My favourite way to celebrate Independent Bookshop Week, aside from buying lots of books, is of course looking at lots of data. Let’s see what BookScan and Books & Consumers can tell us about indie bookshops and their vital role on the UK high street.

The world of BookTok continues to be a driving force in 2022, with books that proclaim ‘TikTok made me buy it!’ or use TikTok/BookTok in the keywords collectively selling 2.2m copies in the first four months of 2022 in the UK, as measured through BookScan.

One fascinating thing that I do with BookScan data every year is to put together the international bestsellers, across all print editions and translations in the markets that we cover (UK, Ireland, Italy, Spain, India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and Mexico). The result is often surprising […]

In 2021, 15% of books bought in the UK were intended as gifts for special occasions, with Christmas and birthday gifts making up the majority of that.

Another World Book Day come and gone, and as with years past, the week of the annual event marked the highest sales for the children’s market for the year so far […]

Sam McBratney’s ‘Guess How Much I Love You?’ is currently enjoying its customary ascent up the February bestseller lists.

Both the UK and Irish print book markets experienced their highest value sales on record in 2021, with £1.82bn and €165.9m, respectively, spent on books across the two countries.

Kate Allinson and Kay Featherstone have joined the record books. Their latest Pinch of Nom cookbook, ‘Comfort Food’ […]

The Christmas shopping period is fully underway, home to the largest weeks of the year for print book sales…but just how many of the books bought at this time of year are intended as Christmas gifts and how many are from readers buying for themselves?

Question: how many writers within the list of the top 50 bestselling books of 2021 thus far also appear in the 2001 end-of-year top 50 chart?

When the first lockdown hit in March 2020, e-books were a saviour for many readers who were suddenly stuck at home with lots of time and limited options for buying print books […]

From July 2020 to June 2021, audiobook purchases in the UK saw their highest 12-month period on record, surpassing the previous record highs that the format had been setting basically every month since last spring.

Super Thursday is upon us — the day in the annual publishing calendar when the biggest* books hit bookshop shelves.

Both ‘The Thursday Murder Club’ by Richard Osman and ‘Megamonster’ by David Walliams sold over 200k copies in the UK from June to August, with Osman about 26k copies ahead of Walliams. But on a regional level […]

TikTok has made plenty of headlines over the past year, notably, for our purposes here, in the book world. The BookTok community on the platform has driven sales of several titles […]

According to results from our Books & Consumers survey, familiarity with an author or series led to one in five book purchases in the UK in 2020, rising to one in three fiction purchases. But the last few years have seen breakout fiction hits from […]