At the end of 2017, Waterstones boss James Daunt bemoaned that too few of that year’s books were blow-the-doors off bestsellers that “packed a wallop”. That all changed in 2018, with many titles showing impressive punching power.

Indeed, one of the reasons the UK print books market was able to notch up its fourth consecutive year of value growth is down to the very top of the table. The Official UK Top 100 of 2018 (by units sold) generated just under £130m through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market, 11.3% up on what the top 100 shifted in 2017. Forty-nine titles earned £1m or more through the TCM last year, a 22.5% jump on the number of “BookScan millionaires” of 2017. Yet, we see the reverse a little further down the list: 71 books sold between £500,000 and £999,999 last year, against a whopping 133 titles which were in that bracket in 2017. In short, if 2017 was about spread betting, in 2018 you should have put your money on the front-runners.

The big hits included a former first lady, a début Scottish author, a doctor-turned-comedian-turned-memoirist and a from-fat-to-fit celeb chef. But first, let us turn our attentions toward the big beast of the Top 100, a 100,000-year-old woolly mammoth.

David Walliams’ The Ice Monster (HCCB) was in second place in the overall top 100 and was by far (260,000 units) the bestselling children’s title of the year. But that is just the tip of the iceberg: the kids’ book Walliams beat to number one was his own The World’s Worst Children 3 and he has a further eight books in the top 100. J K Rowling/Robert Galbraith, with five spots, is the only author within shouting distance of Walliams in terms of multiple entries.

But Walliams is not the true king of the 2018 top 100. No, that crown should go to his long-time collaborator and illustrator, Tony Ross. In addition to the 10 top 100 titles he worked on with Walliams, Ross also created the art for Clare Balding’s World Book Day release, The Girl Who Thought She was a Dog (Puffin), which hit 93rd place.

Oliphant in the room
It will be no surprise to regular Bookseller charts readers—or, for that matter, anyone who went into a bookshop in 2018—that Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (HarperCollins) was the bestselling book of the year. It notched up the Mass Market Fiction top spot in its first week of release in late January and claimed the full market number one two weeks later. Throughout 2018—in which the book would pick up the Costa First Novel Award and the Nibbie for Book of the Year – it has been a remarkably consistent seller, earning seven non-consecutive overall and 18 Mass Market pole positions between January and September. Eleanor Oliphant… sold 240,000 more copies than the next-bestselling title, almost half a million more than the second top-selling work of fiction and it is already the 22nd best-selling general fiction book since accurate records began.

Another across the year fiction success was for Heather Morris’ The Tattooist of Auschwitz (Zaffre). The mass market edition ended the year with a flourish, scoring 13 consecutive MMPB number ones to finish sixth place in the overall 2018 chart. The January-released hardback, meanwhile, was a word-of-mouth hit through the first half of the year, eventually grabbing an Original Fiction number one in July. The HB just missed out on the top 100 (109th overall) and Morris’ début has sold 519,000 units for £3.3m in all print editions.

Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt (Picador) was essentially the non-fiction twin to Honeyman’s novel. Both were the bestselling hardback débuts in their respective categories in 2017, both swept the awards season and both reached even further heights of success in paperback. This is Going to Hurt spent a near-straight eight months atop the Paperback Non-Fiction chart, only falling twice from the pole in its 32-week stretch, and shifted over 500,000 copies across 2018.

Making the print market great again
In 2017, the Donald Trump bump saw sales boosts for classic political dystopias such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, which jumped to number one in the US charts the week of the President’s inauguration ceremony, and Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, the story of a “vain, outlandish, anti-immigrant, fearmongering demagogue” who is elected to the highest office in the land. Somehow, the 2018 book market painted an even worse picture of Trump, with UK bookbuyers reaching deep into their pockets for several titles critical of him and his administration.

The year began with a bang when he attempted to stop US publisher Henry Holt releasing Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury (Little, Brown) with a cease-and-desist letter, which made the title a runaway hit around the world—in the UK alone, it racked up over £1m earned in its first week on general sale. Bob Woodward’s Fear (S&S) followed in September, knocking Joe “the Body Coach” Wicks off the overall number one spot and scoring an average selling price of £15.58.

