Review of the Year: Genres – Non-fiction slips again, but religion and memoir shine

Speaking words of wisdom

NF: Trade contracted 3.6% in value to its worst haul in eight years, but there were some nice wins as 54 of its 141 product classes outpaced their 2024 TCM value. Autobiography: Business hurtled 89.4% to £2.9m, the second-biggest year-on-year growth for any BookScan product class earning over £1m, Fiction and Children’s included. Nearly 72% of the category came from just two smashes, both published in early 2025: What’s Your Dream? (Century, £902,000) by Simon Squibb, who went from homeless teen to entrepreneur and now unlikely TikTok star; and Gary Stevenson’s The Trading Game (Penguin, £1.2m), which was the Paperback Non-Fiction number one for almost all of last year’s first quarter.

BookScan’s categories have three levels: the most granular (what it calls product classes; the accompanying chart is NF: Trade’s top product classes by value), the overarching (like NF: Trade) and the mid-level, which arranges product classes by subject groups. There are 18 of these mid-level NF: Trade categories, and all but three had value contractions.

Yet, the usual biggest player here, Biographies & Autobiographies (B&A), was in the TCM black, up 2.5% to £102.2m. Of B&A’s 18 product classes, 11 had value jumps, all of which were greater than 10%. Biography: The Arts was up a third to £9.5m, with a little help (or, rather, Help!) from Ian Leslie’s much-praised, Baillie Gifford-longlisted Beatles biography, John and Paul (Faber, £533,000). But the really good boy was Ted the Dog, the canine star of Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, whose Ebury-published Pup Fiction and A Pawtobiography combined to shift £950,000.

Continues…

An unusually busy year for memoirs from the scribbling classes – such as Michael Morpurgo, Sebastian Faulks and Geoff Dyer, alongside the controversial release of the late Joan Didion’s therapy diary entries as Notes to John (4th Estate) – had Autobiographies: Literature leaping 26.6% to £3.6m. But the main driver was the combined £950,000 delivered by former Booker winners Margaret Atwood and Arundhati Roy; the latter’s Mother Mary Comes to Me (Hamish Hamilton) was Foyles’ overall and Blackwell’s Non-Fiction Book of the Year (and while this does not apply directly to the TCM, Audible named it Audiobook of the Year, too).

Religion was up 10.5% to £27.9m, NF: Trade’s second-biggest mid-level category gainer – after Personal Development’s 13.5% jump to £53.2m – and the only one to record a best-ever TCM result. Five of the nine Religion sub-genres notched sales jumps, including a record year for Christianity: Bibles & Liturgy (up 15.9% to £9.4m). Religion as a whole is not a category for hits: since records began, only six editions have shifted more than 100,000 units via BookScan and its model is many titles ticking over for years. But Bear Grylls’The Greatest Story Ever Told (John Murray) was one of the rare smashes. The celebrity bivouac-er’s “eyewitness account” of Jesus Christ’s story sold a little more than 62,000 units since its June launch, already the 16th-bestselling Religion title in TCM history.