Chimamanda to the fore, as Black writers look for positives from sales rise

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has just pipped children’s author Rachel Renée Russell to the top of the list of the UK’s bestselling Black authors, according to data from NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM). Ngozi Adichie’s books have earned £834,615 across the first 24 weeks of 2025 – largely thanks to her latest novel Dream Count, which was published at the beginning of March and accrued £648,011 across 43,823 copies.

Such is the dearth of Black authors at the top end of the TCM data that even stripping out Dream Count – which is the 109th bestselling book of the year so far – the Nigerian-born author would still be in seventh place in the Black authors Top 20, an increase on her ranking of 18th in the equivalent period in 2024. 

A note about the data – NielsenIQ’s data does not include ethnicity data on the authors in its charts, so a manual sift-through has led to the compilation of this data. And while every care has been taken to compose an accurate list, we may be missing an author or two. 

To give some context to the size of the task, in the Top 250 ranking of all writers, there are just four Black authors. We have had to look through the Top 1,000 authors to find the first 19 on our list, with Benjamin Zephaniah just outside that list of 1,000. Interrogating that statistic reveals that a mere fraction of the UK’s book sales are generated by Black authors: taking up 1.8% of the slots in the Top 1,000, this Top 20 only accounts for 1.6% of the money spent. 

Meanwhile, the 2021 census estimates that 4% of the UK’s population is Black, with a further 1.3% describing themselves as Mixed White/Black African or Mixed White/Black Caribbean – suggesting that, with all things equal, we should be seeing at least another 30 Black authors in the Top 1,000. 

Just under half of the £5m that has been spent on those authors comes from the top three alone, with Russell and Percival Everett appearing alongside Ngozi Adichie in the overall Top 100 bestsellers of the year thus far.

We should be seeing at least another 30 Black authors in the Top 1,000

It is Everett who has the bestselling title from a Black author in 2025, setting aside Benjamin Dean’s World Book Day (WBD) title This Story Is a Lie for a moment. Everett’s James – which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2025 and last month, perhaps most prestigiously, was awarded the Nibbie for Fiction Book of the Year – has sold a total of 77,473 copies in mass-market paperback since its end-of-February launch and is one of only three Black-authored titles to appear in the overall UK Top 100.

The other two slots are taken up by the previously mentioned Dean and his WBD stable-mate Joseph Coelho whose All Poems Aloud (illustrated by Daniel Gray-Barnett) interested 20,000 fewer children than did Dean’s offering. 

At this point in 2024 there were also three books from Black authors in the TCM Top 100, however in this instance they were all £1 WBD titles – given away by booksellers in exchange for the WBD voucher handed out to children across the country. It is not until position 126 on the chart that we find the first non-WBD Black-authored title – The List by Yomi Adegoke – which sold 40,465 copies, just over 37,000 units fewer than Everett’s James. 

So far in 2025, £5.1m has been spent on the Top 20 Black authors – that is roughly the same amount of money earned by Sarah J Maas’ titles, significantly less than the amount spent on Dav Pilkey, Rebecca Yarros and Julia Donaldson, respectively, and roughly half the amount generated by revision guides from CGP.

Still, one glimmer of hope is that figure is up 11.9% on the bestselling Black authors in 2024, when the list could only take 1.4% of the total pie. At this rate of growth, the market sales will reflect the UK-wide demographics in just under two decades.