According to Circana BookScan, overall print unit sales were up just barely, 0.3 percent, in 2025 versus the prior year. (2024 growth: 0.5 percent). Learn more in Publishers Weekly.
Here’s a summary of category performance in 2025.
- Adult fiction overall: +1%
- Science fiction: +22.1%
- Graphic novels: +9.2%
- Romance: +3.9%
- Suspense and thriller: -2.2%
- Fantasy: -8.7%
- Adult nonfiction overall: -1.5%
- Self-help: +14.7% (led by The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins)
- Religion: +5.4%
- Business/economics: -3.9%
- Biography, autobiography, memoir: -7%
- Children’s fiction: +1.6%
- Children’s nonfiction: +3.6%
- YA fiction: -1.8%
- YA nonfiction: +3.8%
Meanwhile, Bible sales reached a 21-year high in 2025, growing 12 percent over 2024. Learn more.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
