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Review of 2007: Paperbacks ride high

18.01.08 Philip Stone

Discard any preconceptions, cast aside what you have been told: the following pages offer the authoritative breakdown of the bestselling paperbacks published in 2007. The titles in The Bookseller’s third Hot 100 account for an eye-popping 9.6% of all unit  sales in 2007.
With numerous 2007 high-flyers still selling in their thousands early in the New Year, the titles in the chart overleaf demand face-outs, recommendation cards, table piles and window stacks. The figures suggest the big books are still getting bigger: a paperback must now sell 125,466 copies to make the Hot 100, up from 117,355 in 2006 and 110,108 in 2005.

Much has been made of the industry’s reliance on J K Rowling and "Richard & Judy”, and in this chart the TV duo’s influence is obvious. All but two of the 16 titles selected for either their 2007 Book Club or Summer Read make the list; James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack (Penguin) and Jonathan Tropper’s How to Talk to a Widower (Orion) narrowly missed out, although each sold more than 100,000 copies in a single edition. The 14 R&J choices that feature in the chart account for 22%, or £25.4m, of revenue in the Hot 100, based on BookScan’s Total Consumer Market data.

Industry cynics have claimed that the book battle in 2007 was little more than a duel between J K Rowling and R&J producer Amanda Ross. Indeed, sales of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (worth £36.5m) and sales of all editions of all 16 R&J picks (worth £26.8m) combined to take 3.5%, or £63.3m, of total sales in 2007.

The interpretation of data

It is R&J’s Book of the Year that sits atop the 2007 paperback bestseller chart. Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder (Headline) clinches the top spot in a repeat of last year, when the show’s chosen Book of the Year, Labyrinth by Kate Mosse, came out on top. Rubenfeld’s total sales figure is 45,000 copies short of the lofty height gained by Mosse in 2006. The 2005 winner, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, sold fewer than 300,000 copies in its mass market edition.

Other female writers feature strongly at the top end of the Hot 100. Kim Edwards’ The Memory Keeper’s Daughter (Penguin), an R&J Summer Read, sold 701,576 copies to take second place, putting American authors at places one and two. Penguin takes spots two and three, with Marian Keyes’ Anybody Out There? shifting 585,026 copies to reach third place. Keyes was among the Hot 100 top five in 2005 thanks to The Other Side of the Story, which sold 488,508 copies during that year.

Kate Morton’s The House at Riverton and Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother (Vintage) round off the top five. Along with both The Memory Keeper’s Daughter and The House at Riverton, A Spot of Bother has sold at least 5,000 copies every week since publication in paperback. It’s a remarkable feat for Haddon who, although he won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 2003 for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, was not last year afforded any "Richard & Judy” airtime, unlike as Edwards and Morton.

The R&J Summer Reads appear more popular than the Book Club picks, even though the latter have been on sale longer. The eight mass market paperback editions of the Summer Reads outsold the eight Book Club titles by 2.6 million copies to 2.3 million.

Film factor

Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (Harper-Perennial) features, after winning the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction; and Afghan-American Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns (Bloomsbury), a current R&J Book Club choice, is the only trade paperback in the Hot 100.

Maeve Binchy returns to the Hot 100 with Whitethorn Woods (Orion), her tale of a small town divided over plans for a bypass, while Cecelia Ahern’s A Place Called Here (HarperCollins) charts ahead of the film tie-in of PS, I Love You, which narrowly misses out.

US mega-brands James Patterson and Jodi Picoult are the only two authors with more than two titles on the list. Patterson, with the assistance of co-authors Andrew Gross, Maxine Paetro and Peter De Jonge, has four entries, and Hachette Livre stablemate Jodi Picoult takes three chart places thanks to the rapid output of her backlist from Hodder.
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter enjoyed eight consecutive weeks of sales above 10,000 copies, even before it was chosen as an R&J Summer Read, thanks to word-of-mouth floating across the Atlantic. But for every Kim Edwards there is another author who sinks on the crossing: the paperback of Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants (Hodder) sold fewer than 5,000 copies in the UK, compared to more than a million for the US Workman edition, according to Nielsen BookScan figures for 2007.

