Comparing the UK and the US Book Markets:

Does one lead and the other follow?

The international book trade is a rich and varied creature with each territory influenced – more or less so – by cultural and local influences: priests-turned-chefs in Brazil, economics and business titles in India and home-grown fiction authors in Italy for example. But there are also trends that ricochet around the world. In the last few years we’ve observed the global popularity of adult colouring, a grown-up Harry Potter (of course) and dystopian fiction (initially targeted at the emerging adult), to name but a few.
How do you predict what will translate, literally and culturally? How do you take a punt and find you have the next Elena Ferrante? The next Millie Marotta? The next Jeff Kinney?
I’m afraid I’m not about to reveal the secret here and now, but what we can show is a direct comparison of two heavy-weight markets and compare and contrast successes in the UK and the US according to Nielsen Book figures.
Starting with the UK’s print book market – worth £1.6bn in 2016 with a growth of nearly 5%. That’s 5% in a year which saw huge economic uncertainty and fluctuations in the GBP. A year where retailers continue to be under stress from the restructuring needed to co-exist in an online world, where the National Living Wage was introduced resulting in added costs for retailers and where poor weather once again adversely impacted book sales.
Yet people did buy books. Buy them in droves, with volume sales up 2.3% to 195.1m overall and year on year growth seen for healthy eating cookbooks, children’s fiction, crime, thriller & adventure fiction and humour titles. Ebooks account for 28% of all volume sales according to Books & Consumers data, although sales were down 5% year on year.
Compare now the US print book market in 2016. With 623m books sold in 2016 it’s 130m bigger than all the other territories in the Nielsen global BookScan measure combined and growing with year on year growth of 3.3%. Although fiction has taken a hit, the children’s and non-fiction categories are in long term growth and both up on 2015. There is strength in Religious, Crafting and self-help areas. Ebook sales are down -16% according to PubTrack Digital US.
Now to look at specific titles. In 2016 there were 206 common fiction titles between the US and the UK, 117 Trade Non-Fiction titles and 127 Children’s fiction titles.
Of the fiction titles, approximately half were published in the UK first. One of the best-selling authors in both countries is Jojo Moyes. This British author has clearly been exported internationally to great success. There are 10 of her titles in both the UK and the US top bestsellers of 2016. Of the (unique) titles, six appeared on UK shelves first, which makes sense her being a home-grown talent. But if we look at total sales from 2014 onward we see an interesting pattern.
We observe a greater upturn in sales in the US in June 2014, ahead of a peak in the UK in late July. So this recent wave of popularity was seen earlier in the US than the UK. Of course back in 2012 she had achieved weekly sales in excess of 11k in the UK, but here we are looking at recent popularity. The pattern of sales in the two territories then follow on closely until 2016 when there is a huge increase at the end of April in the US while the uplift in the UK doesn’t come until the start of June, slightly offset from the ‘Me Before You’ film release dates (see vertical lines on graph) which were only separated by a week. The US consumers were clearly reacting to the buzz around the film faster than in the UK.
Looking at other fiction titles common to both territories, we observe that the uplift in sales of titles from the hugely popular Italian author Elena Ferrante started in the US before the UK.
The trend for adult colouring books started in Brazil and was seen in early 2015 in the UK. Yet it did not appear in the US until later.
The Little Book of Mindfulness, one of the best-selling titles from this increasingly- popular genre saw success in the UK long before sales picked up in the US despite the titles being introduced to the markets at the same time.
Finally , looking to children’s, there are no clear indicators that either territory leads the other. Considering the examples of Theodore Boone: The Fugitive from John Grisham or Jeff Kinney titles.
So for these examples we would conclude that fiction has a tendency to succeed in the US before the UK while for the Non-Fiction examples used here it took some time for them to gain traction in the US compared with the UK. In children’s there is no clear leader. Of course these are for specific case studies and trends may appear should we expand the study. However, these markets tend to coincide for the bestsellers, cultural nuances aside.

Hazel Kenyon – Head of Publisher Account Management, Nielsen Book Research, UK