Hang the mistletoe: Romance rules this Christmas

A staple of every bookshop at Christmas is festive-themed fiction, which typically falls into one of two camps: Yuletide romance or midwinter murders. Unfortunately, neither of those, nor “Christmas Fiction” is a category provided by NielsenIQ BookData, so this analysis has been done by searching for associated words in the titles, and by highlighting books we know are set in the period itself.

All that is to say, while checking the list more than twice there may be some titles missing from our list of festive bestsellers. The Top 50 titles we have found in NielsenIQ’s festive stocking have sold a total of 84,351 copies in the last week of November, earning £423,225 – that accounts for 5.3% of all fiction titles that have passed through the tills, but only 2.8% of the £15.3m that the category earned in the same period.

That disparity between volume and value is no surprise, considering that the majority of the Christmas-themed titles are paperback: there are just seven hardbacks in the list, with the biggest-selling of those, Nicola Upson’s The Christmas Clue, selling 3,172 copies in seven days with an RRP of just £10.

In addition, 20 of the titles that appear in that Top 50 have an average selling price below £3, suggesting that the biggest present a festive reader is looking for is a discount.

While readers across the country will be escaping enforced fun with their family by diving into a book, it is not necessarily with murder in mind that they turn to fiction. Half of the titles in our list come from the Romance & Saga sub-category, with another 11 finding themselves in the slightly more vague General & Literary Fiction.

Of these 11, at least seven of them – including Miranda Dickinson’s Fairytale of New York and Jill Mansell’s A Walk in the Park – are probably better suited to Romance, and while the clue is in the name for Richard Coles’ Murder Under the Mistletoe, it sits in General Fiction rather than joining the 14 other titles in Crime, Thriller & Adventure.

Continues…