The Canadian Book Market 2024, is out now! It’s your definitive guide to understanding the Canadian book market, making business decisions, identifying trends, opportunities for growth, and more. In this year's edition you’ll find:
Top-level consumer data from BookNet’s Canadian Book Consumer survey panel, including insights about book buying, discoverability, purchasing behaviour, and more.
French Canadian trade book market sales data from the Société de gestion de la Banque de titres de langue française (BTLF).
A section featuring insights into the sales of books by Canadian contributors and Canadian-owned publishing houses.
English Canadian trade book market sales data by subject from BNC SalesData — for more than 50 subject categories. Including top-level data: total value and volume of sales, percent change from the previous year; the subject’s share of the total market; weekly sales analysis; market shares by volume for the top 10 ranked publishers and distributors; and much more.
Information about the top circulated subject categories and titles in Canadian libraries.
Highlights
We've compiled some highlights in the infographic below (scroll down for the text version of these stats). But to get the whole picture of the Canadian book market, be sure to purchase your copy.
The book industry in 2024
In 2024, we tracked sales for 877,916 unique ISBNs, which translated to 47,631,182 physical books sold at a total value of $1,114,780,282.
Combined, the sales of Juvenile and Young Adult subjects accounted for the majority of the market share at 39%. In second place, Non-Fiction made up 30%, and Fiction occupied the third place at 29%.
The top Juvenile & YA titles were Dog Man: The Scarlet Shedder by Dav Pilkey and Powerless by Lauren Roberts respectively.
The top two Non-Fiction titles were Atomic Habits by James Clear and The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt.
The top two Fiction titles were The Women by Kristin Hannah and A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas.
In the French-Canadian market, Juvenile & YA also had the biggest portion of sales throughout 2024, accounting for 44% of the trade market. The best-selling title in this subject category was Mon premier livre de recettes: Tome 2 by Ricardo Larrivée.
Other highlights include
The Juvenile Non-Fiction title To Hope and Back: The Journey of the St. Louis by Kathy Kacer, published by Second Story Press, is the top selling title for Canadian-owned publishers in 2024.
Books by Canadians made up 12% of print book sales in Canada in 2024.
The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny 🍁 was the top selling title by a Canadian contributor.
Half of the titles on the top 10 hardcover and top 10 paperback lists in the Fiction / Fantasy category were by Sarah J. Maas, including the top selling book in the category, A Court of Thorns and Roses.
For the seventh year running, two out of every five print books sold in 2024 in both the English- and French-language markets in Canada were categorized as either Juvenile or Young Adult (YA).
Dav Pilkey is once again at the top of the Juvenile category, for the fifth year in a row, but this time with Dog Man: The Scarlet Shedder.
Insights into the latest updates and additions made to ONIX codelists.