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Sales during the week of World Book Day helped increase the children’s book market by £1.12m, according to WBD director Kirsten Grant, giving a “fantastic” boost to the industry.
World Book Day took place on 6th March and sales of children’s, YA and educational books for the week ending 8th March topped £6.4m—a 21% increase on the £5.3m registered the week before, according to Nielsen BookScan data.
“The rise was bigger than in 2012, when the market went up by £1m, and last year, when it went up by £918,000,” said Grant. “So this year’s rise is absolutely fantastic. There were a lot of people in bookshops buying books.”
Every year WBD sends schoolchildren £1 book tokens and bookshops stock a selection of £1 books to mark the event. The number of £1 book tokens that were redeemed this year totalled 1.11 million, down 3.5% on 2013, but Grant pointed out that teachers are no longer allowed to use them to buy books in bulk.
“That had become a bit of a problem in 2012 and 2013,” she said. “Teachers would go into bookshops with 300–400 tokens and expected to pick up 300–400 £1 books. We took a very deliberate step to stamp that out because we wanted to remind schools that it’s about children getting a book themselves by going into a bookshop.”
The biggest selling £1 title this year was Hello, Hugless Douglas! by David Melling (Hodder Children’s Books), which sold 107,103 copies over a period of seven weeks (to 5th April). The book was chosen as a WBD title at the request of retailers, said Grant.
The next most popular title was Middle School: How I Got Lost in London by James Patterson (Arrow Publishing), which sold 97,282 copies, then Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories: Terrible Trenches (Scholastic), which racked up sales of 89,625 units over the same period.
This year the book tokens were printed with a “golden ticket”, allowing children to enter a competition to win tickets to the musical based on Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. More than 52,000 children took part and what was particularly pleasing was that the entries were spread over the four weeks after WBD itself, said Grant. “In the first week we had 26,000 entries, then in week two we had 12,000, then 8,000 in week three and 7,000 in week four,” she said. “People kept coming back.”
Another success was the WBD website, which received 38% more visits in March 2014, compared to March 2013. Grant said her team did a lot of work in simplifying the user experience—splitting content into nursery, primary and secondary, as well as making sure all parts of the campaign drove people back to the website. “Everything we did this year had an online element, whether it was the competition to win Charlie tickets or the Storycraft interactive tool,” Grant said. “The traffic was amazing.”
Numbers of viewers of The Biggest Book Show—a stage show with authors and illustrators that is available online (2012’s event is pictured, left)—has remained steady over the past few years, but this was the first year the event was available for download, rather than just streaming.
This was also the first year The Biggest Book Show went on tour, performing to 6,500 children at five events around the country. “The plan is to make the tour even bigger next year, with more authors and more venues,” said Grant. “It gives people the opportunity to get involved and more children the chance to see these authors.”