In the past 52 weeks, the Trade Non-Fiction categories have seen volume sales drop nearly 4%, with value performing slightly better, down just over 3% compared with the previous 12-month period, according to data from NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM). However, the Art, Architecture & Photography (AAP) category has fared slightly better, with volume sales dropping just 0.7% in the same period. The average selling price (ASP) for the category contracted slightly from £21.46 to £21.25, meaning that value sales have performed slightly worse than volume, but better than the wider market that was down 1.6%.
Because of its high ASP, AAP accounts for 6.3% of the total money spent on Non-Fiction titles in the past year, although it represents just 3.7% of the volume – both numbers have risen slightly as the category experiences a slower decline than the rest of Non-Fiction.
In spite of the high ASP in the category, the title that has come out on top of this year’s ranking sold for an average price of just £5.04 – Create Your Own Comic Book from Papeterie Bleu shifted 31,100 copies in the past 12 months, nearly a quarter of its lifetime sales, despite first being published in 2019. Its sales have risen 21.7% from the previous 12 months when it sold 25,546 copies – coming in second on the AAP chart.
Thanks to a higher ASP this year, value sales of the title have risen even more – an increase of 25.1% takes it to sales of £156,679, one of just 27 titles to break the six-figure mark in the category in the reporting period, down from 29 in the previous period.
The low price of Create Your Own Comic Book means that it falls to 14th place when the chart is ranked by value sales. Instead, the list is topped by Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers – published in September 2024 to accompany a four-month exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, which became the most popular ticketed event in the gallery’s history. The retrospective of Van Gogh’s final years has sold 28,776 copies since its publication, putting it in second place in the volume charts, but securing the honour of being the only AAP book to bring in sales of more than £1m. But it only just achieves this, passing the milestone by just £1,616.
The retrospective of Van Gogh’s final years has sold 28,776 copies since its publication
In the previous year, Gabrielle Chanel (a companion to the V&A’s blockbuster exhibition on the designer) topped both the volume and value charts, with 41,582 copies of the hardback edition accruing sales of £1.1m – at the same time as the paperback edition of the same collection came third in the value chart with sales of £287,442.
In the past year, the same two editions have earned a combined total of £41,307, representing a reduction of 97.1%. It more than accounts for the sales reduction seen by V&A Publishing – a fall of 50.5% year-on-year – and is £1.3m of the category’s overall loss of £21.2m. It means it loses its place as the third-biggest publisher by value, dropping to eighth place overall – while Thames & Hudson (T&H) retains the top spot with a decline of just 1% and overall sales of £4.4m.
T&H owes its performance partly to the sheer quantity of titles, with only Taylor & Francis, Bloomsbury and CreateSpace having more books featuring in the sales data. However, these three publishers combined only achieve volume sales of 57,126 across the nearly 5,000 titles they have between them, with most of the volume coming from Bloomsbury. Meanwhile, T&H’s sales volume comes in at 194,177 – a 4.3% rise year-on-year and nearly twice as much as its nearest rival Taschen.
Despite this strong performance, T&H’s highest-ranked title can only manage 22nd place on our chart. The Book of Wild Flowers by Angie Lewin and Christopher Stocks has sold 4,831 copies, just nine units ahead of The Lives of Lee Miller by Antony Penrose, which has improved its performance by 404.9% – no doubt thanks to the film adaptation that was released in September 2024.
