SECTOR ANALYSIS
Trendwatch Top 5 Food & Drink titles
185,680 units
Pinch of Nom Air Fryer: Easy, Slimming Meals Kay & Kate Allinson
86,127 units
So Good Emily English
70,812 units
RORY STEWART: STILL RELEVANT IN THE TOP 50
the royal memoir, volume sales are still down 3.5%, the equivalent of around 2.5 million books. I write this before 2024’s crucial Christmas run-in, but in 2023 the Non-Fiction sector delivered 25% of its total sales for the year in the last six weeks—plent of time for the market to pull back some missing sales. In the sales data provided by Nielsen for independent book shops—covering the six months between April and 2nd November— the number one ranked title was Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart, a close match to its second-place position in the wider TCM top 50. Meanwhile, customers of inde- pendent bookshops seem less keen on air fryers, with the TCM number one—Pinch of Nom: Air Fryer—not appearing in the indie bookshop best- seller list at all. It is a similar patern for Food & Drink titles in general: this accounts for 20% of the nationwide top 50, but has only three bestsellers in the indie list. Rick Stein’s Food Stories is one such title, appearing in 35th place, despite only making it to 149th nationally, although this boost
could be provided by the chef’s own bookshop in Padstow. Including Stein, there are 31 titles popular in the indie sector that do not cross over with the UK-wide TCM. Of these, the biggest over-indexer is James Rebanks’ memoir The Place of Tides, which, despite not making it into the total top 500 Non-Fiction titles, gets to 42nd place on the indie list—even though it has been available for only two of the 26 weeks covered in the data. Rick Astley’s Never—another rela- tively new title—has also proven to be popular, making it to third overall and the highest-placed hardback in indie bookshops. It is one of 25 hardbacks on the list, showing the indie sector is slightly more skewed towards the format than the country as a whole, where the chart features only 20— half of which are the cookery books mentioned earlier. The most popular category in
Non-Fiction for indies is Biography & Memoir, taking up 32% of the total slots available, followed by the combined history categories with 16%—a list that includes the second
bestseller for the independent market, David Mitchell’s Unruly. Perhaps perpetuating an image
of what the average indie bookshop customer spends their time on, Gardening and Poetry take up 10% of the space on the indie list between them, despite not appearing in the UK-wide top 50 at all. Both gardening titles— Olivia Laing’s Garden Against Time and Why Women Grow
by Alice Vincent—are perhaps less “how-to” and fit more into the biography and history categories. Poetry titles from Wendy Cope, Simon Armitage and Lemn Sissay have all sold well in indie bookshops this year, along with Raynor Winn, who is the sole writer to have two titles to feature in the list—The Salt Path and The Wild Silence. The only authors to replicate this in the TCM are G T Karber with his Murdle books and the late Dr Michael Mosley— both of whom can muster only one appearance with the indies.
Simply Jamie Jamie Oliver
60,606 units
The Food for Life Cookbook Tim Spector
46,983 units
How to Eat 30 Plants a Week Hugh Fearnley- Whittingstall
*Lifetime sales are across all editions through the entire TCM.
February 2025–July 2025 07
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