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Review of 2009: The Bestsellers

07.01.10 Philip Stone

This time last year, in The Bookseller's review of 2008, it was written: "we, perhaps fittingly, have the much pilloried celebrities to thank for saving what could have been an even poorer end to the year".

So much changes in just 12 months.

Last month, sales were down 1.2% on December 2008 in spending terms and it was the failure of the celebrities to reach previous heady heights that was one of the root causes. In 2008, Paul O'Grady's memoir sold 664,000 copies in hardback, while Dawn French's sold 590,000, Julie Walters' sold 477,000 and Michael Parkinson's recollections fell just short of the 450,000 mark. Last year, Ant & Dec's Ooh! What a Lovely Pair (Michael Joseph) proved the biggest selling celebrity memoir of the year, but at 309,083 sales, it was less than half Paul O'Grady's 2008 total.

Other celebrities struggled to match previous performances. Peter Kay's Saturday Night Peter, for example, sold 249,534 copies in hardback over Christmas last year—less than a third of the sales his first memoir, The Sound of Laughter (both Century), managed in 2006. And it wasn't only memoirs that struggled. It seemed a US diet didn't whet the UK appetite—Jamie Oliver's Jamie's America sold 239,623 copies last year, less than half the figure Ministry of Food posted in 2008.

However, perhaps heralding the death of the celebrity book is a little premature. They still dominate the non-fiction bestseller lists, after all. And perhaps the world's biggest celebrity, Barack Obama, takes the PB non-fiction number one spot with Dreams from My Father (Canongate).

Of course, one man's "celebrity" is another man's "who?", so it is incredibly difficult to calculate their value to publishers and retailers. But it is obvious that without them, sales in 2009 would have been far lower.

According to Nielsen BookScan data, £1.752bn was spent on 235.7 million books last year, down 1.2% year on year by value and down just 0.5% in volume terms. It confirms many early 2009 predictions from voices within the industry that the cheap price of books would protect the trade against the recession. However, Nielsen BookScan's General Retail Market, which is a good indicator of high street bookshop performance (as it includes sales data from branches of Waterstone's, W H Smith, and "general independents"), reported a sales decline of 6.9%, to £967.9m, the lowest figure since 2000. In the face of increasing internet and supermarket competition, and exemplified by the collapse of Borders, the high street bookshop undoubtedly still faces a difficult future.

But what of the past? This was the year of Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown, who were worth a combined £44.2m to UK book retailers—or 3% of all book sales in volume terms. Meyer topped The Bookseller's weekly children's bestseller lists for a staggering 46 weeks of the 52, while Brown's long-awaited The Lost Symbol smashed sales records on its way to top spot in September. It tops the Official UK Top 50 of 2009 (right) with 1,278,014 in sales, some 980,000 copies more than the previous adult hardback fiction sales record. -However, the Top 50 is based on single-edition sales only. If you were to compile an "across all editions" bestseller list (which can be viewed online), Meyer's second Twilight novel, New Moon (Atom) would top the chart with a 1,298,477 sale.

While Meyer-mania swept the UK and the market gained a new Brown, what it lost was a fully functioning "Richard & Judy". Although sales of their Book Club and Summer Read titles didn't suffer the catastrophic drop that their viewing figures experienced, the consequences of their move from Channel Four to digital TV obscurity was felt by retailers. Just shy of £12.6m was spent on the 18 R&J-approved titles in 2009, down 52% year on year, with volume sales falling 46% to 2.3 million. In fact, if you were to strip both years' titles out from the year-end data, volume sales last year would actually have been up 0.4% in 2009. Kate Atkinson's When Will There be Good News? (Black Swan) and Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (Bloomsbury) are the only two R&J titles to chart in the 2009 Top 50. Seven achieved the feat in 2008, with two (by Linwood Barclay and Khaled Hosseini) posting 600,000-plus sales.  


 

Original fiction
The Lost Symbol's initial five-day sale of 550,900 copies smashed the previous hardback fiction sales record—set by Thomas Harris' Hannibal— by more than 250,000 copies. Dan Brown's novel (Bantam Press) went on to sell an additional 727,000 copies by the end of 2009, meaning the conspiracy thriller sold one copy every seven seconds on average since publication. If you were to stack every copy sold in the UK into a single pile, it would reach 35 miles into the air.

Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals narrowly beats Martina Cole's Hard Girls into the original fiction runner-up spot. Unseen Academicals' sales were up around 16% on Pratchett's previous adult Discworld novel, Making Magic, while sales of Hard Girls were up one-third on last year's The Business.

Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall takes fourth thanks to huge popularity since its Man Booker win—it has become the fastest-selling Booker winner since records began in 1998.

Mass market fiction
Across all editions, Marian Keyes' ninth novel, This Charming Man, sold just over 500,000 copies last year, and the mass market edition's 54,729 weekly sale in March was the 2009 record. It was one of three mass market fiction titles to sell more than 400,000 copies in 2009, a feat achieved by just one (Linwood Barclay's No Time for Goodbye) in 2008.

The late Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo takes second position. It belatedly topped the paperback fiction bestseller lists in December 2009, almost two years after it first hit UK bookshop shelves —an incredibly rare feat for a book that doesn't benefit from a film adaptation boom, as did Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper (in fourth), Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife (fifth) and Dan Brown's Angels and Demons (16th).  A big year for Larsson; the second and third books in his Millennium trilogy take ninth position here and fifth in Original Fiction.

Fiction heatseekers
The fiction heatseekers chart contains any work of fiction by an author who has never made The Bookseller's weekly Official UK Top 50 since records began in 1998, and it is topped by one of the most discussed books of 2009—Seth Grahame-Smith's undead twist on Jane Austen's classic, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. A graphic novel edition hits the shelves later this year.

Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram topped the 2008 heatseekers list and takes second position this year, but it is surely only a matter of time before it cracks the Top 50—the much-delayed film adaptation is set for release in 2011. Scott Mariani (twice) and Tom Knox both chart with Dan Brown-esque conspiracy thrillers, while Penguin's 2004 edition of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four charts in 15th. Beatrice Colin and Jill Dawson both chart with R&J Book Club/Summer Read members but Stephen L Carter's Palace Council (34,416) misses out altogether.

Hardback non-fiction
Many column inches revelled in the poor performance of the celebrity memoir over Christmas 2009 but, while it is certainly true that sales were down on a bumper 2008, the fact remains that they still dominate the weekly bestseller lists. Bar Guinness World Records (which suffered a dip in sales compared to 2008), Ripley's Believe it or Not and a couple of "Top Gear" spin-offs, the only bona-fide non-celebrity in the list is Antony Beevor. His comprehensive history of the Battle for Normandy, D-Day, set a new benchmark in modern serious non-fiction in the summer. Its 22,432 weekly sale was the highest from an academic subject hardback since Christmas 2000. It spent eight weeks as the hb non-fiction number one, beaten only by Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food (nine weeks) and Guinness World Records (14 weeks).

BBC "Top Gear" spin-off Where's Stig? proved one of the sleeper hits of Christmas, ending the year as the fourth bestselling hb non-fiction book.



Paperback non-fiction
The US president missed out top spot in this chart of 2008 to the consistent-seller, The Official Highway Code, but Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father takes the 2009 top spot thanks to a 367,829 annual sale. But it didn't hold the paperback non-fiction "weeks at number one" record in 2009, spending three weeks less at the top than both Julie Walters' That's Another Story and Jade Goody's Jade: Fighting to the End which both spent eight weeks each at the summit.

Kate Summerscale's award-winning The Suspicions of Mr Whicher was one of few R&J successes in 2009, and takes second position overall, while Dawn French was second only to Ant & Dec as the author of the year's bestselling celebrity memoir.

There's also a place in the Top 20 for Ben Goldacre's quack science exposé, Bad Science. Released in a mass-market edition in April 2009, it has enjoyed consistently strong sales since publication.



Children's
Stephenie Meyer spent an unparalleled 46 weeks at the top of the children's bestseller lists in 2009. The first three books in her Twilight series all sold more than one million copies at UK bookshops last year, across all editions, while Breaking Dawn sold more than 900,000 copies in hardback.

For the first time since 2005 The Beano took the crown of the bestselling annual of the year. Its 227,949 sale was up 12,000 copies on the previous edition but, crucially, sales of The Official Doctor Who Annual and High School Musical Annual were much lower in 2009 than in previous years. If multiple editions were taken into consideration, both Eric Carle's classic, The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Julia Donaldson's The Gruffalo would enter the Top 10.
Donaldson's World Book Day title, The Tyrannosaurus Drip Song, misses out on the Top 20 by just 215 copies. The six 2009 WBD titles sold 815,131 copies last year, down 21% on the total sales of the nine titles in 2008.


 

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