According to Circana BookScan, 2024 US print book sales ended up 0.56 percent ahead of 2023. That makes 2024 the third-best sales year for print since BookScan started. Fiction dominated as in past years; bestselling authors included Sarah J. Maas, Freida McFadden, Ana Huang, and Colleen Hoover. The number-one bestselling title of the year was The Women by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin’s Press).
Of the top 200 titles of the year, 29 percent were new (frontlist) titles. According to Publishers Marketplace (sub required), only one of the top 10 bestselling books published during 2024 was nonfiction: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (Penguin Press).
Results were much the same in the UK: According to Nielsen BookScan, fiction had its best year since recordkeeping began, with roughly flat sales for the entire industry year on year. Bestselling authors there include Richard Osman, Sarah J. Maas, and Freida McFadden.
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.
