Review of the Year: Authors – The Gruffalo soldier marches on as ‘Freida readahs’ take McFadden to new heights

As Trina and Missy Elliott once memorably rapped, let’s rewind that back. In fact, we are rewinding it back as we have since 2020, for Julia Donaldson has notched a record sixth consecutive year as the UK’s bestselling author through NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM).

The picture-book empress secured the crown with a personal best of £17.9m on 3.3 million copies sold. This continues another record: 2025 was the 16th year on the trot that Donaldson smashed the £10m TCM mark. While it would be unwise to say a record will never be broken, Donaldson’s annual eight-figure run seems nigh-uncatchable. David Walliams had been second on the consecutive yearly £10m+ streak with eight, but that ended in 2022; the author with a current next-longest active run is Richard Osman with five straight years. Plus, unless something drastic happens, Donaldson’s sales will undoubtedly continue to roll on in similar fashion for years. 

(A quick aside, which I have been asked to stress by an Authors Top 50 frequent flyer as “people think I’m far richer than I am”: TCM value data corresponds to money sold through the tills, certainly not what writers earn.)

While Donaldson showed a clean pair of heels to the rest of the league table, second-placed Freida McFadden’s year was transformational. The psychological crime writer’s £12m nearly doubled the total of her huge breakout a year earlier when sales shot up 757% to £6.5m. There was a boost from The Housemaid (Little, Brown) film adaptation at the end of last year but the bulk of the sales had been rung up before then, helped by a hefty schedule of six new releases over the course of 2025.

While a brace of The Housemaid series is published digitally by Bookouture (which launched the author in Britain) and in print via its sister Hachette division Little, Brown, the majority (£8.7m) of McFadden’s sales derived from Sourcebooks’ Poisoned Pen Press, distributed in the UK by DK. With £100,000 chipped in from a handful of other authors, that means the US-based outfit was the UK’s second-biggest imprint in 2025 through BookScan’s Crime, Thriller & Adventure category, trailing only Penguin. There are a few T&Cs here, including how Penguin Random House (PRH) splits its imprints’ paperbacks and hardbacks metadata-wise. But still, this is quite an achievement for the American mystery specialist. 

It could be an even bigger 2026 for McFadden, as she kicked off the year with two straight overall UK number ones and there are a brace of confirmed titles on tap for 2026, plus in her latest newsletter to fans – or her “Freida readahs” (Boston-based McFadden’s phrase works best if said with a thick Massachusetts accent) – the author teased there was “much more to come” in the next 12 months.

Actually romantic

It is apposite that Donaldson and McFadden are at the business end of the 2025 league table as it is dominated by Children’s and Fiction. Twenty-seven slots are taken up by adult novelists, 17 by kids’ authors, though there are a number who write across both camps, including JK Rowling, Holly Jackson, Philip Pullman and Sarah J Maas. Kids’ and Fiction authors combined to account for 90.5% of the £247.4m generated by the Top 50. That £247.4m was worth 13.6% of the entire TCM, a significant £20m and 1.2 percentage-point rise on the 2024 list’s share of the market.

Love was in the air for 2025’s Top 50 with 11 authors largely writing about romantic themes, though that is a big tent which can encompass cowboys (Elsie Silver), dragons (Rebecca Yarros) and more traditional fare (Danielle Steel). I am including Jane Austen in this romance 11, who debuts on the league table as publishers piled into her 250th anniversary celebrations. The indefatigable Steel has an interesting volume game model: she produced her typical seven new hardbacks and seven paperbacks over the 12 months. None of them set the world on fire – she is the only author on this list to not have an entry in the TCM’s top 500 titles for the year – but the 14 releases combined to move £2m.

