Books for Kids Up, Celeb Memoirs Down

A recent article in The Guardian reports that, in the UK, there has been a “decline in biography and cookbook sales, while children’s literature in print” has risen by 10 per cent.

As the piece points out, there was a time when publishers knew all they had to do was sign up a big name and get the book out by Christmas. Recent data indicates those days are gone.

Overall in the UK, non-fiction was down, but books for kids were up across all categories:

Sales of children’s books in print were up 10% to £328m, defying expectations that under-18s would abandon paper books for screen reading.

Children’s fiction provided the industry’s biggest-selling book, John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. The love story narrated by a 16-year-old cancer patient was turned into a Hollywood film and sold 900,000 paperbacks in 2014 – outselling the latest offerings from Lee Child, Kate Atkinson and Donna Tartt.

The full piece is here.