Hoover, Yarros buoy adult fiction as US print sales decline

In the US, print sales declined 2.6% in 2023, according to Circana BookScan figures, reports Publishers Weekly (PW).

Sales were down 4.1% after the first nine months of the year, but were helped by a 1.7% increase in the fourth quarter, and sales still remained 10% ahead of 2019, the last pre-pandemic year.

Helped by strong sales of titles by Colleen Hoover and Rebecca Yarros, adult fiction was the only category to record an increase in 2023, with sales up by almost 1% (0.8%), ‘a solid performance considering sales in the category jumped 8.5% in 2022 over 2021’, said PW. Within the adult fiction category, sales of fantasy jumped 51.7%, led by sales of the Yarros bestsellers, followed by a 24.2% increase in sales of horror/occult/psychology titles. Graphic novel sales were down 22.4%, but still represented the third largest subcategory within adult fiction.

In adult nonfiction, strong sales for Prince Harry’s Spare and The Woman in Me by Britney Spears meant the category declined by only 3.1% in 2023, ‘a much slower rate of decline than in 2022, when sales dropped 10.3%’. Overall, sales in the biography/autobiography/memoir category increased 1.8%, representing the third largest increase in the adult nonfiction segment, behind religion (which increased 6.4%) and travel (up 3.8%).

In children’s, juvenile fiction was down 4.7%, and nonfiction was down 7.1%. Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under the Sea was the top seller in juvenile fiction, selling almost 1.1 million copies.

Category: International news