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The decade that brought us Fifty Shades of Grey, adult colouring books and YouTuber memoirs is coming to an end. Though we may not mourn the passing of the 2010s too much—thanks to Brexit, President Trump and a full-blown climate emergency—it was a roller-coaster ride for the print market. E-books threatened to take over in the first part of the decade, before print made a stunning return to form in 2015—and has clocked up value rises in every year since. Audiobooks became the industry’s fastest-growing sector, with Nielsen consumer data finding the sector accounts for 5.5% of the total market in 2019, up from just 2.2% in 2012.
E L James, Joe Wicks and Paula Hawkins became household names, while David Walliams went from a comedian who had written a few kids’ books to a literary phenomenon, now worth more than £100m through BookScan’s TCM. Food trends ranged from intermittent fasting, quick-and-easy recipes and vegetarianism, to Instagram personal trainers, food bloggers and wellness gurus, with fiction zipping through sick-lit, grip-lit and up-lit in quick succession. Five books with "girl" in the title were among the decade’s 20 top-selling books, encouraging a tsunami of books featuring the g-word—over 100 sold more than 50,000 copies across the decade. The aforementioned president loomed large, with dystopian fiction, particularly George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, soaring in 2017. Additionally, three Trump-critical behemoths hitting the UK number one across 2018: Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Bob Woodward’s Fear and Michelle Obama’s Becoming.
But even more so than Trump, the internet ruled over the book charts in the 2010s—although perhaps not in the way everyone thought it would back in 2009. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey became the bestselling book since records began in 2012, with a fevered 22-week run at the top of the charts for the author across the summer. The original trilogy tops the decade’s bestseller chart through Nielsen BookScan’s TCM with a combined 11.2 million copies sold. Follow-up Grey, published quick-sharp in 2015, hit 18th with a further 1.1 million print units sold. Yet without the e-book, would any of us even know about Anastasia Steele’s inner goddess, or Christian Grey’s Red Room of Pain? (We truly do live in the darkest timeline.) While the trilogy’s industry-shaking e-book figures pre-date The Bookseller’s e-book charts, Grey shifted a whisker under half a million e-books in a month and a half on sale in the middle of the decade.
Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train was another e-book behemoth, its four-month reign atop The Bookseller’s Monthly E-Book Ranking shunting its hardback to new heights in the print charts. Through BookScan, print book sales slid to a 12-year low in 2014, drop- ping below £1.4bn.
However, Joe Wicks’ Lean in 15 represented a turning point in 2016—it became the fastest-selling début cookbook of all time, smashing the record already set by wellness blogger Ella Mills (née Woodward), but later usurped by Kay Featherstone and Kate Allinson’s Pinch of Nom. Instagram-bred personal trainer Wicks has now earned £27.5m through BookScan, making him the second most-valuable cookbook author of the decade, after Jamie Oliver. Zoella’s Girl Online became the fastest-selling of any début in 2014, with the vlogger eventually shifting 1.35 million books across the 2010s, but many YouTubers opted for the memoir route—not letting the fact that they were aged around 23, on average, stop them—selling a combined 1.54 million books in the short-lived burst in 2015. In 2019, the power of the influencer in print form has never been more apparent, with Pinch of Nom stacking up a million copies in the blink of an eye and cleaning queen Mrs Hinch selling a whisker under 600,000 copies with her two books. Six years on from print’s nadir, it has grown in value every year since—and with 2019 looking set to hit its highest value since 2010, the decade is ending at a level almost back where it started.
The two bestselling authors of the decade would be familiar to anyone time-travelling from 2009 (although that may not be highest on their list of concerns), with Julia Donaldson far and away ahead on £126.8m, and J K Rowling in second on £103.8m. Rowling pipped Walliams to the runner-up post by a scant £3.3m—pocket change for either of them—and only because of her dramatic reveal as début crime author Robert Galbraith in 2013. Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike series contributed £10m to Rowling’s total. The rise of Walliams, of course, has been meteoric—his £100m represents a 17,651% improvement decade-on-decade. Children’s authors over-indexed in the author chart, with nine in the top 10 and only Jamie Oliver and James Patterson joining Donaldson, Rowling and Walliams in the top five.
Digital
The Bookseller began running the Monthly E-Book Ranking in 2013, and introduced the Weekly E-Book Ranking in May 2016, using data collated from publishers. The monthly chart’s first number one in June 2013 was Sylvia Day’s Bared to You, with a volume of 201,053 e-books sold, while the latest chart (for October 2019) saw Adam Kay’s Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas triumph, with 34,114 units sold. Day’s Crossfire trilogy benefited from similar themes to Fifty Shades of Grey, with more than a million copies sold of the series over the heady summer of 2012.
Grey would post the chart’s record monthly sale, of 359,756 units, in June 2015. No title has recorded a six-figure sale in the e-book chart since. Former junior doctor Kay’s This is Going to Hurt proved a slow-burn success in digital, eventually racking up 20 weeks as the Weekly E-Book Ranking number one—a record. It claimed that accolade by surpassing more “traditional” digital-friendly bestsellers such as serial e-book chart-toppers The Girl on the Train and Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.
While we can only comment on e-book data from the major publishers, it does seem that "e" and "p" have found a way to comfortably co-exist. Through BookScan, the Adult Fiction category—e-book bread and butter—was a hefty 34% down in volume in 2018 compared to 2009. However, it has only fallen 1.6% in the past five years.
The Official UK Top 50: The bestselling books of 2010-19