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The success of John Green and Veronica Roth has lifted the children's market in the USA to a double digit year on year rise for the first half of 2014, with the print market as a whole recording an almost 2% increase.
Green's The Fault in Our Stars (Penguin) was atop Nielsen BookScan US Top 100 for the week ending 6th July, selling 75,327 copies. That is the eighth straight week it has hit number one, and ninth time in the last 10 weeks. Additionally, the film tie-in version was in second place, selling 44,714 units. Together, the books have sold almost 1.8 million copies through BookScan in 2014.
The latest number one for Green means that in the first 27 weeks of 2014, the top spot was held by a children's book 23 times (Penguin US classifies The Fault in Our Stars as Juvenile Fiction, whereas Penguin UK codes it as adult fiction). Roth's Divergent (Katherine Tegan) was number one for 13 weeks, whilst Dr Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham (Random House Children's Books) held pole position for one week.
Children's books as a whole have shifted 100.8 million units through the tills in the US thus far in 2014, a massive 13.5% rise year on year. Together, Green and Roth have sold 7.5 million copies (3.7 and 3.8, respectively), which means the two authors have combined for 9.5% of all Juvenile Fiction's sales (79.3 million units, up 14% year on year).
Juvenile Non-Fiction has also had a double digit percentage rise in the first half of the year, up 11% to 21.5 million units. As in the UK, this has been driven in a large part by the Minecraft phenomenon, published in the US by Scholastic. The Official Redstone Handbook and Essential Handback are Juvenile Non-Fiction's top two sellers in 2014, selling 333,505 and 327,591 copies respectively.
Overall, BookScan US has recorded 296.4 million units sales in 2014, a 1.7% rise. Print Adult Fiction sales have continued a digital-driven decline, down by 13% year on year to 67.6 million units, whilst Adult Non-Fiction remained level at 114.4 million copies.
Unfortunately, market comparison can only be made year on year, and not for years prior to 2013 as Nielsen added retail giant Wal-Mart to its panel at the end of 2012.