We’re halfway through the year so now’s the perfect time to check in with how the Canadian English-language book market has been performing in the first half of 2022, with the latest data from SalesData, BiblioShare, and the Canadian Book Consumer survey.
Book sales
Using SalesData, our national sales tracking service for the Canadian English-language trade book market, we’ve found that print unit sales for the first six months of 2022 are up 8% over the same time period in 2021 according to our comparable stores panel. Looking even farther back, print unit sales during the first six months of 2022 are 2% higher than in 2019, signalling the Canadian book market’s recovery from COVID-19 related losses.
The graph below shows the change in print unit sales month-by-month in the Canadian English-language trade market from January to June over the last four years using the comparable stores panel. As pandemic restrictions continued to lessen, the first half of 2022 saw peaks in sales in March and June that were well ahead of past years.
Over the entire market, the value sold in the first half of 2022 is up almost $5.8 million year over year. In the first six months of 2022, for the entire Canadian trade print book market, there were 22,096,413 units sold for a value of $469,550,154.
Which titles sold the most in the first half of 2022?
Bestselling Fiction title: It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover
Bestselling Non-Fiction title: Atomic Habits by James Clear
Bestselling Juvenile and Young Adult title: Cat Kid Comic Club: On Purpose by Dav Pilkey
Bestselling title by a Canadian contributor: Five Little Indians by Michelle Good 🍁
Looking at category trends during the first six months of 2022:
Juvenile and Young Adult titles continue to reign supreme at 40% of all English-language book sales so far in 2022, down from 42% in the same period in 2021.
Non-Fiction holds on to second place with a 33% marketshare, up from 30% during the first half of 2021.
Fiction remains in third place at 26% of all units sold, down slightly from 27% in 2021.
Frontlist sales (sales for titles with a publication date within the year) accounted for 24% of all units sold in the first half of 2022, down from 27% in 2021.
Subjects with the largest increases year over year so far include:
Comics & Graphic Novels (up 62%);
Fiction / Biographical (up 801%); and
Fiction / Humorous (up 159%, with Fiction / Humorous / Black Humour seeing an increase of 8,707%).
Publication dates
Data collected by BiblioShare, our quality-controlled data aggregation and distribution system, allows us to track publishers' print publishing schedules and the number of new titles entering the Canadian book market.
The graph below shows the number of publication dates by month for print releases in Canada for the first six months of the year from 2019 to 2022. So far in 2022, the number of new print books entering the Canadian market has decreased when compared to previous years. This decrease in the number of new titles is a consistent trend since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020.
Canadian book consumers
The Canadian Book Consumer survey is conducted quarterly by BookNet Canada and queries Canadians about their book acquisition behaviour. The data below is a sneak peek at the results of the April and July 2022 fieldings that reached over 1,000 Canadian book buyers.
During the first and second quarters of 2022, Canadian book buyers primarily purchased print books. Print books made up 71% of all book purchases — 46% paperback and 26% hardcover, as shown in the graph below. Digital book purchases continued to make up a growing percentage of book purchases during the first six months of 2022 — 19% ebooks and 7% audiobooks.
The graph below shows how the purchasing behaviour of Canadian book buyers continues to change in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As pandemic restrictions continue to lessen for retailers across Canada, Canadian book buyers are returning to in-person shopping, with the percentage of online and in-person purchases approaching their 2019 figures.
Looking for more research into the Canadian book market, Canadian book consumers, and Canadian readers? Complete information on print book sales broken out by category and by Canadian-owned firms for 2021 can be found in our annual publication The Canadian Book Market 2021.
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