Publishers Weekly crunched the numbers on their 2023 hardcover bestseller lists (powered by Circana BookScan print sales data) and found that the Big Five held about 85 percent of bestseller slots overall. The two independent houses that had the best showing were Entangled Publishing (publisher of Rebecca Yarros) and Grove Atlantic (publisher of The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese).
Publishers Weekly also looked at trade paperback bestsellers and found more diversity in publishers represented—as long as you don’t count Sourcebooks as one of the Big Five publishers. (Penguin Random House has a 53 percent stake in Sourcebooks.) Overall, Sourcebooks accounted for more than 20 percent of PW’s trade paperback bestseller slots. See this week’s On the List for more detail on where they’re excelling, but Ana Huang led the way, with seven titles. On PW’s mass-market bestseller list, Kensington had the best showing after the Big Five. Learn more.
Meanwhile, in the UK, the best-performing publishers of the year remain the same as in the US, with the addition of Bloomsbury (the UK publisher of JK Rowling). The fiction market enjoyed its best year of print book sales since records have been kept, mainly driven by genres popular on BookTok: romance and science fiction and fantasy. Another standout category: history, particularly regional history. The top-seller in this category for 2023 was Unruly by David Mitchell, a “ridiculous” history of England’s kings and queens.
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.
