A half dozen of the UK’s largest publishers claimed their best-ever years of domestic print revenue, led by giant Penguin Random House with a 12-month period that helped the Big Four increased their share to nearly half the market.
Yet three houses in the Top 20, all in the academic sphere, had dramatic falls to their worst returns through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market as the lengthy managed decline of physical sales in the Higher Education sector suddenly accelerated, no doubt prompted by methods of delivering content to students changing since the pandemic and disruption linked to the increased implementation of AI.
PRH broadened its lead at the top of the publisher league table, up 3% to £389.4m. That is an excellent return given the slight contraction in the overall market, which fell 0.6% to £1.822bn in value terms, and by 1.7% in volume, to 195.3 million copies sold. With that climate, and though there were ups and downs, it stands to reason that there were few great ructions in the Top 20. The Big Four grew, but the quartet’s combined market share of 48.6% was up by around one percentage point from last year. The Top 20 publishers collectively earned 71% of the TCM’s total, a slight rise from 2023 (70.2%).
The top nine houses stayed the course, locked into the same positions from the previous year, with DK the league table’s first mover. It returns to the top 10 after an absence of one year – though the illustrated and lifestyle publisher’s sales actually shrunk by 1.7%, and its climb was due to Oxford University Press’ 10.7% TCM drop and consequent ranking tumble.
However, there was an unofficial mover in the Top 10, as the Faber-led Independent Alliance (IA) recorded Big Four-level sales, vaulting over Pan Macmillan for the first time. We have noted the IA’s performance since we started compiling publisher league tables 15 years ago, though we do not give it a formal place as it is not a discrete publishing group. It is quite an achievement for the IA houses, though it is certainly no shade on Pan Mac: CEO Joanna Prior’s business trousered £90.1m through the TCM, a return beaten only by 2019’s record £95.2m.
The usual T&Cs for this exercise are in force: the ranking is based on UK sales recorded through BookScan, and thus do not include digital, export and rights revenue or any non-book streams that add to publishers’ bottom lines, like the merch sold on the PRH website (the Isokon Penguin Donkey bookcase in birch is currently in the House & Home section for £900; delivery takes 10 weeks). Historic comparisons are slightly hindered by the pandemic, with 2020 and 2021 having data blackouts, and thus we are not playing with a full annual TCM deck in those years.
Hot to go: the record-setters
It is a second annual TCM best on the trot for Scholastic, up 5.8% to its record £29.4m, with much of that down to comics superstar Dav Pilkey. Strip out the Dog Man and Captain Underpants creator from Scholastic’s last two years and the publisher’s sales would have dropped by £500,000 in 2024. Pilkey’s take leapt 41% to £7.2m, with his 12th Dog Man title, Scarlet Shredder, earning £1.5m. It was the UK’s second-bestselling Children’s book by value, and one of only four to have eclipsed £1m. With the Dog Man film being released in February, it would be hard to bet against Pilkey having an even better 2025. The UK’s top author Julia Donaldson contributed mightily too, as some 40% of her £17.1m in 2024 came via Scholastic’s Alison Green imprint. Pilkey and Donaldson were responsible for Scholastic’s top 16 bestsellers last year and 22 of its first 25, with two Suzanne Collins Hunger Games titles and Liz Pichon’s Happy to Help (eventually) breaking the stranglehold.
There are publishers who dominate certain sectors, and then there is CGP. Of the top 100 titles in BookScan’s School Textbooks & Study Guides categories, the Cumbrian indie was responsible for 85. That share lessens as we go further down the genre, but still a touch over 50p in every £1 spent on a study guide last year through a British bookshop was on a CGP product. Sales were up only fractionally (+0.8% to £24m), but if we discount the pandemic years and their data blindspots, this is CGP’s 12th annual TCM record in a row, a mighty impressive feat.
Manga powerhouse Viz enjoyed a 3.9% (shōnen?) jump to £17.6m to snatch a seventh consecutive all-time yearly haul – and that includes the Covid-19 era. It even tops CGP’s category dominance, notching up two-thirds of all Manga sales in the UK. Under CEO Ken Sasaki, Viz has come a long way to break into the top 20: its TCM stash in 2024 was over three times what it earned five years ago; in 2014 its BookScan sales were £2.7m; in 2004, the San Francisco-based English-language arm of Japan’s Shogakukan was barely a blip, earning just £42,000 in the UK.
