27th June 2025


Data source Date range


Bestselling Black


authors (and their bestselling book)


£ 


Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie  Dream Count 4th Estate, 9780008685737


 Rachel Renée Russell


Dork Diaries: I Love Parties Simon & Schuster, 9781471196850


 Percival Everett


James Picador, 9781035031269


4 Saara El-Arifi


Faebound Harper Voyager, 9780008597009





Steven Bartlett Diary of a CEO


Ebury Edge, 9781529146523 6              


Marcus Rashford The Goblin’s Revenge Macmillan Children’s, 9781035062294


Patrice Caldwell Where Shadows Meet Hot Key, 9781471411861


James Baldwin Giovanni’s Room Penguin, 9780141186351


David Goggins Can’t Hurt Me Lion Crest, 9781544507859


Amber V Nicole The Book of Azrael Headline Eternal, 9781035414505


Joseph Coelho All Poems Aloud WideEyed Editions, 9781836002864


MH Ayinde A Song of Legends Lost Orbit, 9780356525303


Zadie Smith The Fraud Penguin, 9780241983096


       


Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo Penguin, 9780140449266


bell hooks All About Love HarperCollins, 9780060959470


Lemn Sissay Let the Light Pour In Canongate, 9781837262670


Malorie Blackman Noughts & Crosses Penguin, 9780141378640


Benjamin Dean This Story Is a Lie Simon & Schuster, 9781398542679


Ta-Nehisi Coates The Message Hamish Hamilton, 9780241724187


Benjamin Zephaniah Nature Trail Orchard, 9781408361269


       46 Charts


Chimamanda to the fore, as Black writers look for positives from sales rise


C


himamanda Ngozi Adichie has just pipped children’s author Rachel Renée Russell to the top of


the list of the UK’s bestselling Black authors, according to data from NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM). Ngozi Adichie’s books have earned £834,615 across the first 24 weeks of 2025 – largely thanks to her latest novel Dream Count, which was published at the beginning of March and accrued £648,011 across 43,823 copies.


Such is the dearth of Black authors at the top end of the TCM data that even stripping out Dream Count – which is the 109th bestselling book of the year so far


– the Nigerian-born author would still be in seventh place in the Black authors Top 20, an increase on her ranking of 18th in the equivalent period in 2024. A note about the data –


NielsenIQ’s data does not include ethnicity data on the authors in its charts, so a manual sift-through has led to the compilation of this data. And while every care has been taken to compose an accurate list, we may be missing an author or two. To give some context to the size of the task, in the Top 250 ranking of all writers, there are just four Black authors. We have had to look through the Top 1,000 authors to find the first 19 on our list, with Benjamin Zephaniah just outside


   


We should be seeing at least another 30 Black authors in the Top 1,000


Charts


Market Spotlight


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