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8 Publishing Insights Revealed By Last Year’s Top 50 Bestselling UK Books

This article is more than 4 years old.

Every year, plenty of publishing pundits offer up advice on what sells, what doesn’t, and how an author can best climb the rankings themselves. And, every year, there’s really just one way to know for sure what works: Taking a deep dive into the most recent bestsellers and examining the data for insights into what titles people are actually buying.

The Guardian's John Dugdale has published a UK-centric list of the top 50 best-selling titles of 2019, and author Chris McCrudden has used the raw data available in that article to figure out a few more insights, which he shared in a Twitter thread on the topic.

So what books did the British public open their wallets for in 2019, and what can the data tell us about what might sell in 2020?

Here are the biggest insights and analysis that McCrudden came away with.

Pinch of Nom dominated

The top book pulled well ahead of the pack: Pinch of Nom: 100 Slimming, Home-style Recipes, is a cookbook out from Kate Allinson and Kay Featherstone, of the slimming recipe blog of the same name.

It sold over one million copies last year — which is more than double the copies sold by the second best-selling book in the UK in 2019 and a solid 200,000 more copies than 2018’s top selling hit, Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.

“Every year has its runaway success,” Chris noted.

David Walliams stayed huge...

David Walliams is a British comedian, actor, and talent show judge. He’s also a hugely high-selling children’s book author: In 2018, he authored 40% of the bestselling children's books sold in the U.K.

“I've talked a lot about the enormous commercial power of David Walliams,” McCrudden tweeted, “and in 2019 he smashed it, with: 2 books in the Top 10; 3 books in the Top 50; 1.5 million [in] sales; That's 13 percent of all books sold in the Top 50.”

...And so did Children’s Books in general

Of the top selling titles from last year, which genre did the best?

If you read this section’s heading, you already know: The Children’s Fiction genre saw the most bestsellers in 2019 (well, assuming you don’t count all nonfiction titles as their own monolithic genre).

The “women’s” genre moved relatively fewer bestsellers, while literary fiction, crime thrillers, and food all kept to the middle of the pack with similar numbers of bestsellers sold.

Literary fiction sold a lot more than normal

Granted, just looking at which genres had the highest number of top-selling titles won’t tell you the full story: You also need to look at where each of those titles fell on the list, and how many copies each one sold to get there.

“In previous years,” McCrudden says for context, “a breakthrough literary fiction title would sell an average of 100,000 units. Thanks to a couple of runaway titles, this year you had to sell an average of 250,000 units to hit the Top 50.”

And we can expect to see those lit fic titles for years to come, considering this next insight.

The hits have a long half-life

When a book hits it big, the title sticks around for years — or decades — afterward.

“We focus a lot on the new, but a surprising amount of these books are quite old,” McCrudden explains. “11 out of the Top 50 were published before 2019, with the oldest (The Handmaid's Tale) dating back to 1985.”

Granted, this is sobering news for someone hoping to break in: They’re not competing against the other top titles of the year, they’re competing with the best of the best from years earlier.

How-tos and instructions had a good year

The top selling title, Pinch of Nom, was a cookbook and it was joined by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s Veg, which took the ninth place spot with 321,580 copies sold. A book on how to clean, Hinch Yourself Happy, landed at fifth place with 427,060 sales, and Greta Thunberg’s No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference reached the 32nd spot with 176,896 in sales.

Whether it was cooking, cleaning, or climate change, 2019’s audiences were interested in learning more and taking action.

Releasing a bestseller? Aim for mid-October

That said, there’s still an objectively great release date to aim for: Over ten percent of the top 50 bestsellers on the 2019 list were released between October 10 and October 17 of that year.

An early-ish Fall release date can take full advantage of the holiday sales, proving it isn’t a disadvantage to debut later in the year. The longer, darker days might even lead more readers to curl up with a book by the fire as well.

Penguin Random House published a lot of hits

The publishing houses behind the top 50 bestselling UK titles tell a pretty clear-cut story. Ten publishers released the crop of bestsellers, but the distribution was far from even.

Penguin Random House easily published the most top-selling books, with HarperCollins and Macmillan also nabbing a decent-sized if much smaller piece of the bestseller pie. Everyone else, not so much.

“A good year for HarperCollins & Macmillan, a relatively bad one for Hachette and further signs that the Penguin Random House merger is concentrating too much commercial power in one publisher,” McCrudden summed it up.

That’s not all that McCrudden had to say: He pointed out a range of additional insights, from nice surprises — Sally Rooney's Normal People was the rare title that garnered both literary praise and high sales, clocking in as the thirteenth bestselling title with over a quarter million sales — to surprising misses — Elton John's biography did just okay, perhaps indicating a bit of a malaise towards celebrity biographies.

You can check out McCrudden’s full Twitter thread for more, and if you’re still hungry for more UK bestseller data-crunching, you might consider checking out last year’s article after that.

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