And would we have crowned Michelle Obama the Christmas number one (and the first author of colour to do so) if Hillary was in the White House? Becoming (Viking) shifted over half a million books in under two months, obliterated records set by Alex Ferguson’s My Autobiography (Hodder) in 2013 and, in the last week of the year, became the most expensive number one bestseller of all time, at £17.04.

Fire and Fury’s blazing success story at the start of the year had even more bizarre twist when it didn’t immediately rocket into the UK number one—despite blanket press coverage and the literal US President tweeting that he was “a very stable genius”. Instead, and perhaps demonstrating British bookbuyers’ commitment to “new year, new you”, Michelin-starred chef Tom Kerridge’s Lose Weight for Good (Absolute) pipped it to the post, setting the record for hardback sales in January. Kerridge lost 10 stone with a high-fat, low-carb diet—and netted his first number one in 2017 with Tom Kerridge’s Dopamine Diet—yet his more user-friendly calorie controlled recipe book shifted more than double its predecessor and became the bestselling cookbook of the year. Kerridge even dethroned the previously unassailable Wicks, shifting more than 200,000 copies in excess of the Instagram personal trainer’s The Fat-Loss Plan (Bluebird).

Fantastic Four
With their abllity to spend more on marketing, promotion, publicity and advances, the Big Four publshing groups almost always have a greater share of the biggest selling books than they do of overall sales. That was certainly the case in 2018, with 78 of the 100 entries split among Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins and Pan Macmillan. PRH claimed 34% of the top 100 in a year in which its overall print market share will be around 22%. Transworld is big part of this; PRH had 21 titles in the top 50, a third of which were from the commercial powerhouse, led by its crime lords Lee Child, Dan Brown and Paula Hawkins.

Hachette notched up 19 spots—an improvement on 2017 when it had 16 of the top 100—but only one of those was in the top 20, and that was John Grishamn’s 19th-placed The Rooster Bar (Hodder), although Wolff’s Fire and Furywould probably have also cracked the BookScan top 20 for Hachette if the print versions were available immediately after it had to be rush-released in early January. There were some decent Hachette Christmas crackers, though. John Murray had Stephen Hawking’s Brief Answers to the Big Questions (poaching the late physicist’s last book from Transworld), while Orion imprint Trapeze scored with both The Ordnance Survey Puzzle Book (a.k.a. this year’s GCHQ Puzzle Book) and the holiday season’s sleeper hit, Noel “the Supervet” Fitzpatrick’s Listening to the Animals, the latter of which shifted an impressive 75,000 units in the three weeks before Christmas.

HarperCollins was a smidgeon behind Hachette with 18 entries, 11 of which were from the heretofore discussed Honeyman and Walliams/Ross partnership, but breakouts included SAS badass turned TV presenter Ant Middleton’sFirst Man In (20th) and Henry Firth and Ian Theasby’s BOSH! (HQ, 54th), the standard-bearer for the surging vegan cookery market. A good year, too, for Pan Macmillan and its seven Top 100 entries, which include Kay, two from Wicks and the return of C J Sansom’s Turdor sleuth Matthew Shardlake in Tombland, which sold almost 170,000 units in hardback this autumn.

Only three publishers outside the Big Four had three or more entries. Bloomsbury’s had a quintet wtih Kerridge, Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology (33rd place) and three of Rowling’s Harry Potter tiltes (all told, the boy wizard’s backlist was worth £9.9m to Bloomsbury last year). Irish eyes smiled upon Faber for its three spots: Sally Rooney, the pride of Castlebar, Co. Mayo, hit 99th with the paperback of Conversations with Friends, while a Waterstones Book of the Year nod pushed Normal People up to 77th. Meanwhile, Belfast’s Anna Burns claimed the Man Booker Prize, and the 135,000-unit sale for her supposedly difficult Milkman was proof the Booker bounce was back.

