Juvenile Fiction, Body/Mind/Spirit See Impact of Runaway Bestsellers
TORONTO May 23, 2008 – Big category winners for 2007 are apparent in BookNet Canada’s annual review of the Canadian trade book industry, The Canadian Book Market 2007.
Market Share (Units Sold; Value Sold - List)
- Juvenile Fiction (22%; 16%)
- Juvenile Non-Fiction (6%; 4%)
- Fiction – Suspense and Thrillers (5%; 4%)
Due to the power of the Potter and Stephenie Meyer, Juvenile Fiction led all other categories by a wide margin. Not so in percentage jump over 2006 results though—for that, we can look to some of the other big books of 2007.
Percentage increase (Units Sold; Value Sold - List)
- Body, Mind and Spirit (93%; 123%)
- Comic and Graphic Novels (31%; 19%)
- Humour (28%; 42%)
Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret was an obvious contributor to the year-over-year value increase for Body/Mind/Spirit. In Humour, celebrated authors like Stephen Colbert and Rick Mercer pushed the category up and Comics continues to grow as the popularity of manga and graphic novels increases.
The absence of Dan Brown probably contributed to a 12% unit decrease in Fiction – Mystery & Detective though the category still had the fourth highest market share in both value and volume. Still, the dearth of Da Vinci had unexpected reach. Four explications of The Da Vinci Code made it to the top ten titles in Literary Criticism in 2006 and none in 2007. Literary Criticism went down 31% in both units and value sold.
There’s all this and more in The Canadian Book Market 2007. For more information, visit BookNet Canada’s website at www.booknetcanada.ca/canadian-book-market.
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About BookNet Canada
Created and supported by the Canadian book industry, BookNet Canada is the not-for-profit agency dedicated to technology innovation in the Canadian book industry. It is responsible for tracking national book sales, managing industry-wide business-to-business electronic commerce, bibliographic data, and other critical components of technology infrastructure.
