SalesData subscribers have recently received access to a new research study, Sales Trends in Children's Publishing (for those of you who are subscribers, go to the SDA Research Portal to download your copy). The research paper explores sales trends of Juvenile print books in Canada, digging into subject and format performance over recent years. It also examines trends within the category, such as the performance of picture books and the newer phenomenon of 5-Minute Stories.
A couple of notes about our data and sales panel: Data is limited to titles that are designated as Juvenile based on publisher metadata and does not include Young Adult titles. While our research represents approximately 85% of print sales in the Canadian English-language trade book market, a subset of comparable stores was used for this study since we add to SalesData’s panel of reporting retailers every year. This comparable store panel is geographically representative and includes the majority of stores across Canada. It's also a group of stores that have consistently reported data, which means any increases or decreases we see are not due to growth in the panel itself.
As part of this study, we looked at a few of the most popular Juvenile genres as well as some smaller ones that have grown consistently over the past few years. We found that the biggest selling Juvenile Fiction genre is Humorous Stories.
Top Authors and Titles
In this genre, the top-selling books contain a lot of names you would expect to see: Jeff Kinney, Dav Pilkey, and Robert Munsch are all in the top 10.
One standout title is the The Wonky Donkey, the 2010 breakout title by Craig Smith and Katz Cowley. It was the top-selling title in this genre for 2018 and it fell to second place in 2019. Made famous by a viral video of a Scottish grandmother reading to her grandson, The Wonky Donkey video went on to get millions of views and book sales soared along with it.
Which other books made the Humorous Stories top 10 list in 2019? Well, they spanned the gamut of ages from the Sandra Boynton board book Moo, Baa, La La La!, to the middle grade Jeff Kinney book, The Meltdown. But Dav Pilkey is the big winner with two titles in the top 10 – both belonging to the Captain Underpants series.
When it comes to publication date, half of the books in the top 10 were published in 2019. Four are deeper backlist published prior to 2018 including The Wonky Donkey from 2010 and Moo, Baa, La La La! from 1982.
When it comes to Canadian titles, Robert Munsch is the only Canadian to make the top 10 for 2019 with Pyjama Day making it to the 10th spot.
Annual Sales Performance – Comparable Stores
Again, looking at a subset of comparable stores, the Humorous Stories category is notably trending up over the past three years. From 2017 to 2018 there was a 4.4% increase in sales, which follows a bigger jump of 23.2% from 2016 to 2017.
Monthly Sales Performance – Comparable Stores
When we look at the month-by-month breakdown of sales, we find that throughout the bulk of the year sales are relatively flat, with small spikes in March (perhaps due to March break?) and a bit of an increase in the summer. But the largest spike by far happens over the winter holiday season.
Format Performance – Comparable Stores
Both trade hardcover and trade paperback sales are seeing notable increases, with the sale of board books on a slight upwards trend.
If you're a SalesData subscriber, you can find a complimentary copy of the entire study in the SDA Research Portal. If you’re not, keep an eye out for more posts highlighting a couple of trends from the study that we’ll be posting here on our blog.
International standards organization, EDItEUR, releases Application Notes.