We have chronicled the recent rise of Manga, and though the genre has slowed, it was still in growth (sales for the category were up £400,000 to £26.5m in 2024). It is interesting because the model is at odds with much of the rest of trade publishing, relying on Mariana Trench-deep backlist and retailers, both online and bricks-and-mortar, willing to have all 23 volumes of Koyoharu Gotouge’s Demon Slayer in stock. Viz’s bestselling book last year via Bookscan was Gege Akutami’s Jujutsu Kaisen Vol 1, in 857th place overall. Viz had no other title in the top 1,500, only five in the top 2,500.
Viz’s near-neighbour on the publisher ranking, Quarto, reached its TCM zenith with a £15.3m take, its third year on the trot of record results under CEO Alison Goff, which makes her stepping down at the end of 2024 for personal reasons more bittersweet. We discuss the group’s children’s arm later (see pp26–27), but Little People, Big Dreams writer Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara is by far the group’s most valuable asset, earning £3.7m, or around a quarter, of its total. But it is not just the kids’ division: the cookery lists under the White Lion and Carnival imprints shone, particularly with Sam and Dom Milner’s air fryer titles (which combined to shift £1.1m) and Prue Leith’s Life’s Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom.
Big fish
Led by CEO Tom Weldon, PRH put a bit of space between it and its competitors: the 21.4% share is PRH’s best slice of the market in eight years. The group’s record £389.4m was helped by the late 2023 acquisition of Hardie Grant UK and Quadrille, which adds £7.5m in revenue. PRH’s year-on-year value includes the indie’s 2023 figures for a better like-for-like comparison. Things have started off swimmingly: the new Quadrille division, which sits under Ebury’s auspices, jumped 16% in 2024. As always, PRH’s totals do not include sister companies DK, Little Tiger and Hay House, all which run as discrete companies or report directly into the US. Add those entities together and Bertelsmann’s TCM footprint was £422m.
The group’s hegemony at the business end of the charts continues apace. In 2024, 60 titles had sales greater than £1m through the TCM and PRH published an impressive 26 of them; Bloomsbury and Hachette tied for second place in the seven-figure value stakes with six apiece. And PRH swept the major prizes, nabbing the Booker, Baillie Gifford, Women’s Prize for Fiction and a portion of the 2024 Nobel (Han Kang moved to Hamish Hamilton from Granta).
Second-placed Hachette was the only Big Four publisher with a sales contraction, down 3.5% to £241.1m, though it only lost less than half of a percentage point off its 2023 market share – and that was the group’s all-time record. But just four of Hachette’s 13 groups posted TCM gains in 2024, though company leader Little, Brown’s 3.9% hop to £55.3m was its best return in eight years. BookTok was the driver, with L,B’s top seven titles coming from platform’s mainstays Freida McFadden, Rebecca Yarros, Ana Huang and Colleen Hoover. Orion bounced 4.6% to £39.9m, thanks to a breakout from nutritionist/influencer Emily English’s So Good (at £1.6m, the entire Hachette group’s top non-fiction title of 2024), an emotional farewell from the Hairy Bikers following Dave Myers’ death in February (the hirsute duo’s titles combined for £1.7m), plus Ian Rankin’s latest Rebus, Midnight and Blue (£1.1m).
There are publishers who dominate certain sectors, and then there is CGP… this is its 12th annual TCM record in a row, a mighty impressive feat
BookScan gives and it takes away: John Murray Press had Hachette’s biggest jump in 2023, but in 2024 it holds the sharpest decline, with a fifth lopped off its TCM takings, down to £15.5m. It suffered from no autumn hardback non-fiction hits, as it has had in the previous two years – Billy Connolly’s The Accidental Artist led the way last year on a relatively lean £305,000 – but in Fiction, Mick Herron jumped 18% to £2.1m, despite having no new titles in 2024. The spy master’s backlist was powered by the latest series of the Gary Oldman-led Slow Horses dropping on Apple TV+.