Auriol Bishop, Hodder’s paperback publishing director, confesses sadness that it "made barely a murmur”. Booksellers suggest that the book’s subject matter of a travelling circus against the backdrop of the Great Depression is inviting to US readers, while Edwards’ emotional drama is more of a misery memoir drama, traditionally popular in the UK.
But Hodder has another bite at the cherry with a film adaptation scheduled for release in 2009. The novel is to be re-jacketed and is a World Book Day Top 100 Hidden Gem, as part of the Books to Talk About in 2008 promotion.

Another mass market hopeful from the US, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, the US Christmas number one, sold 10,000 copies in the UK in 2007, for Bloomsbury. In the US, Penguin shifted 2.4 million copies, helped by a spot on "The Oprah Winfrey Show”; again a film adaptation might come to the rescue for the UK publisher, with Julia Roberts pencilled in to star in Paramount’s adaptation.

The silver screen effect ought not to be underestimated. Many of last year’s film successes, such as Brick Lane (Black Swan), PS I Love You (HarperCollins), The Golden Compass (Scholastic) and The Kite Runner (Bloomsbury), were adapted from novels published before 2007. Their original editions are therefore ineligible for Hot 100 inclusion. However, the film tie-in editions published in 2007 do make the cut. Ian McEwan is pick of the bunch with the tie-in edition of Atonement (Vintage), which makes the top 10. The original 2002 paperback edition also shifted 80,000 copies during the year.

Transworld on top

Honorary Brit Bill Bryson proves ever-popular with his autobiography. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (Black Swan) takes the paperback non-fiction crown, thanks to annual sales of 444,167. Kudos goes to Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (also Black Swan) and Peter Kay’s The Sound of Laughter (Arrow)—both huge hits in hardback in 2006 that repeated the success in paperback in 2007. John Grisham’s work of non-fiction The Innocent Man (Arrow) also deserves a non-fiction nod, for shifting 322,250 copies in just seven weeks.

Jeremy Clarkson is one of three authors who appears twice in the Hot 100. What is unusual in Clarkson’s sales is that Born to be Riled was first published as a BBC hardback in 1999; Penguin’s re-jacketed 2007 edition proved his most popular backlist book last year. He narrowly misses a top 20 place in the current Hot 100, after scoring a top five entry in 2006 with I Know You Got Soul, and a number one in 2005 with The World According to Clarkson.

The lack of a non-fiction paperback in this year’s top five points more to the strong performance of the category in 2006 than a poor 2007. Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze? (Profile) set a new benchmark for paperback non-fiction, with 583,271 sales in the final three months of 2006. It was a staggering performance to follow, even for Profile itself, whose New Scientist follow-up, How to Fossilise Your Hamster, sold a much lower 161,248 to enter the Hot 100.

Misery memoirs have a lower profile in this year’s Hot 100 than last year, taking only five spots compared to 13 in 2006—HarperElement own three of these, Toni Maguire’s Don’t Tell Mummy, Cathy Glass’ Damaged and Stuart Howarth’s Please, Daddy, No.
In children’s, High School Musical 2: The Book of the Film (Parragon) takes the crown, one of three High School Musical titles to appear in the list.

Orion and Transworld both have fiction, non-fiction and children’s books in the Hot 100. Transworld commands the charts with 19 of its titles appearing, helping Random House Group nudge slightly ahead of big rival Hachette Livre, with 32 Hot 100 titles to 31.

Hot 100 by Publisher Titles
Pos    Publisher    Titles
1    Transworld    19
2    HarperCollins    13
3    Headline    10
4    Penguin    9
5=    Random House CHA    8
5=    Hodder    8
7    Little, Brown    7
8    Orion    6
9    Pan Macmillan    5
10    Random House CCV    4
11    Parragon    3
12    Bloomsbury    2
13=    Ebury    1
13=    Granta    1
13=    Profile    1
13=    Quercus    1
13=    Scholastic    1
13=    The Stationery Office    1

Flagship Feature publishers Philip Stone Paperbacks Review of the year

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