Market Analysis


Data source NielsenIQ BookScan Date range 26 weeks to 2nd May 2026


Indie Retailers’ Top 50 Fiction


Charts


Fiction surges across the UK, while Andrew Miller lands a win with indies


Fiction continues to storm the TCM off the back of a record- breaking year, with General & Literary Fiction making a great showing with indies, led by Andrew Miller’s Booker-Prize nominee The Land in Winter


L 06 The Bookseller Buyer’s Guide Fiction


ast year was quite the 12 months for the Fiction corner of NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market


(TCM). Not only did the category achieve its highest volume perfor- mance since 2012, but it earned more money than ever before (at least since accurate records began at the turn of this century). The £582m spent through the


TCM on fiction titles in 2025 accounted for just under a third of the total money spent on books across the whole year – its biggest share of the pot since, once again, records began – and is “just” £116.9m behind the money garnered by product class leader Non-Fiction: Trade in the same year, the smallest that gap has ever been. Those who have been paying


attention may not be surprised, as volume figures for Adult Fiction have been rising for the past few years, and in 2024 overtook Non-Fiction:


Trade’s figures for the first time since 2012 (when Fifty Shades of Grey was first published). The total volume for 2025 was just 0.2% higher than in 2024, while value jumped 5.3%, pushing the average selling price (ASP) up 43p to £9, the first time it has passed the £8.99 mark, which only a few years ago was the stand- ard RRP for a fiction paperback. How do things look so far in 2026?


Up to and including the first week of June, 26.1 million copies have sold across all fiction categories, 4% more than in the equivalent period


1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10


The Land in Winter Andrew Miller Sceptre, 9781529354300


The Safekeep Yael van der Wouden Penguin, 9780241999776


There Are Rivers in the Sky Elif Shafak Penguin, 9780241988749


Hamnet Maggie O’Farrell Tinder Press, 9781472223821


Flesh David Szalay Jonathan Cape, 9780224099783


Wild Dark Shore Charlotte McConaghy Canongate, 9781837265923


The Rose Field Philip Pullman Penguin/David Fickling Books, 9780241458693


The Names Florence Knapp Phoenix, 9781399624046


The Long Shoe Bob Mortimer Gallery, 9781398548046


You Are Here David Nicholls Hodder, 9781444715460


11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20


The Wedding People Alison Espach Phoenix, 9781399622752


Flesh David Szalay Vintage, 9781529932423


The Impossible Fortune Richard Osman Viking, 9780241743980


When the Cranes Fly… L Ridzén, A Menzies (trans) Penguin (Transworld), 9781804995808


Perfection Vincenzo Latronico, S Hughes (trans) Fitzcarraldo Editions, 9781804271049


Project Hail Mary Andy Weir Penguin (Cornerstone), 9781529157468


The Homemade God Rachel Joyce Penguin (Transworld), 9781804994344


James Percival Everett Picador, 9781035031269


The Proof of My Innocence Jonathan Coe Penguin, 9781405962414


Three Days in June Anne Tyler Vintage, 9781529940220


in 2025 – which translates to just over one million extra books. Those one million units translate to £23.7m, up 10.9% on the equivalent period in 2025, increasing the ASP from £8.63 to £9.20.


T


General & Literary Fiction does tend to over-index for indie bookshops, but it has outperformed compared with the same time period across 2024-25


he continued success of 2025’s big offer- ings such as Freida McFadden, plus the ongoing popularity of


romantasy subscription boxes, is surely a factor. But the early part of this year has also seen big wins for the likes of Rachel Reid’s hockey romances, meaning that fiction sub-categories across the board have seen year-on-year increases – with the exception of Erotic Fiction, possibly because those titles have been rebranded as “spicy” and filed under Romance. Even the slightly outdated


category of Westerns has experi- enced a jump, with volume climb- ing 221.9% to 13,122 copies so far – most of which has come from Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, thanks to Picador’s rejacketing of the 1986 Pulitzer winner (and the rest of his backlist). McMurtry has not sold enough to


make it into the Indie Retailers’ Top 50 for the six months from the beginning of November 2025 – though of course, we cannot be sure how far off he was from making it to the list, as NielsenIQ does not provide sales data for this sector.


LINDA NYLIND


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