Cozy up with aspirational books and home-cooked food as we continue our series of holiday perennials to get you ready for the holiday season. This time, we're taking a look at Non-Fiction titles.
Specifically, we looked at titles with the most consistent sales during the last eight weeks of the year for each year from 2015 to 2017, thanks to our consistently awesome BNC SalesData sales-tracking service. (SalesData tracks sales in the Canadian, English-language trade market for print books only; sales for formats like ebooks and digital audiobooks are not included.) This means that all Fiction titles on the list were published more than three years ago and have sold well over the holiday period in 2015, 2016, and 2017. We then sorted the compiled list by units sold in 2017 to make sure the rankings reflected the current relevance of each title. Though sales for some of these titles may have diminished or increased over the course of the three years, they remained high enough to be considered perennial bestsellers.
The top 10 perennial Non-Fiction favourites over the holidays
Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur 🇨🇦 (Andrews McMeel, 9781449474256)
Thug Kitchen by Thug Kitchen Staff (House of Anansi, 9781770894655)
Red Notice by Bill Browder (Simon & Schuster, 9781476755748)
A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout & Sara Corbett🇨🇦 (Scribner, 9781451651485)
The Oh She Glows Cookbook by Angela Liddon 🇨🇦 (Penguin Canada, 9780143187226)
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by William Watterson (Andrews McMeel, 9781449433253)
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (Gallery Books, 9780671027032)
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (Scribner, 9780743247542)
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey (Free Press, 9781451639612)
A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead (Random House of Canada, 9780307356956)
While our Fiction titles may not have been so festive, we can say with certainty that the Non-Fiction category is in line with the tradition of inspirational stories around the holiday season. We love seeing three Canadian authors make the list (indicated in the list by the maple leaf) with our own Rupi Kaur at the top along with some non-Canadian deep backlist titles such as Calvin and Hobbes and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The Non-Fiction list has seen a fair bit of change over the years, as How to Win Friends and Influence People is the only perennial favourite from last year that remained on our top 10 list this year.
Find out more about this year's favourites in our Holiday Perennials 2018 – Non-Fiction catalogue.
Next up in our holiday perennial bestsellers series are the Juvenile and Young Adult categories. Stay tuned for more holiday perennials!
Highlights from The State of Publishing in Canada 2023.