IN BRIEF Top 10 Australia


Home-grown talent leads the pack Down Under as spin-offs and seasonal specials make serious headway


Text Kiera O’Brien 3


Readers display their dogged devotion


Dav Pilkey’s 10th Dog Man title, Mothering Heights, charted third in the Aussie children’s chart, with 77,979 copies sold in the country. The author-illustrator’s Dog Man series has been particularly popular in Australia, with Cat Kid Comic Club also charting 19th in the kids’ chart last year. Pilkey also fared well in Ireland (see p12), where Mothering Heights was the third most popular children’s title.


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Bestseller Lists Australia Top 10


1


Top of the tree


Top


of the charts


Australia’s children’s market took a 46% share of print as a whole, though this was 4.8% down on 2020, when lockdown after lockdown saw kids’ book sales jump. Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton’s The 143-Storey Treehouse easily breezed into the territory’s number one spot, outselling Jeff Kinney’s latest Wimpy Kid title, Big Shot, by over 25,000 units.


4


Anh Do’s fifth title in his Wolf Girl series,


Across the Sea, claimed fourth place, as both Ninja Toys! from his Ninja Kids series and the first Wolf Girl title, Into the Wild, joined it in the children’s top 20


6


Blabey’s latest adventure is a cut above


overseas smash


The 13th title in Aaron Blabey’s The Bad Guys series, Cut to the Chase, cut loose in the Australian Children’s chart, selling 50,986 copies in 2021. Blabey’s series, featuring the exploits of Mr Shark, Mr Snake, Mr Wolf and Mr Pirahna as they perform good deeds in an attempt to improve their villainous reputations, has been an international hit, charting top of the New York Times bestseller list in 2019. Its star could be set to rise even further in the coming months, as it is about to become a Dreamworks animated film, featuring the voice talents of Sam Rockwell and Richard Ayoade.


8 Seasonal title strikes chord


Aaron Blabey’s second bestselling kids’ series, Pig the Pug, returned with a Halloween special—Pig the Monster charted eighth, with 47,173 copies sold last year.


10 22nd March 2022 9


Aussie pair scale new heights


Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton’s 2020-published Treehouse series continued to sell strongly in 2021, with The 130-Storey Treehouse scoring ninth place with 44,867 copies sold in total last year. The series is mammoth in Griffiths and Denton’s native Australia, but its sales are growing steadily in the UK too—through BookScan UK, the duo have sold in excess of a million books to date, for a whop- ping £5.4m.


year’s This


2 Kinney takes a shot at the top


Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series remains a behemoth around the world, 16 books in and 14 years on from its opener’s publication. Big Shot sold 83,506 copies to claim second.


5


Teen internet sensation kills it


Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End became an international bestseller in 2021, four years on from its original 2017 publication. Leading the BookTok boom, the Young Adult Fiction title shifted 56,863 copies last year in Australia, with the similarly viral One of Us is Lying by Karen McManus falling just outside the territory’s top 10. Both titles enjoyed a sales boost in the UK after exposure on the social media platform.


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Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid


spin-off series, Diary of an Awesome Friendly Kid, continued to sell strongly Down Under, with Awesome Friendly Spooky Stories notching up seventh place


10


Perennial favourite returns


Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar was the territory’s second-bestselling picture book, after Pig the Monster, in the year of the stal- wart author’s death. In the UK, the originally 1969-published title is just one of two titles to chart in every weekly TCM Top 5,000 since BookScan records began in 1998. After the announcement of his death, aged 91, in May 2021, the 1994 edition rose in sales by 42% week on week.


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