This is a rather interesting article from 2011 -- I am not sure that The Bookseller has done another analysis since then. Some rather interesting things in there -- did you know that Carol Vorderman, Roald Dahl, Dawn French and Sarah Waters were all Welsh? Or sort of? Some big sellers in there .. although Iris Gower is out of the top ten. So is Catrin Collier -- but that may be because she publishes under a number of different names.
Note that these figures are based on EPOS figures collected by Nielsen from big bookstores across the UK. Within Wales, very few bookshops have these electronic systems, so it's difficult to collect data.
But one thing stands out -- not one of these big authors (or big titles) was published in Wales. The big London publishers are the only ones that feature. So that does make me rather happy in the knowledge that I have sold around 85,000 paperback copies, mostly within Wales, with no subsidies and no big teams of marketing and publicity people working for me.......
--------------------------------
Welsh publishing: the charts
The bestsellers thus far this year in Wales and the West more or less correspond to BookScan’s overall UK charts. A couple of authors do seem to be a bit more popular out west. Maeve Binchy’s Minding Frankie (Orion) is the 10th bestselling title book in Wales and the West thus far this year, shifting 14,666 copies; it is the 21st ranked bestseller UK-wide. Meanwhile, Philippa Gregory’s The Red Queen (Simon & Schuster) is 20th in Wales and the West, 28th across Britain.
Dahl-icious
The list of bestselling Welsh authors throughout the UK since records began in 1998 provides some surprises—mostly of the “I didn’t know he/she was Welsh" variety. Carol Vorderman at number two? The former “Countdown" queen was born in Bedfordshire, but her Welsh mother took her back to Wales when she was three weeks old, and she grew up in Rhyl. Most of her £16.4m-worth of sales comes from her range of Su Doku books.
Ken Follett was born in Cardiff, and lived in the city until moving to London at age 10.
Martin Amis? Born in Swansea and educated in part at Swansea Grammar School. Sarah Waters? She comes from Pembrokeshire. Dawn French, the pride of Holyhead, has achieved her massive sales on the back of just two books, her memoir Dear Fatty (Random House) and her novel A Tiny Bit Marvellous (Penguin). Most of Carmarthen native Allison Pearson’s sales (£2.7m out of £2.9m) are from I Don’t Know How She Does It, helped by the current film.
The bestselling Welsh author since records began is Roald Dahl. Born in Llandaff in 1916, Dahl’s books have shifted a whopping £39.2m through BookScan since records began, helped by clever management by the Dahl estate and Puffin, a few series refreshes, and film adaptations—including the recent “The Fantastic Mr Fox" and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the Dahl leader, having sold almost 742,000 copies for £3.8m in its many editions. With all those sales you might think there would be money spare to buy a writer’s shed.
Just missing out on the Welsh author Top 10 are saga queen Iris Gower (£1.4m), Cardiff’s Jon Ronson (£1.6m), Swansea-born Ian Hislop (£1.4m—most from Private Eye annuals) and Manchester United legend and committed family man Ryan Giggs (£1.1m). Wales’ most famous literary son, Dylan Thomas, has sold just over £600,000 worth of books since 1998.
Giggs does make our Top 10 Welsh-themed chart, his autobiography selling almost 103,000 copies since publication in 2006. Peter Ho Davies—English-born US resident of Welsh and Chinese parentage—tops the chart with his 2008 Richard & Judy Book Club- boosted The Welsh Girl. Like The Welsh Girl, two other titles broadly deal with the Second World War: Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War (child evacuees to Wales) and Owen Sheer’s Resistance (the plucky Welsh defend home and hearth from a Nazi invasion). The Welsh-themed king is Englishman Malcolm Pryce, whose alternate reality Aberystwyth noir books take four places on our list, with the entire series generating £1.5m in sales.
Published October 4, 2011 by Tom Tivnan
The Bookseller
https://www.thebookseller.com/feature/welsh-publishing-charts
Nielsen BookScan breaks down book sales throughout the UK roughly along the lines of the old television regions. Welsh sales, therefore, are part of Wales and the West—the West meaning Bristol and parts of Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire.
