers chart is topped by the Royal Academy, which simply struggled to match the tie-in sales for the well-attended “Charles I: King
and Collector” exhibition of spring 2018. Elliot & Thompson suffers from a drop in sales of Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography, which has been a huge bestseller since its 2016 release. Amazon’s Createspace had enjoyed 10 years
of continuous TCM growth, but its decline is down to Amazon’s policy of moving Createspace authors to its combined p.o.d./e-book Kindle Direct Publishing platform. Fewer authors are publishing through Createspace: just 15 2019- issued books hit Createspace’s 2019 TCM 5,000, compared to 496 2018-issued titles last half-year.
10
James Patterson £2,302,232
2.7%
The drop for James Patterson is the differen- tial between the hardback and paperback sales of his and Bill Clinton’s The President is Missing and a lighter schedule: “only” 13 new editions have been released in 2019, compared to 19 in 2018.
10 26th July 2019 11
Sally Rooney £2,001,854
of the Week
Stat 629.5%
A helluva year for Sally Rooney, responsible for three of Faber’s top four bestsellers of 2019 (not bad for someone who has written two books). She had five Original Fiction number ones on the trot with Normal People after winning the Costa Novel gong.
12
Jojo Moyes £1,967,477
1.4%
Jojo Moyes’ Still Me has shifted 268,000 paper- backs this half year, the bestselling General Fiction title of 2019. Moyes has earned £19.7m since first being published in 2002, 92% of which has been made since her move to Michael Joseph in 2012.
13
Heather Morris £1,905,231
183.1%
Heather Morris’ The Tattooist of Auschwitz has stepped up a gear in 2019, shifting 329,000 units for £1.9m, the half year’s top- selling novel. All versions of the book have earned £5.7m through BookScan since its initial January 2018 release.
14
Liz Pichon £1,739,496
6.5%
A dip for Liz Pichon, undoubtedly because her usual spring Tom Gates hardback was primarily an activity book: Mega Make and Do sold 32,000 copies in 2019, compared to Biscuits, Bands and Very Big Plans’ 61,000- unit haul last year.
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