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Wellbeing publishing extends its reach beyond the New Year, New You season
Tom Tivnan is the managing editor of The Bookseller.
Tom Tivnan is the managing editor of The Bookseller.
The wellbeing publishing sector is in the midst of a revolution in recent years—not just in sales, though 2023 is on track to be a near record return through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market, but in how, and crucially when, books are published.
First, to a somewhat lengthy definition of how we’ll analyse the wellbeing market as its titles are scattered through a host of BookScan genres and sub-genres. For these purposes we will look at (deep breath) all seven Mind, Body & Spirit categories; Self Improvement: General; Popular Psychology; Health, Dieting & Wholefood Cookery; and the six subsets to Family, Health & Relationships.
That is the widest net to capture wellbeing performance but it will of course miss out some books across other genres that have a clear wellbeing angle. Take for example, Allessandro Vitale’s Rebel Gardening and Ellie Austin-Williams’ financial health guide, Money Talks, from Watkins Publishing (see company profile, pp06–07). Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life (Ebury) could just as easily sit in Self Improvement: General rather than its current home Autobiography: The Arts; the reverse could be said for Paris Fury’s How Does She Do It? and national treasure Miriam Margolyes’ Oh Miriam!, which both hit our Wellbeing Top 20.
All that said, our wellbeing categories have combined to sell £104m through the Nielsen Total Consumer Market in the first 49 weeks of 2023, just 1% off the pace of this time last year, when the sector went on to record a TCM all-time best of £117.5m. To put that in context, the wellbeing arena is more than double its TCM turnover from the early 2010s when it was regularly shifting between £50m and £55m annually.
I included Health, Dieting & Wholefood Cookery as it has been inextricably linked to the rise of the wellbeing market that truly kicked off in 2015 and 2016 which aligned with the launches and/or reinventions of imprints such as Bluebird, Yellow Kite and Orion Spring. The category might be slightly less purely wellbeing-focused this year as it is so air fryer-heavy (certainly, my own wellbeing will be seriously compromised on Christmas Day if my mother-in-law follows through on her threat to buy me an air fryer). But strip out Health, Dieting & Wholefood Cookery, and the rest of our wellbeing genres are actually a smidge up on 2022 (+0.5% to £87.1m).
But the real step-change in the sector since that huge jump in sales seven or eight years ago is that it is not just for January anymore. Previously the “New Year, New You” market was wellbeing’s Christmas, with the first quarter of a year regularly responsible for as much as 35% to 40% of sales (BookScan has five quarters, a year’s initial 48 weeks divided by four and its Q5, which is roughly December). That first quarter remains crucial, and still has an outsized footprint for a couple of categories such as Health, Dieting & Wholefood Cookery. But the overall wellbeing Q1 sales shares have contracted in the past few years to around 28% to 29%, not because January and February are doing worse, but because the rest of the year is doing better. Strip out Health, Dieting & Wholefood Cookery from 2022 and the wellbeing categories were neck-and-neck in Q1 and Q4 at just over £24m.
And wellbeing often now has a proper Christmas: December 2022 sales for the categories were £12.4m, that’s double the Q5 of 10 years ago, almost triple the TCM revenue in 2008. The change probably really began in 2019 with Bluebird publishing Kay and Kate Allinson’s Pinch of Nom Everyday Light in early December. A healthy eating tome launched before Christmas raised eyebrows at the time, but it sold 130,000 units in its first week and other publishers have since either had December launches or leaned more into the festive selling season.
The change probably really began in 2019 with Bluebird publishing Kay and Kate Allinson’s Pinch of Nom Everyday Light in early December.
Cookery is obviously an easier Christmas-time leap than some other wellness categories. But it probably reflects a greater societal acceptance of discussing these issues, and the way wellness titles are packaged and marketed now, that makes almost all wellbeing categories more apt to be found under the tree. Dr Julie Smith’s toolkit for mental health challenges, Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?, sold almost 33,000 copies in December 2022, an impressive take for a book that was still in hardback and had been out nearly a year. Across the bestseller lists this week (see pp16–21), there are a number of wellbeing titles, such as the latest Pinch of Nom, James Clear’s Atomic Habits, Dr Nicole LePera’s How to Be the Love You Seek and Thomas Erikson’s Surrounded by Idiots.
Erikson is sixth on our top 20 and is one of the reasons Vermilion leads our imprint chart. But Vermilion’s list also reflects that wellbeing is a true word of mouth category and titles can backlist for yonks. Erikson’s 2014 title tops Vermilion’s bestsellers of the past year, followed by Professor Steve Peters’ The Chimp Paradox (2012) and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936).