Two newcomers to the list in the broad love-story space hail from this side of the Atlantic, a relative rarity in romance/romantasy’s TikTok era. Thirty-sixth-placed Chloe Walsh originally began self-publishing her Boys of Tommen tranche in 2018, with the series picked up for traditional release in 2023 by Sourcebooks’ Bloom imprint in the US and Piatkus in Britain. Piatkus repositioning the titles as New Adult rather than the YA of the series’ indie-authored incarnation has helped expand the audience; the Piatkus sextet of Walsh’s titles hit the stratosphere in 2025, with sales jumping by 88%, which included an overall UK number one in May. Fun fact: Walsh is the only person from County Cork to ever appear on one of our Author Top 50s.   

Callie Hart may be claimed for this side of the pond as she is British, but she began her writing career after moving to California in 2014. Like Walsh, she was not an overnight smash, there were years of the self-publishing grind before she was taken to BookTok’s bosom in 2024 with Quicksilver. Snapped up by Hodderscape, Quicksilver was a hit at its UK launch while November’s follow-up, Brimstone, debuted at number one on just over 43,000 copies.            

Winn some, lose a lot

For the 2024 list, I bemoaned the difficult state of Non-Fiction and that there were only 10 authors from the sector in the Top 50. I did not know how good we had it: there are just six entries this time out and one of those, Ruth Jones, derived 40% of her sales from Fiction (though the bulk of her haul came from her and James Corden’s When Gavin Met Stacey and Everything in Between, 2025’s biggest celeb memoir). 

For the second year in a row there is no Non-Fiction author in the Top 10 – Jamie Oliver leads the pack in 12th place while Charlie Mackesy returns one rung, and £16,000, behind him – and the only fresh breakout was 18th-placed Mel and Sawyer Robbins.

However, there were some Non-Fiction authors hovering outside the Top 50. Celeb fare was pretty light, though hits in this space are about exceeding expectations and Simon & Schuster had to be delighted with the £1.2m earned by Kathy Burke’s A Mind of My Own, as Sphere probably was with Ozzy Osbourne’s posthumous Last Rites (£1.2m).

The bestselling memoir of 2025 overall, though, was tinged with tragedy. The late Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s Nobody’s Girl (Doubleday) was her chronicle of surviving abuse at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein and, she alleged, the former Prince Andrew. The book was released under intense media scrutiny, hit number one and its launch nine days before the prince was stripped of his titles was not coincidental timing. A measure of justice for the author, then, though she sadly died by suicide following a car crash a few months before publication. The £2.1m the book shifted through the TCM means Roberts Giuffre missed out on this list by a whisker.    

Gary Stevenson (£1.2m) seems like a brand in the making as his The Trading Game (Penguin) was a first half of 2025 hit, scoring 11 consecutive Paperback Non-Fiction number ones. Chloe Dalton shifted £1.7m, thanks to Raising Hare (Canongate) doing even better in second format, helped by prize wins and shortlistings.

Raynor Winn (£1.3m) had a heck of a 2025, a film adaptation-boosted hike of 75% year-on-year, but for some reason tailed off in the latter half of the year. What happened? Seriously, it is interesting that the decline was not so precipitous: Winn sold just over 37,000 units after the Observer published allegations that she fabricated parts of her first book, including husband Moth’s degenerative illness, until the end of the year, which was only 2,000 copies off her pace in a similar period for 2024. Maybe this was partially due to retailers having tonnes of stock and wanting to shift the books rather than return.

This is wholly anecdotal, but about a month after the Observer broke the news, amid fresh allegations, PRH soul-searching about its fact-checking and the furore at full height, I was at WH Smith Heathrow T5 and an entire Books We’re Recommending Now bay was devoted to Winn. WHS, we all know, is not the most pulse-taking, responsive bookseller. But it does know its customers and maybe the bulk of the reading public just does not care about veracity in memoir.             

In the end, there just were not the hits: only 20 Non-Fiction titles shifted more than £1m through the TCM in 2025, an all-time low, barring the pandemic years, and five fewer than 2024’s previous nadir. This affected old Author Top 50 reliables (Jeremy Clarkson was down 17.6% to £1.9m) and newer brands – Nathan Anthony’s sales contracted 62% to £1.9m, GT Karber’s Murdle stable slid 41% to £2.1m – alike.   

Continues…