Scholastic, lastly, had hits from the usual suspects—Liz Pichon’s latest Tom Gates adventure (92nd spot) and Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s newest (83rd)—and from completely out of nowhere with The Wonky Donkey. Craig Smith and illustrator Katz Cowley’s picture book was originally released in 2009 and up to the end of 2017 had sold a modest 2,100 copies through BookScan. But after a video of a Scottish woman reading the book to her grandson and dissolving into uncontrollable giggles on lines like “Who ever heard of a spunky hanky-panky cranky stinky-dinky lanky honky-tonky winky wonky donkey?” went viral, the book hit the stratosphere, becoming the bestselling pre-school book of the year.

 

 

Pos	Title	Author; Illustrator	Imprint	ISBN	2018 Total
1	Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine	Gail Honeyman	HarperCollins	9780008172145	866,200
2	The Ice Monster	David Walliams; Tony Ross	HarperCollinsChildren’s	9780008164690	624,913
3	This is Going to Hurt	Adam Kay	Picador	9781509858637	541,219
4	Becoming	Michelle Obama	Viking	9780241334140	533,727
5	Lose Weight for Good	Tom Kerridge	Absolute	9781472949295	406,665
6	The Tattooist of Auschwitz	Heather Morris	Zaffre	9781785763670	370,266
7	The World’s Worst Children 3	David Walliams; Tony Ross	HarperCollinsChildren’s	9780008304591	365,606
8	The Meltdown	Jeff Kinney	Puffin	9780241321980	365,196
9	The Midnight Line	Lee Child	Bantam	9780857503619	354,769
10	Guinness World Records 2019		GWR	9781912286461	352,121
11	Origin	Dan Brown	Corgi	9780552174169	323,525
12	Sapiens	Yuval Noah Harari	Vintage	9780099590088	306,908
13	Into the Water	Paula Hawkins	Black Swan	9781784162245	265,379
14	The Break	Marian Keyes	Penguin	9781405918756	255,029
15	The Midnight Gang	David Walliams; Tony Ross	HarperCollinsChildren’s	9780008164621	244,358
16	5 Ingredients	Jamie Oliver	Michael Joseph	9780718187729	242,416
17	Past Tense	Lee Child	Bantam	9780593078198	213,609
18	The Wonky Donkey	Craig Smith; Katz Cowley	Scholastic	9781407195575	213,310
19	The Rooster Bar	John Grisham	Hodder	9781473616998	205,025
20	First Man In	Ant Middleton	HarperCollins	9780008245719	200,624
21	Where’s the Unicorn?	Sophie Schrey & Jonny Marx; Paul Moran	Michael O’Mara	9781782439073	188,087
22	The Fat-Loss Plan	Joe Wicks	Bluebird	9781509836079	183,004
23	Listening to the Animals	Noel Fitzpatrick	Trapeze	9781409183747	182,463
24	Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone	J K Rowling	Bloomsbury	9781408855652	182,281
25	Camino Island	John Grisham	Hodder	9781473663749	179,444
26	Brief Answers to the Big Questions	Stephen Hawking	John Murray	9781473695986	178,798
27	Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald	J K Rowling	Little, Brown	9781408711705	171,803
28	Why We Sleep	Matthew Walker	Penguin	9780141983769	169,674
29	Tombland	C J Sansom	Mantle	9781447284482	167,014
30	The Girl Before	J P Delaney	Quercus	9781786480262	164,686
31	12 Rules for Life	Jordan B Peterson	Allen Lane	9780241351635	163,961
32	Fire and Fury	Michael Wolff	Little, Brown	9781408711408	162,427
33	Norse Mythology	Neil Gaiman	Bloomsbury	9781408891957	161,513
34	Surprise Me	Sophie Kinsella	Black Swan	9781784160432	161,233
35	Oi Goat! (WBD)	Kes Gray; Jim Field	Hodder	9781444942316	160,998
36	Jamie Cooks Italy	Jamie Oliver	Michael Joseph	9780718187736	158,620
37	Gangsta Granny	David Walliams; Tony Ross	HarperCollinsChildren’s	9780007371464	156,475
38	Homo Deus	Yuval Noah Harari	Vintage	9781784703936	156,236
39	Mythos	Stephen Fry	Penguin	9781405934138	154,266
40	Brain Freeze (WBD)	Tom Fletcher; Shane Devries	Puffin	9780241323724	154,113
41	Damaged	Martina Cole	Headline	9781472201096	153,851
42	Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls	Elena Favilli & Francesca Cavallo	Particular	9780141986005	153,042
43	Munich	Robert Harris	Arrow	9781784751852	151,711
44	SIMPLE	Yotam Ottolenghi	Ebury	9781785031168	150,102
45	No Middle Name	Lee Child	Bantam	9780857503770	149,632