HarperCollins just squeezed by its previous 12-month haul to notch £165.9m, its highest point via the TCM in a decade and a half. There was a pad of Butter (Fourth Estate) on top, as Asako Yuzuki’s Waterstones Book of the Year (in Polly Barton’s translation) was the group’s bestseller in value terms, at £3.5m. Boris Johnson’s much-anticipated Unleashed (William Collins) was one of few autumn non-fiction smashes; neatly, its £2.4m was 100 times the cost of the famous gold wallpaper of the former PM’s Downing Street flat refurbishment scandal.
Pan Mac is the odd one out for the Big Four, as it was the only group whose bestseller by value was not a novel. In fact, its top three were non-fiction: the two 2024 releases by Kay and Kate Allinson (the Pinch of Nommers earned £4.3m overall) sandwiched Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money (£1.1m), the evergreen backlist title that came over when Pan Mac snapped up business books indie Harriman House in 2023. Picador had a starry year with Colm Tóibín’s Long Island and Percival Everett’s Booker shortlistee, James. The commercial fiction list boasted its usual grand turns from Ann Cleeves (£2.4m), David Baldacci (£2m) and the indefatigable Danielle Steel (£2.6m), yet the most important cog was Donaldson, whose take was worth 11.5% of the entire group’s output – and coming up to 40% of Macmillan Children’s.
Rise up, rise up
In our look at the top 10 houses with the greatest year-on-year value leaps, there is a marked trend of digital-first lists increasing their print footprints. Boldwood, Canelo and Dark Skies (set up by indie author LJ Ross ( 2) specifically to expand her presence in bricks-and-mortar shops) all sit in this space, and while Sourcebooks may be more on the traditional end, its biggest brand, Freida McFadden, has famously crossed over from being a self-published Kindle bestseller. Sourcebooks directly entered the UK market in 2023 via its distribution deal with DK, and the first full year in the partnership coincided with McFadden’s breakthrough. Just over 52% of Sourcebooks’ TCM take stems from McFadden, but there were other highlights with Laura Nowlin’s YA thrillers (£1.2m) and Emily McIntire’s myth and magic-tinged romances (£365,000).
Two publishing divisions of revered British institutions appear, helped in varying degrees by recent exhibitions. The lion’s share (61%) of the National Gallery’s £1.3m stemmed from the tie-in book to the monster autumn show Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, the third-biggest attraction in the museum’s history. British Library Publishing benefits from more slow-burn success as Medieval Women: Voices & Visions and Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music – both tied to long-running 2024 exhibitions – combined to shift £150,000. Those two titles, plus an increased publishing programme in its classic crime series, gave BLP a £486,000 lift.
Decline and fall
Three academic publishers/university presses appear in the top 20 league table, a trio – OUP, Pearson and John Wiley – that have been rock-solid staples of the list from the jump. Yet all drop down in the ranking after enduring double-digit revenue contractions, with 2024 their lowest TCM ebbs.
Adult Non-Fiction: Specialist, the category for much of the academic market, had its worst year on record, a 15% drop on its previous low
This is not a blip limited to these players, as many established academic publishers sank by double-digits percentage-wise to either a lowest or near-lowest BookScan haul, including, but not limited to: Taylor & Francis (-15% to £8.8m), Elsevier (-24.8% to £2.8m), Sage (-30.1% to £3.75m), Cambridge University Press (-14.8% to £5.1m) and Cengage (-48.1% to £610,000, the first time it has failed exceed £1m). The only players in this space to have some success, or at least not a massive decline, were university presses with a significant trade list, like Princeton University Press (–2.2% to £2.3m) and Yale University Press, level year on year at £3.9m.
Plus ça change, you might say. Well, quite: The Bookseller’s coverage of the university sector in the past 15 years has unremittingly been of the academic players exiting the print arena. And those groups tend to do pretty well for themselves: Pearson’s recently released trading update on its upcoming 2024 full-year report said it expected a global profit of £595m–£600m; OUP’s latest filing revealed what it calls a “surplus” of £113m on revenue of £833m.
But the rate of across-the-board decline through the TCM has never been this precipitous. Adult Non-Fiction: Specialist, the BookScan category for much of the academic and professional market, had its worst year on record, £107.5m, a 15% drop on its previous low. Next year there may be no academic publishers at all in the top 20, though OUP and Pearson may cling on because of their significant schools footprint.
This post was originally published on here