Though we cannot strip out Wales, it makes up the majority of the region’s population (around 3.1 million out of five million people), and the figures can be a broad guideline for Welsh book buying patterns. Wales and the West makes up about 8% of the UK population; it accounts for slightly less of the entire country’s sales through BookScan—around 7% by value in each of the past five years. Just over £117.5m was spent through the tills in Wales and the West in 2010 out of £1.722bn throughout Great Britain.
The UK as a whole has experienced a 9.6% drop in value sales through BookScan since the trade’s high-water mark in 2007. Wales and the West has bucked that trend—but only marginally: the market has dropped by 9.3% since 2007 in the region.
Nielsen BookScan breaks down book sales throughout the UK roughly along the lines of the old television regions. Welsh sales, therefore, are part of Wales and the West—the West meaning Bristol and parts of Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire.
Though we cannot strip out Wales, it makes up the majority of the region’s population (around 3.1 million out of five million people), and the figures can be a broad guideline for Welsh book buying patterns. Wales and the West makes up about 8% of the UK population; it accounts for slightly less of the entire country’s sales through BookScan—around 7% by value in each of the past five years. Just over £117.5m was spent through the tills in Wales and the West in 2010 out of £1.722bn throughout Great Britain.
The UK as a whole has experienced a 9.6% drop in value sales through BookScan since the trade’s high-water mark in 2007. Wales and the West has bucked that trend—but only marginally: the market has dropped by 9.3% since 2007 in the region.
The bestsellers thus far this year in Wales and the West more or less correspond to BookScan’s overall UK charts. A couple of authors do seem to be a bit more popular out west. Maeve Binchy’s Minding Frankie (Orion) is the 10th bestselling title book in Wales and the West thus far this year, shifting 14,666 copies; it is the 21st ranked bestseller UK-wide. Meanwhile, Philippa Gregory’s The Red Queen (Simon & Schuster) is 20th in Wales and the West, 28th across Britain.
Dahl-icious
The list of bestselling Welsh authors throughout the UK since records began in 1998 provides some surprises—mostly of the “I didn’t know he/she was Welsh" variety. Carol Vorderman at number two? The former “Countdown" queen was born in Bedfordshire, but her Welsh mother took her back to Wales when she was three weeks old, and she grew up in Rhyl. Most of her £16.4m-worth of sales comes from her range of Su Doku books.
Ken Follett was born in Cardiff, and lived in the city until moving to London at age 10.
Martin Amis? Born in Swansea and educated in part at Swansea Grammar School. Sarah Waters? She comes from Pembrokeshire. Dawn French, the pride of Holyhead, has achieved her massive sales on the back of just two books, her memoir Dear Fatty (Random House) and her novel A Tiny Bit Marvellous (Penguin). Most of Carmarthen native Allison Pearson’s sales (£2.7m out of £2.9m) are from I Don’t Know How She Does It, helped by the current film.
The bestselling Welsh author since records began is Roald Dahl. Born in Llandaff in 1916, Dahl’s books have shifted a whopping £39.2m through BookScan since records began, helped by clever management by the Dahl estate and Puffin, a few series refreshes, and film adaptations—including the recent “The Fantastic Mr Fox" and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the Dahl leader, having sold almost 742,000 copies for £3.8m in its many editions. With all those sales you might think there would be money spare to buy a writer’s shed.
Just missing out on the Welsh author Top 10 are saga queen Iris Gower (£1.4m), Cardiff’s Jon Ronson (£1.6m), Swansea-born Ian Hislop (£1.4m—most from Private Eye annuals) and Manchester United legend and committed family man Ryan Giggs (£1.1m). Wales’ most famous literary son, Dylan Thomas, has sold just over £600,000 worth of books since 1998.
Giggs does make our Top 10 Welsh-themed chart, his autobiography selling almost 103,000 copies since publication in 2006. Peter Ho Davies—English-born US resident of Welsh and Chinese parentage—tops the chart with his 2008 Richard & Judy Book Club- boosted The Welsh Girl. Like The Welsh Girl, two other titles broadly deal with the Second World War: Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War (child evacuees to Wales) and Owen Sheer’s Resistance (the plucky Welsh defend home and hearth from a Nazi invasion). The Welsh-themed king is Englishman Malcolm Pryce, whose alternate reality Aberystwyth noir books take four places on our list, with the entire series generating £1.5m in sales.
No comments:
Post a Comment