Australian book market overview: 2023 so far

Tuesday, 3 October 2023 Books+Publishing

After three consecutive years of growth, the Australian book market flattened out in 2023. In the year to 17 June 2023, Australian book sales totalled $548 million, up 0.6% on the same period in 2022, while sales by volume were down 0.2% to a total of 28.3 million units, according to Nielsen BookScan Australia. Compared to the same period in pre-pandemic 2019, the market is up $82 million (18%) by value, following annual growth of 7.8% in 2020, 2.5% in 2021 and 8.2% in 2022.

In 2023, Nielsen BookScan Australia reported growth in the adult fiction category (up 7% by value) and nonfiction (up 1.6%) but a decline in children’s books (down 3%).

Growth in adult fiction was driven by sales of romance (up 37%) and historical & mythological fiction (up 17%). From Simon & Schuster (S&S), Colleen Hoover’s It Starts with Us and It Ends with Us, as well as Hannah Grace’s Icebreaker, boosted romance sales, while in historical fiction, local author Pip Williams’s The Bookbinder of Jericho (Affirm Press) spent six weeks as the overall weekly bestselling title from its publication date earlier this year, and was the second highest selling adult fiction title in the year to date. Sales of general & literary fiction titles were down 7%, after being boosted last year by bestsellers Where the Crawdads Sing (Delia Owens, Hachette) and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (Taylor Jenkins Reid, S&S).

In children’s, the novelty & activity books (up 7%) and pre-school & early learning subcategories (up 19%) were boosted by Bluey: Happy Easter (PRH) and In My Heart (Abrams), respectively. Nielsen BookScan Australia attributes the decline in children’s fiction (down 14%) to strong sales in 2022 of higher priced Harry Potter and The Bad Guys series box sets, and the release of the latest David Walliams title Robodog (HarperCollins) occurring a month later than the author’s previous title in 2022.

Nonfiction was helped by sales of the year’s overall bestselling title, Prince Harry’s Spare, from Penguin Random House, as well as strong performances in the travel & holiday guides subcategory (up 64%). Travel book sales have rebounded significantly since their lowest point in the second quarter of 2020, when pandemic lockdowns resulted in the atlases, maps and travel category reaching just $1.3 million in value, compared to a pre-pandemic average of $4 million per quarter. For 2023 to 17 June, the category has reached $8.1 million in value, down 6% on the same time in 2019. The general food and drink subcategory was up 17%, helped by local author Nagi Maehashi’s bestselling cookbook RecipeTin Eats: Dinner (Macmillan).

Top 10 bestsellers in year to 17 June

Spare (Prince Harry, Bantam Books)
RecipeTin Eats: Dinner (Nagi Maehashi, Macmillan)
It Starts with Us (Colleen Hoover, S&S)
The Bookbinder of Jericho (Pip Williams, Affirm Press)
It Ends with Us (Colleen Hoover, S&S)
Atomic Habits (James Clear, RH Business Books)
Homecoming (Kate Morton, A&U)
Verity (Colleen Hoover, Hachette)
Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea (Dog Man #11) (Dav Pilkey, Scholastic)
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (Taylor Jenkins Reid, S&S)

Local bestsellers

Three Australian authors made the overall top 10: Nagi Maehashi (RecipeTin Eats: Dinner), the author of a popular cooking blog by the same name; Pip Williams, for The Bookbinder of Jericho (the follow-up to her 2020 historical fiction The Dictionary of Lost Words, which was still the eighth bestselling title by an Australian author in the year to 12 August); and Kate Morton, for the epic mystery Homecoming.

The overall bestselling Australian titles so far for the year—taken from the charts of the top-selling books by category—also includes The Voice to Parliament Handbook (HG Explore), a guide to Australia’s forthcoming referendum on a First Nations Voice to Parliament by Thomas Mayo and Kerry O’Brien; The Barefoot Investor (Wiley), Scott Pape’s perennial bestseller on personal finance, as well as a book on the same topic adapted for children (Barefoot Kids, HarperCollins); Exiles (Macmillan), the latest entry by blockbuster crime novelist Jane Harper, author of The Dry; children’s picture book Bluey: Happy Easter (Puffin), one in a series of books about the cartoon dog from the Australian TV show of the same name; and Let the Games Begin! (Scholastic), the newest instalment in Aaron Blabey’s The Bad Guys children’s series.

