Australian market report: 2024 book sales down 3% in value
Overall, the book market was down in Australia in 2024, by 3% in value and 1.2% in volume, according to figures from Nielsen BookData’s BookScan service.
Nielsen’s 2024 snapshot, which covered 31 December 2023 to 28 December 2024, showed the Australian market for the period was worth A$1.29 billion in value, down from A$1.33 billion in 2023. Sales by volume for 2024 totalled 69 million, down from 69.8 million the prior year, while the average selling price for the 2024 year was $18.69, down 1.8% on the previous year.
Homing in on Christmas, Nielsen data showed that, while the Christmas 2024 period was slightly up by value compared to Christmas 2023, sales in the children’s category were down by both volume (-4.4%, at 4.5 million) and value (-1.8%, at $54.9 million) for the four weeks to Christmas 2024. In the same period in 2023, children’s sales were worth 4.7 million in volume and $55.9 million in value.
For the 2024 year overall, Nielsen’s snapshot showed the top three growth categories for the year were humour, trivia and puzzles; food and drink; and genre fiction.
Sales for the year included titles across more than 757,460 unique ISBNs; however, one author’s titles undeniably ruled the market in 2024: Nagi Maehashi took out both first and second place in the year’s bestseller lists with RecipeTin Eats: Tonight and RecipeTin Eats: Dinner (both Macmillan), respectively. Liane Moriarty’s Here One Moment (also Macmillan) took out third place in the year’s bestsellers. Meanwhile, Maehashi also topped the Christmas bestseller list, with RecipeTin Eats: Tonight beating the competition by a significant margin.
The highest-selling children’s titles for the Christmas 2024 period were Big Jim Begins (Dog Man #13) (Dav Pilkey, Scholastic), which reached number 4 in the overall Christmas bestsellers list, and Hot Mess (Diary of a Wimpy Kid #19) (Jeff Kinney, Puffin), which came in at number 10 overall. (Children’s favourite Guinness World Records 2025 placed ninth for Christmas.)
As in other markets, a sector that continues to grow in Australia is the adult fiction category, with Australian book buyers purchasing 18.5 million books at a value of $380 million for the year to 14 December 2024. This represented a 5.6% increase in volume and 7.3% uplift in value, translating to an additional 974,000 units and close to $26 million in books being purchased, compared to the same period in 2023, according to Nielsen.
As previously reported by Think Australian, Black Friday continues to change Australian shopping habits. Nielsen BookData reported that Black Friday–week sales in 2024 ‘saw volume sales in the Australian book market 40% higher than the average weekly sales in the four weeks prior’, with sales volume in the week of Black Friday up 4% compared to the week of the retail promotion in 2023.
‘Australian book buyers bought more than 2.05 million books during Black Friday week, spending more than $37 million, bringing 2024’s event to the second highest on record, behind 2020’s bumper sales,’ said Nielsen of data from the week ending 30 November 2024.
Said Nielsen BookData Australia general manager Bianca Whiteley of sales in 2024: ‘Although 2024 is a continued adjustment on record sales of recent years, Australian book buyers continue to turn to books as a source of information and escape, and perhaps a great budget-friendly gift choice.’
Top 10 Australian Christmas bestsellers list*, 2024
- RecipeTin Eats: Tonight (Nagi Maehashi, Macmillan), 27,900 copies
- Bake with Brooki (Brooke Bellamy, Penguin), 14,585 copies
- The Voice Inside (John Farnham & Poppy Stockell, Hachette), 11,316 copies
- Big Jim Begins (Dog Man #13) (Dav Pilkey, Scholastic), 11,306 copies
- Here One Moment (Liane Moriarty, Macmillan), 10,448 copies
- In Too Deep (Jack Reacher #29) (Lee Child & Andrew Child, Bantam), 9352 copies
- RecipeTin Eats: Dinner (Nagi Maehashi, Macmillan), 8748 copies
- Quicksilver (Callie Hart, Hodderscape), 7798 copies
- Guinness World Records 2025 (Guinness World Records), 7501 copies
- Hot Mess (Diary of a Wimpy Kid #19) (Jeff Kinney, Puffin), 6269 copies.
*Data sourced from Nielsen BookScan’s Australian Book Market panel, measuring print book sales in Australia through its defined panel. Period: 8 to 14 December 2024.
Category: Think Australian feature
