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Tony Ross has yet again topped The Bookseller’s chart of the bestselling children’s illustrators, with his books earning almost twice the total of his closest rival, Axel Scheffler, in 2018.
Ross, whose official sales figures are bolstered by working with David Walliams, achieved value sales of £16.6m last year and volume sales of 2,823,928 units. He has 20 fewer titles in the list than Scheffler, but the Hamburg-born illustrator posted lower value and volume sales, of £8.4m and 1,879,239 units respectively.
Ross’ bestselling book of last year was The Ice Monster, the chart-topping middle-grade novel by David Walliams (HarperCollins Children’s Books), which sold 643,126 copies and spent four weeks at the top of the charts. In contrast, Scheffler’s biggest seller was The Ugly Five (Alison Green Books/Scholastic), his latest collaboration with Julia Donaldson, which sold 221,588 copies last year.
Both of the illustrators, however, suffered year-on-year sales falls; in 2017 Ross earned £16.8m, and Scheffler £9.4m. To compile the chart, The Bookseller looked at the top 1,000 books from three categories (Children’s Fiction, Picture Books & Pre-school and Children’s Non-fiction) on Nielsen BookScan and, if the illustrator was missing on the Nielsen database, their name was added manually to the chart.
The illustrators in spots three and four remain unchanged from last year. Jeff Kinney and Liz Pichon achieved sales of £5.7m and £4.2m respectively, but Jim Field, who has had huge success with his Oi! series of picture books (written by Kes Gray) among other titles, leapfrogged Quentin Blake to hit the top five for the first time. His value sales through Nielsen were £3.7m and his biggest hitter was Oi Goat! (Hachette Children’s Group).
The highest new entry in the chart was Dav Pilkey, who writes and illustrates the Dog Man series for Scholastic. His sales of £1.5m last year earned him ninth place. Quinton Winter, who contributed the illustrations for Stories for Boys Who Dare to be Different (Quercus), jumped in at 13th.
Katz Cowley is another new entry, in 15th, after The Wonky Donkey, the picture book by New Zealand author Craig Smith, stormed up the charts after a video of a Scottish grandmother reading the story went viral. The book wasn’t even in print in the UK until Scholastic snapped up the rights towards the end of last year, raising the profile of both Smith and Cowley.
Stalwart illustrator Judith Kerr, who didn’t make the top 20 the previous year, was the 20th-bestselling illustrator in 2018, perhaps a result of HarperCollins Children’s Books’ celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of her beloved classic The Tiger Who Came to Tea.
The illustrators who dropped out of the list in 2018 included Jim Kay, who took a break from illustrating J K Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, and Where’s Wally? creator Martin Handford. Ben Cort, who created the Underpants series with Clare Freedman (Simon & Schuster Children’s), also failed to make the grade, as did Sara Ogilvie and Oliver Jeffers.
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Sarah McIntyre, illustrator and founder of the Pictures Mean Business campaign, said the chart includes a "good mix" of long-time illustrators and more recent arrivals to the industry, and demonstrates "a wide range of styles: everything from Ross’ loose drawings to Axel’s very tight, solid pictures, to Kinney, Pichon and Pilkey’s more cartoon-like drawing. It’s great to see the picture book illustrators who work with Julia Donaldson being recognised; Axel and Lydia [Monks] very often get left out in mentions; their books are simply listed as ‘Julia Donaldson’s books’. And with David Walliams storming the charts, it’s good to see Tony Ross’ name mentioned."
McIntyre said, however, that illustrators still needed to be more widely recognised. "If you ask someone on the street to name a children’s book illustrator, I’m guessing most people would only be able to name Quentin Blake. It would be good to see more illustrators becoming household names, since they play such a big role in children’s reading experience. Book illustration is a UK export we can be proud of."
For this to happen, publishers need to ensure they submit full illustrator details to Nielsen, McIntyre said, pointing out that the data Nielsen receives is still patchy. "Until people can gauge how illustrators affect the economy, people in business and the media assume they’re economically worthless. It’s easy to see how that plays out in the way illustrators aren’t credited, or included regularly in bestseller lists."