The holiday shopping season (i.e., those magical eight weeks when indie bookstores generate a quarter of their yearly sales) is well underway. While top 10 lists, staff picks, and gift guides are making the rounds and booksellers are keeping all the hot new releases stacked high, we’re here to remind you to save some shelf space for your trusty old backlist buddies. Our data shows that over the holiday shopping season, over 50% of sales are of backlist titles, and we want to make sure your perennial all-stars keep shining (and selling) this year.
In this instalment of Easier with BookNet, we’ll show you how to find the backlist titles that sell well consistently during the holiday season each year, and share some tips on how you can harness the power of SalesData to identify your tried and true backlist bestsellers.
What are holiday shoppers buying at independent bookstores?
We looked at sales reported by the Independents market over the same eight-week holiday shopping period (Weeks 44 to 51) for the past three years (2020 to 2022) and found that on average, frontlist titles made up 46% of sales, while backlist titles accounted for 54%.
How far back do backlist bestsellers go?
Zooming in on those backlist sales over the same period for the last three years, we sorted the titles by publication age and found that on average, titles published within the last five years make up the bulk of backlist sales over the holiday season. So, if you’re deciding which titles to keep on hand for holiday shoppers this year, looking at books published in 2018 and onwards would be a safe bet!
Backlist breakdown: On average, 19% of backlist sales over the holiday shopping period for the last three years consisted of titles that were a year old; books that are two and three-years-old made up almost a quarter of backlist sales; and books that are four and five-years-old made up 15% of backlist titles sold over the holiday season.
Which backlist titles should you be stocking this year?
Knowing that titles published within the last five years make up the bulk of backlist sales at independent bookstores, you can fine-tune a Bestseller Report to identify which backlist titles in particular have sold consistently well over the last few holiday seasons in your store (and that you might want to keep in stock). We do this by applying the pub date filter and by selecting a specific reporting period (Weeks 44 to 51 of any given year). For example, using the data for our BookNet Sample Store, we could find out which 2018 releases continued to sell during the eight-week holiday season in 2022 by running a Bestseller Report and limiting the search to titles published in 2018.
Selecting Weeks 44 to 51 as the reporting period will pull a list of books sold during the holiday shopping season.
Using the pub date filter will help to identify bestselling titles published within the last five years.
Running a report with the above criteria for our Sample Store, we were able to generate a list of two dozen titles (published between 2018 and 2021) that have sold consistently over the last few holiday seasons.
To determine which of these titles we could expect to perform well this season (hey, there’s still three weeks left!), we ran a Multi-ISBN Report to see how many copies each of these books have sold within the last 52 weeks and were able to weed out titles that have slowed down.
Now, based on three years of data (and including year-to-date sales for 2023) these are the Top 12 bestselling backlist titles you’d find in our Sample Store (stacked between Barbra and Britney, of course):
Backlist titles that sell consistently well every holiday season
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
Five Little Indians by Michelle Good 🍁
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
21 Things You May Not Know about the Indian Act by Bob Joseph 🍁
All About Love by bell hooks
The Barren Grounds by David A. Robertson 🍁
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Atomic Habits by James Clear
A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice 🍁
The Wild Robot by Peter Brown
With a few weeks left to go, we hope you’re inspired to dive into your data and keep your backlist business bumping! If you’re a bookseller who wants to learn more about running reports and playing with search filters, visit our website to learn more about SalesData’s capabilities or give us a shout at salesdata@booknetcanada.ca. If you’re already a SalesData subscriber, and want even more perennial bestseller content, you can find our subscriber-exclusive report, Perennial Bestsellers 2017-2021, in the research portal.
In this podcast episode, we talk to Simon Crump to discuss the EUDR and its impact on the book industry.