Retail sales struggled in 2016, but JK Rowling cast a spell strong enough to power sales towards a magical £1.6bn during the year, a rise of almost 5% on 2015, according to the latest annual sales data.
Led by Harry Potter’s newest incarnation in a West End play, Rowling’s first screenplay and titles by diet and fitness guru Joe Wicks, annual book sales in the UK rose to just over £1.59bn in 2016, from £1.51bn in the previous year, according to the annual sales roundup from data specialist Nielsen BookScan.
The number of physical books sold also rose, from 190m in 2015 to 195m, in the 12 months to December 2016. The data measures sales of consumer books scanned through tills by high street, supermarket and online booksellers and is the most accurate available.
Rowling spread her presence across the charts, thanks to four different releases – the script for the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the screenplay for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the new illustrated editions of the Harry Potter series and a Potter colouring book. Total sales for the Edinburgh-based author crashed through the £20m mark during the year, cementing her place as the most powerful author in the UK.
Wicks, whose career was launched by Pan Macmillan last year with his Body Coach food and fitness series which promises to help readers become lean in 15 weeks, was one of the publishing sensations of 2016. The 31-year-old former personal trainer’s sales accounted for almost £15m. According to Tom Tivan in the Bookseller, Wicks’s were the only books to appear in every week on the official top 50 chart– 12 times at No 1.
Wicks recently attacked the clean-eating fad, saying in an interview with the Guardian that he didn’t understand it. The bestselling author shot to fame on Instagram and has added a Channel 4 series and bestselling DVD to his list of money-making lines in the last year.
Though the biggest market remained adult fiction, the number of copies sold slid slightly in 2016 to 51.7m from 51.9m. The drop in numbers was not reflected in the money that went through tills, however: the value of sales in 2016 was £349m, up from £343m. Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train and two JoJo Moyes titles – After You and Me Before You – drove sales, between them taking more than £15m at the till.
After Rowling, the biggest winner in the children’s market was TV celebrity David Walliams, whose sales headed towards the £9m mark during the year. Overall, the market grew in value by 6.55% to £382m. The strong growth is a reflection of the impact a book by Rowling has on its market in the year of publication.
Rowling had good news for booksellers at the end of last year when she took to Twitter to announce that she was working on two more novels. Although she refused to give details of what the novels would be about or whether they were for her younger or adult fans, booksellers will likely be breaking out the bunting when they finally appear.
In the US, book sales rose 3.3% to 674m, with Pope Francis racking up six figure sales for his book The Name of God is Mercy, helping adult non-fiction sales jump 7% since 2015. Adult fiction sales fell 1.04%, reflecting the dearth of a new breakout bestseller like Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train, which, despite coming out in 2015, was the US’s biggest selling paperback in 2016, selling almost 1m copies. Two children’s titles sold over a million copies, however: Rowling’s Cursed Child and Jeff Kinney’s latest Wimpy Kid instalment Double Down.
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