Shall I compare thee to 2024? Poetry sales start to slip, but still sing
It is tempting to start a piece of analysis on the state of the UK poetry market with a rhyming couplet, but unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – there are not many poets whose names or works rhyme with NielsenIQ BookData.
According to NielsenIQ’s Total Consumer Market (TCM) figures, for the 47 weeks of 2025, so far, the Poetry Texts and Poetry Anthologies have sold more than a million copies – making it the 10th year out of the past 11 that the category will finish with a seven-digit volume total. The only exception in this run was in 2020 because of the Covid-19 lockdown, a year for which we do not have complete sales data.
Poetry ’s sales of 1,047,490 copies are down 4.1% compared with the equivalent period in 2024 – but the category is still on track to end the year with 1.3 million books sold. It is a similar story in terms of actual money spent: the £11.7m rung up through the tills so far in 2025 is down 4.9% against last year, which had a record TCM of £15m.
The latest year is on course to finish with a total of £14.3m – still enough to make it the third-best performance since records began, just behind 2023 and 2024. Those declines are relatively small – the volume figure will miss its 2024 total by just over 50,000 copies, a fifth of which comes from the Top 50. That frontlist is performing slightly better than the rest of the category, down just 9,281 copies – a change in fortune of 2.9%.
One thing that has not changed in the Top 50 is the author sitting at the top of the chart. Donna Ashworth’s To the Women has sold 59,513 copies, putting it comfortably in first place, having sold nearly five times as many as its nearest rival, Simon Armitage’s Dwell.
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At this point in 2024, the bestselling title was Ashworth’s Wild Hope, which, though it was first published in September 2023, managed to sell 34,220 copies – more than twice as many as second-placed Wendy Cope’s The Orange and Other Poems.
To the Women is one of six titles from Ashworth in the Top 50 (three of which appear in the Top 10) and help the Scottish poet to a value of £866,989, a 42.5% increase on 2024 that takes her from the second-biggest author in the category to top of the tree.
Ashworth is a relative newcomer to the poetry scene with her first title, History Will Remember When the World Stopped, independently published just after the end of the first lockdown in 2020. But since then, her nine collections have amassed a lifetime value of just short of £3m, nearly a third of that coming in the past 12 months.
Three thousand years earlier on the timeline, give or take a century or two, is Homer. With three versions of both The Iliad and The Odyssey appearing in the Top 50, the Blind Bard has seen his sales rise 20% compared with 2024, but falls to second place in the author ranking. With sales worth £800,336, Homer is not far behind Ashworth, but comes in significantly ahead of third-placed Seamus Heaney.
With sales of £291,074, Heaney is 157.5% ahead of his 2024 figure, thanks to the much-praised “definitive” collection, The Poems of Seamus Heaney, which, with its meaty average selling price of £33.67 has accrued £155,197 since it was published in the beginning of October. In fact, it is Faber’s Christmas hit, the publisher’s top 2025-published title by value over the autumn months.
The biggest author contractions have been due to a lack of new releases year-on-year. John Cooper Clarke sheds £135,317 as the paperback of his latest anthology WHAT fails to live up to the performance of its hardback in 2024. Pam Ayres is also a victim of the publishing schedule: October 2024’s Doggedly Onward: A Life in Poems has come in with £100,000 less so far this year, accounting for the majority of the poet’s ranking descent.
