Choose the subscription that suits you: digital or delivered.
Book trade insight,
your way
Print & Digital
Digital 30.01.26 30th January 2026 Features Review of the Year
Non-Fiction O
Non-fiction slips again: A new low for academic, but religion and memoir shone
In a down year for Non-Fiction, there were some stand-out successes among memoir, religion, philosophy and self-improvement. Tom Tivnan reports
ur previous Reviews of the Year across this January – in which we focused on bestsellers,
authors and publishers – have not been the cheeriest for the Non- Fiction side. And the category’s performance in this genre analysis will not bring much sunshine either. All is not downbeat, as there were a few green shoots. But let us not sugarcoat it: combined sales through NielsenIQ BookScan’s
Total Consumer Market’s (TCM) for Adult Non-Fiction: Specialist and Adult Non-Fiction: Trade slumped 4.9% to £790.6m, the fifth- lowest return since records began. NF: Specialist – where much of
the academic and professional titles sit – drifted below the £100m mark for the first time, its third- consecutive TCM nadir. This is part of the long-running and much-discussed in these pages shift of higher education output to digital. And while some NF: Specialist categories are less prone to attrition – broadly, those in the humanities – the dip is largely across the board. At its most granu- lar level, BookScan has 73 different Specialist sub-sub-genres, 62 of which had value sales losses in 2025, and 52 of those were in double-digit percentage slides. The 11 NF: Specialist product
1 26
classes that bucked the downward trajectory often did so because more trade-facing titles ended up coded within them. The overall bestselling NF: Specialist outing of 2025 was Gareth Southgate’s Dear England (Century, £561,000), which could have been slotted into NF: Trade’s Careers & Success or its sport and business auto- biography categories better than NF: Specialist’s Management Techniques. An exception was
2 £400m
Philosophy’s 11.5% growth to £4.9m. And while it did benefit from this metadata wrangling – the category’s top by value, Ash Sarkar’s Minority Rule (Bloomsbury), arguably fits better in one of NF: Trade’s politics sub- genres – the real push was from the online stoicism trend with hits from Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and the philosophy’s popular modern- day proponent, Ryan Holiday.
Speaking words of wisdom NF: Trade contracted 3.6% in value to its worst haul in eight years, but there were some nice wins as 54 of its 141 product classes outpaced their 2024 TCM value. Autobiography: Business hurtled 89.4% to £2.9m, the second- biggest year-on-year growth for any BookScan product class earn- ing over £1m, Fiction and Children’s included. Nearly 72% of the category came from just two smashes, both published in early 2025: What’s Your Dream? (Century, £902,000) by Simon Squibb ( 1) , who went from home- less teen to entrepreneur and now unlikely TikTok star; and Gary
Top-Line data Non-fiction: Trade & Specialist Trade BookScan TCM volume
54,610,223 698,089,473 4,950,906 92,559,019
Trade BookScan TCM value (£) Specialist BookScan TCM volume Specialist BookScan TCM value (£) £800m £600m Year-on-year difference
6.0% 3.6% 11.4% 13.7%
Ten-year TCM history Value sales 2016-25 30.01.26 Year-on-year difference Year-on-year difference Year-on-year difference 3
Stevenson’s The Trading Game (Penguin, £1.2m), which was the Paperback Non-Fiction number one for almost all of last year’s first quarter. BookScan’s categories have
three levels: the most granular (what it calls product classes; the accompanying chart is NF: Trade’s top product classes by value), the overarching (like NF: Trade) and the mid-level, which arranges product classes by subject groups. There are 18 of these mid-level NF: Trade categories, and all but three had value contractions. Yet, the usual biggest player here,