46	The Last Tudor	Philippa Gregory	Simon & Schuster	9781471133077	149,363
47	Prisoners of Geography	Tim Marshall	Elliott & Thompson	9781783962433	149,126
48	Wonder	R. J. Palacio	Corgi	9780552565974	148,035
49	Beano Annual 2019		D C Thomson	9781845356798	147,834
50	The Official Highway Code		TSO	9780115533426	147,505
51	Little Fires Everywhere	Celeste Ng	Little, Brown	9780349142920	145,788
52	The Couple Next Door	Shari Lapena	Corgi	9780552173148	145,231
53	A Legacy of Spies	John Le Carré	Penguin	9780241981610	142,221
54	BOSH!	Henry Firth & Ian Theasby	HQ	9780008262907	141,983
55	Then She Was Gone	Lisa Jewell	Arrow	9781784756253	141,387
56	The Good Daughter	Karin Slaughter	HarperCollins	9780008150792	140,518
57	Paddington Turns Detective (WBD)	Michael Bond; Peggy Fortnum	HarperCollinsChildren’s	9780008279806	139,851
58	You Are Awesome	Matthew Syed; Toby Triumph	Wren & Rook	9781526361158	139,163
59	How to Stop Time	Matt Haig	Canongate	9781782118640	138,078
60	Awful Auntie	David Walliams; Tony Ross	HarperCollinsChildren’s	9780007453627	136,040
61	Milkman	Anna Burns	Faber	9780571338757	134,929
62	Demon Dentist	David Walliams; Tony Ross	HarperCollinsChildren’s	9780007453580	133,581
63	The Getaway	Jeff Kinney	Penguin	9780141376677	133,580
64	Grandpa’s Great Escape	David Walliams; Tony Ross	HarperCollinsChildren’s	9780008183424	132,628
65	Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets	J K Rowling	Bloomsbury	9781408855669	128,958
66	Bad Dad	David Walliams; Tony Ross	HarperCollinsChildren’s	9780008164652	128,560
67	The Ordnance Survey Puzzle Book	Dr Gareth Moore	Trapeze	9781409184676	126,282
68	Insidious Intent	Val McDermid	Sphere	9780751568240	125,889
69	Why Mummy Swears	Gill Sims	HarperCollins	9780008284213	124,116
70	The Thirst	Jo Nesbo	Vintage	9781784705091	122,862
71	Classic	Mary Berry	BBC Books	9781785943249	120,182
72	He Said/She Said	Erin Kelly	Hodder	9781444797145	119,699
73	The World’s Worst Children	David Walliams; Tony Ross	HarperCollinsChildren’s	9780008197032	119,500
74	Private Eye Annual 2018	Ian Hislop	Private Eye	9781901784664	118,341
75	Blowing the Bloody Doors Off	Michael Caine	Hodder	9781473689305	115,762
76	Double Down	Jeff Kinney	Puffin	9780141376660	114,926
77	Normal People	Sally Rooney	Faber	9780571334643	114,233
78	Dear Zoo	Rod Campbell	Macmillan Children’s	9780230747722	114,178
79	Dead If You Don’t	Peter James	Pan	9781509816378	113,687
80	Fire and Blood	George R R Martin	HarperCollins	9780008307738	113,684
81	A Stranger in the House	Shari Lapena	Corgi	9780552173155	113,414
82	Lethal White	Robert Galbraith	Sphere	9780751572858	113,117
83	The Ugly Five	Julia Donaldson; Axel Scheffler	Alison Green	9781407184630	112,874
84	End Game	David Baldacci	Pan	9781447277415	110,787
85	The Chimp Paradox	Prof Steve Peters	Vermilion	9780091935580	110,766
86	Friend Request	Laura Marshall	Sphere	9780751568356	109,610
87	Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban	J K Rowling	Bloomsbury	9781408855676	109,350
88	Sleeping in the Ground	Peter Robinson	Hodder	9781444786903	109,293
89	How to Be a Footballer	Peter Crouch	Ebury	9781785039768	108,369
90	The Story of Brexit	Jason Hazeley & Joel Morris	Michael Joseph	9780241386569	108,294
91	My Book about Me by Mr Silly (WBD)	Adam & Roger Hargreaves	Egmont	9781405290869	108,047
92	Biscuits, Bands and Very Big Plans	Liz Pichon	Scholastic	9781407179858	107,853
93	I’ll Keep You Safe	Peter May	riverrun	9781784294977	106,838
94	The Girl Who Thought She Was a Dog (WBD)	Clare Balding; Tony Ross	Puffin	9780241323731	106,450
95	In a House of Lies	Ian Rankin	Orion	9781409176886	106,427
96	Close to Home	Cara Hunter	Viking	9780241283097	104,434
97	Joe’s 30 Minute Meals	Joe Wicks	Bluebird	9781509836093	104,045
98	Billionaire Boy	David Walliams;Tony Ross	HarperCollinsChildren’s	9780007371082	103,720
99	Conversations with Friends	Sally Rooney	Faber	9780571333134	103,482
100	Birthday Boy	David Baddiel; Jim Field	HarperCollinsChildren’s	9780008200510	103,134

