SECTOR ANALYSIS
The 11th title is Saga superstar Dilly Court’s A Thimble for Christmas. Saga’s core demographic obviously isn’t on TikTok, but its retailer wheelhouse is supermarkets and Court’s book’s 51,000-unit sales have come on a 45% discount off r.r.p. Indies do benefit
from BookTok, but it
SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA PICKED UP THE BOOKER PRIZE IN 2022
This chart is awash with prize winners, who indies consistently support. And even some authors who missed out on the gongs
Monica Heisey’s Really Good, Actually (35th place) is a Romance novel while Bella Mackie’s How to Kill Your Family (45th) is Crime. Plus, there is the age-old issue of
the indie chart. And in the sharpest difference of all there are 11 Romance & Sagas books market wide and not one in this top 50. This does not necessarily mean that indie bookshop buyers are all high literati tpes who anxiously await the next Knausgaard and hoover up whatever Fitzcarraldo Editions publishes. I mean, you can’t get more mainstream, crowd-pleasing genre fiction than Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club series, three of which are
represented here. And part of this is publishers’ metadata choices as there are a number of books on the indie Top 50 that could easily sit in another BookScan category; I would argue that
widely available big brand author titles at retailers such as Tesco or W H Smith that will have a whopping discount. Ten of those 11 Romance & Sagas authors in the full TCM Top 50 are from the BookTok end of the market (four are from Colleen Hoover), all of which have average selling prices that are about 40% off their recommended retail price.
tends to be at the more literary end. Coco Mellors’ 21st-placed Cleopatra and Frankenstein has been a hit on the app, as has Donna Tart’s The Secret History. I’ve never felt older than recently when my teenage niece began enthusing about a “new” book she discovered on BookTok which aſter a while I realised was Tart’s 1992 début, which I remember buying when it came out. Anyway… The Secret History has shiſted just over 200,000 units in the BookTok era (since the beginning of 2020), quadruple what it sold in the previous decade. This chart is awash with prize
winners, who indies consistently support. And even some authors who missed out on the gongs. Claire Keegan was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, losing to Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (38th). But that shortlisting has been transformational for Keegan’s career, helped by Faber rejacketing her backlist: she has three entries on this chart and has sold £2.2m through the TCM in the past 12 months aſter earning £700,000 in the 24 years prior to the Booker nod.
Fourth Wing Rebecca Yarros Piatkus
80,438 units
Trendwatch Fantasy
96,509 units
Fairy Tale Stephen King Hodder
57,384 units
Iron Flame Rebecca Yarros Piatkus
34,385 units
A Court of Thorns and Roses Sarah J Mass Bloomsbury
31,464 units
Babel R F Kuang HarperVoyager
COCO MELLORS TITLE HAS BEEN A HIT ON BOOKTOK
*Sales are across all editions through the entire TCM.
February 2024–July 2024 07
© Booker Prize Foundation
© Ryan Pfluger
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