Top 10 Australian titles in year to 12 August

RecipeTin Eats: Dinner (Nagi Maehashi, Macmillan) 150,470
The Bookbinder of Jericho (Pip Williams, Affirm Press) 96,745
Homecoming (Kate Morton, Allen & Unwin) 70,765
The Voice to Parliament Handbook (Thomas Mayo & Kerry O’Brien, HG Explore) 50,030
The Barefoot Investor (Scott Pape, Wiley) 40,075
Bluey: Happy Easter (Puffin) 37,085
Exiles (Jane Harper, Macmillan) 35,890
The Dictionary of Lost Words (Pip Williams, Affirm Press) 35,080
Barefoot Kids (Scott Pape, HarperCollins) 32,765
Let the Games Begin! (The Bad Guys #17) (Aaron Blabey, Scholastic) 30,315

Booksellers are facing a tough retail market; inflation and cost-of-living pressures have hit consumer confidence, and customers are spending more cautiously. Despite this, Nielsen BookScan’s Bianca Whiteley told the BookPeople conference in June there had been a slight increase in the percentage of those who bought print books at independent stores, with a decrease in internet retailer sales. One of the biggest names in online bookselling in the Australian market—Booktopia—continued its messy trajectory from burgeoning ecommerce start-up to embattled publicly traded company. The retailer reported its revenue for the 2023 financial year was down 18%, and recorded an EBITDA loss for the second year in a row. The company’s value has also fallen steeply: at 1 September, its shares were trading at $0.11 per share, giving the company a market cap of around $25 million—a fraction of its initial issuing at $2.30 per share, which valued the company at $316 million in December 2020. With a new CEO appointed in April, and a larger, more efficient distribution centre operational ahead of the 2023 Christmas season, Booktopia has its sights on returning to profitability in 2024.

In the children’s books market, Australian consumers and institutions have showed little appetite for the type of book censorship controversy seen in other markets, particularly the US. Discount department store Big W announced it would stop selling the book Welcome to Sex: Your no-silly-questions guide to sexuality, pleasure and figuring it out (Melissa Kang & Yumi Stynes, HGCP) in physical stores, after objections to the book’s content aired by mainstream media outlets led to multiple incidents of abuse aimed at staff. However, Welcome to Sex was the sixth highest-selling book in the following week, as buyers heeded calls to support the book and its authors. Also earlier this year, Sydney bookstore Kinokuniya paid for the Australian Classification Board to determine the classification of the graphic novel Gender Queer: A memoir (Maia Kobabe, Oni Press) following a complaint about the title—after which the board gave its final ruling that the book be available unrestricted. In adult book publishing, an Australian Federal Court ruling in favour of the defendants in a defamation case brought by former soldier Ben Roberts-Smith against several newspapers opened the way for the books by the journalists involved to hit the market.

While levels of author-funded publishing are on the rise, especially for genre fiction authors, many writers still value the support offered by a traditional publisher, including editing, promotion and access to distribution networks of bookshops and discount department stores, the National Survey of Australian Book Authors found. The survey found the capacity of Australian authors to earn an income from their creative practice remains challenging. However, the Australian government this year heeded long-standing calls from authors—and the Australian Society of Authors in particular—to compensate creators for library borrowings of audio and ebook formats of their works. The government extended lending rights to cover audio and ebooks as part of a new arts policy, which also rebranded the Australia Council for the Arts as Creative Australia and promises a new body, Writers Australia, ‘to support writers and illustrators to create new works’.

In 2023, the rise of generative AI technology has pushed AI to the forefront of many publishing conversations, with the Australian Publishers Association addressing the topic at its annual conference, and the ASA raising the concerns of authors and illustrators in a submission to a federal government inquiry into safe and responsible AI.

Perhaps the event with the biggest effect on the Australian market for 2023 is the one that didn’t happen. After a long wait to hear if the ‘big five’ would indeed become the ‘big four’, Simon & Schuster’s Australian operations are now owned by private equity firm KKR, meaning all five major subsidiaries—S&S, Hachette, HarperCollins, Pan Macmillan and Penguin Random House—continue to trade as normal, albeit with the latter having recently made several redundancies within its Aotearoa New Zealand business.

Category: Think Australian feature