Rebuck pays tribute to ‘writer’s publisher’ Stephen Johnson

Penguin Random House UK chair Gail Rebuck has paid tribute to Stephen Johnson, the former m.d. of Exclusive Books and Random House South Africa, who died earlier this week, as “a larger than life figure” in South Africa’s publishing industry who will be “greatly missed”.

Johnson, born in Cape Town, was dubbed a “writer’s publisher” by his authors and had a career in the book trade spanning 40 years. He started out at educational publisher Maskew Miller before becoming m.d of the South African book chain Exclusive Books. Subsequently he became m.d. for Random House South Africa, a role he held for two decades until in 2008 he was made the founding m.d. of Random House Struik. After this, from January 2013 to June 2014, he served as c.e.o. for Penguin South Africa for two years, before going on to work for South African discount book retailer Bargain Books. He died on Tuesday (1st January).

In tribute, PRH SA c.e.o. Steve Connolly hailed him “a true leader in the industry”. Meanwhile Rebuck recalled Johnson’s exuberance and said he would be “greatly missed”.

Connolly wrote as part of an email to staff in the South African office: “In his time as a publisher, Stephen worked closely with many great writers and was an active and larger than life figure in the local publishing industry. Stephen was renowned for his erudition and remarkable eloquence, making him much in demand as Master of Ceremonies for many events.  He was an active and highly involved figure in the Publishers Association of South Africa for many years and has been a true leader in the industry. Our thoughts go to Louis, his partner, and to his children and family.”

Rebuck said: “It is with great sadness that I heard the news of Stephen Johnson’s untimely death. He was a larger than life figure and the face of Random House in South Africa for many years.

“I shall never forget an incredible visit to South Africa to launch Umuzi in 2006, when Stephen had arranged a surprise and truly remarkable tea with Nelson Mandela.  Mandela responded so warmly to Stephen’s size and exuberance that he started calling him The Boxer – a nickname we adopted for Stephen ever after.

“Stephen was known in South Africa as the ‘writer’s publisher’ and will be greatly missed.”