December marks a major holiday season with celebrations like Christmas, Kwanzaa, and Hanukkah all falling in the final month of the year. Using SalesData we took a look at the market share and sales of Juvenile titles with BISAC subjects that reflect these end-of-year holidays.
We decided to focus only on the Fiction titles, because Non-Fiction titles followed similar trends to Fiction but had far fewer sales and a lower market share overall. Juvenile Non-Fiction / Holidays & Celebrations / Hanukkah and Juvenile Non-Fiction / Holidays & Celebrations / Kwanzaa held a 0% market share throughout the year with no variation. The market share for Juvenile Non-Fiction / Holidays & Celebrations / Christmas & Advent peaked at only 0.36%.
Monthly market share of holiday titles
For Fiction titles, we compared Juvenile Fiction / Holidays & Celebrations / Christmas & Advent, Juvenile Fiction / Holidays & Celebrations / Kwanzaa, and Juvenile Fiction / Holidays & Celebrations / Hanukkah to find out how these categories have been selling so far this year in the lead-up to December.
We first looked at the market share of these subjects from January to November 2024. Kwanzaa titles held steady throughout the year at a market share of 0.01% with no changes month to month. The Hanukkah subcategory was similarly consistent with an average market share of 0.01%; falling to 0.00% from March to July and rising to 0.02% in November. The Christmas & Advent subcategory saw the most change, with its share being lowest from May to July at 0.04%, beginning to rise in August, and peaking in November at 2.29%.
We then zoomed in to the monthly market share for Juvenile Fiction / Holidays & Celebrations / Christmas & Advent from 2021, 2022, and 2023 to see how it compared to the current year so far. It's relevant to note that the 2024 data does not include December. Reviewing past data provides insight into the market share of these subjects in the month of December, but this gap in data means that December 2024 cannot be directly compared to past years at this time.
We found that 2021, 2022, and 2023 market shares all follow a similar trend, with sales beginning to increase in August and September, peaking in November, and beginning to decline in December. The data from the current year is also indicative of following this same trend. Unsurprisingly, we see that holiday subjects hold the greatest market share in the lead-up to the holiday months.
Sales of Holiday Titles Year Over Year
We next looked at overall sales for Fiction holiday titles year over year. When looking at the sales of each individual subject year over year, some interesting trends emerge.
For Juvenile Fiction / Holidays & Celebrations / Christmas & Advent, there is a steady upward trend year over year.
For Juvenile Fiction / Holidays & Celebrations / Hanukkah sales also trended upward, with the most significant jump occurring 2018 to 2020.
Sales of Juvenile Fiction / Holidays & Celebrations / Kwanzaa saw a major spike in sales of books in 2020 with consistently higher sales thereafter. It is possible that this could be a reverberation of the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.
The Top Titles in 2024 for Juvenile Fiction / Holidays & Celebrations
The top-selling books in each subcategory for 2024 so far were:
Christmas and Advent: Bluey: Awesome Advent Calendar Book Bundle by Penguin Young Readers Licenses
Hannukkah: Hanukkah Pajamakkahs by Dara Henry, Olga Ivanov, and Aleksey Ivanov
Kwanzaa: Dear Baby, Board Book by Paris Rosenthal and Holly Hatam
Though we have shown the top book for each specific subject, Bluey: Awesome Advent Calendar Book Bundle ranked far higher in sales overall than either of the other books, and was the bestselling book so far in 2024 for the whole Juvenile Fiction / Holidays & Celebrations category.
To summarize these findings, we found that in the Juvenile Fiction subcategories, Christmas & Advent titles had the most sales compared to Hanukkah and Kwanzaa titles, and the Fiction subjects had more sales than the Non-Fiction subjects.
When focusing on market share of Juvenile Fiction / Holidays & Celebrations / Christmas & Advent, sales begin to increase at the end of summer and beginning of fall, with market share consistently peaking in November. Sales then begin to decrease in December and drop off significantly in January. Therefore, holiday titles released and marketed well before the end of the year likely have a higher chance of being successful.
Finally, when breaking down sales of the individual subjects, there was an overall rise in sales between 2015 and 2023. However, Juvenile Fiction / Holidays & Celebrations / Christmas & Advent indicated a more gentle ascent, whereas Juvenile Non-Fiction / Holidays & Celebrations / Hanukkah and Juvenile Non-Fiction / Holidays & Celebrations / Kwanzaa both showed steeper increases year over year.
Using SalesData, we’ve identified the top performing titles of 2024.