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The best chart to demonstrate the absence of fresh trends and breakouts last year is our Revenue Growth Top 10. In 2017, these 10 BookScan sub-categories combined to record a jump of £39.1m on their previous year’s overall haul. In the same chart in 2016, the top 10 revenue growers exceeded their previous year’s tally by £79.4m. In fact, the top two in 2016’s table—Children’s Fiction and Health, Dieting & Wholefood Cookery—boosted their coffers by £43m, swelling the TCM by more than the entire top 10 did last year.
Thus, there was little boom and bust in 2016: of the 250 BookScan sub-categories, 86 had value sales percentage gains of more than 10%— in 2017, just 69 did. There were actually more individual product classes in growth in 2017 (141, compared to 129) but in 2016 49 sub-categories experienced value hikes of more than 20%, compared a leaner to 37 last year.
Records are made to be broken
Our category “fallers” chart could perhaps be better termed The Graveyard of Past Trends. Health, Dieting & Wholefood Cookery; Humour: Collections & General; and Handicrafts, Arts & Crafts—all near the top (or bottom?) of both the Per Cent and Revenue crashers—were the categories for clean eating, Ladybird and Enid Blyton parodies, and adult colouring titles, respectively.
But context is king, as all three product classes were being compared to record,or near-record, years. For example, Health, Dieting... may have lost £14.2m (43%) of its TCM value year on year, but the £18.8m it earned is still its second-best sum since records began. To show how far the category has come, in the 17 years BookScan genre figures have been available, Health, Dieting... has only surpassed £10m five times; in eight of those 17 years it earned less than £5m. The category’s nadir was £2.3m, in 2008; Joe Wicks alone exceeded that figure in the first half of 2017.
And a good portion of the clean/ healthy eating trend has simply moved category to the broadly similar Fitness & Diet and Vegetarian Cookery, the latter of which had its best 12 months ever through the TCM, 66% up on 2016 and 50.4% better than its previous high (2002’s £3.9m). Three 2017 releases—Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Much More Veg (£780,000, Bloomsbury), The Hairy Bikers’ Hairy Dieters Go Veggie (Orion, £580,000) and Anna Jones’ The Modern Cook’s Year (Fourth Estate, £294,000)—are already among the Vegetarian Cookery sector’s 20 most valuable titles since records began.
Telly was a key to Biography: Royalty’s triple-digit percentage gain. Daisy Goodwin and Sara Sheridan’s Victoria & Albert (HarperCollins), based on ITV’s “Victoria”, earned £370,000, while the Blink-published official tie-in to Netflix’s “The Crown” trousered £154,000.
As always, smaller categories can be greatly swayed by one title. For the first time since records began, Gender Studies/Gay & Lesbian Studies crossed the £1m barrier, almost wholly down to Mary Beard. Her Christmas hit Women & Power (Profile) accounted for 42% of the sub-category’s annual take.
Category top 10s: four genres’ 2017 bestsellers by revenue
Crime, Thriller & Adventure
It would have been a tough 2017 for Crime, Thriller & Adventure without Transworld. The publisher issued five of the 10 most valuable books of the year and accounted for £22.1m (18.8%) of the category’s total sales. Dan Brown’s Origin earned twice what its closest rival did, and 2017 was the third year in a row, and the fourth in the past five, that a Transworld-published book has been the crime category kingpin.
Poetry
For a third year on the trot, Poetry Texts & Anthologies chalked up a record TCM haul—it also cracked the £10m mark for the very first time (up 13.3% to £11.2m). Rupi Kaur was responsible for £1 in every £10 spent on a poetry title last year. Nearly £200,000 was chipped in to the poetry cause by The Good Immigrant, although it may well have been better categorised in the Anthologies, Essays, Letters & Miscellaneous product class.
Children’s Non-Fiction
The £44.5m Children’s Non-Fiction earned is a record, 0.4% up on 2014’s Minecraft-led year. Children’s General Non-Fiction had by far its biggest year (£16m), driven by Pokémon, Minecraft and Star Wars tie-ins, plus a slew of feminist- themed works such as Kate Pankhurst’s Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World. Two British Library Harry Potter exhibition titles combined to earn £1m for YA Non-Fiction.
Family, Health & Relationships
The Family, Health & Relationships category had its best year in a decade, hitting £32.6m. There were strong years for sub-categories Fitness & Diet (+22% to £11.8m, led by Tom Kerridge’s Dopamine Diet) and Coping with Problems & Illness (+42.6% to a record £6.1m), topped by Russell Brand’s Recovery and Bryony Gordon’s Mad Girl. Henry Marsh’s memoir Do No Harm fuelled Family & Health: General’s 15% climb.