Key l Non-Fiction: Trade l Non-Fiction: Specialist
Top 20 Non-Fiction: Trade 1 Food & Drink: General
2 Travel & Holiday Guides: General 3 Autobiography: The Arts 4 Handicrafts, Arts & Crafts
5 Health, Dieting & Wholefood Cookery 6 Autobiography: General 7 Popular Psychology
8 Self Improvement: General 9 Military History 10 Regional History 11 Music & Dance
12 Poetry Texts & Poetry Anthologies 13 Puzzles
14 Popular Science
15 History: Specific Subjects 16 Fine Arts/Art History 17 Careers & Success
18 National & Regional Cuisine 19 Biography: The Arts
20 Christianity: Bibles & Liturgy RECORD
20.0% 2.1% 6.4% 1.5% 0.3%
15.6% 32.5%
12.0% 2.5% 3.3% 4.1%
19.5% 2.0% 7.8%
45.8%
32.5% 15.9%
£40,836,528 £25,750,617 £23,601,713 £23,458,048 £23,180,560 £22,219,950
3.6% £19,250,928 £16,154,481
9.9% £15,153,230 £15,043,823 £14,927,830 £14,496,515 £11,999,637 £11,150,748 £10,843,611 £10,249,330 £10,124,094
8.4% £9,760,529 £9,503,264 £9,420,636
Biographies & Autobiographies (B&A), was in the TCM black, up 2.5% to £102.2m. Of B&A’s 18 product classes, 11 had value jumps, all of which were greater than 10%. Biography: The Arts was up a third to £9.5m, with a little help (or, rather, Help!) from Ian Leslie’s much-praised, Baillie Gifford- longlisted Beatles biography, John and Paul (Faber, £533,000). But the really good boy was Ted the Dog, the canine star of Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, whose Ebury-published Pup Fiction and A Pawtobiography combined to shift £950,000. An unusually busy year for memoirs from the scribbling classes – such as Michael Morpurgo, Sebastian Faulks and Geoff Dyer, alongside the controversial release of the late Joan Didion’s therapy diary entries as Notes to John (4th Estate) – had Autobiographies: Literature leap- ing 26.6% to £3.6m. But the main driver was the combined £950,000 delivered by former Booker winners Margaret Atwood and Arundhati Roy ( 2) ; the latter’s Mother Mary
Comes to Me (Hamish Hamilton) was Foyles’ overall and Blackwell’s Non-Fiction Book of the Year (and while this does not apply directly to the TCM, Audible named it Audiobook of the Year, too). Religion was up 10.5% to £27.9m,
NF: Trade’s second-biggest mid- level category gainer – after Personal Development’s 13.5% jump to £53.2m – and the only one to record a best-ever TCM result. Five of the nine Religion sub- genres notched sales jumps, including a record year for Christianity: Bibles & Liturgy (up 15.9% to £9.4m). Religion as a whole is not a category for hits: since records began, only six editions
72%
Percentage of Autobiography: Business’ value sales generated by Simon Squibb and Gary Stevenson
41%
Percentage of Careers & Success’ £10.1m earned by Mel and Sawyer Robbins
have shifted more than 100,000 units via BookScan and its model is many titles ticking over for years. But Bear Grylls’ ( 3) The Greatest Story Ever Told (John Murray) was one of the rare smashes. The celebrity bivouac-er’s “eyewitness account” of Jesus Christ’s story sold a little more than 62,000 units since its June launch, already the 16th-bestselling Religion title in TCM history.
27
Print & Digital Digital only From £19
From £18
Weekly print copies of The Bookseller magazine Unlimited access to
thebookseller.com (single user)
l l
The Bookseller digital edition for desktop, tablet, mobile l Subscriber-only newsletters
l Twice-yearly Buyer’s Guides worth £30
Discounts on tickets for The Bookseller conferences and The British Book Awards
Find out more at
thebookseller.com/subscribe l l l l l l l
Review of the Year
The Genres
MAYANK AUSTEN SOOFI
SOURCE: NIELSENIQ BOOKSCAN. 2020 AND 2021 MISSING 17 AND 11 WEEKS OF DATA, RESPECTIVELY
Review of the Year
The Genres
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68
