Welcome to a new instalment part of our Subject spotlight series! For those of you who are just joining us, in this series we’ll be sharing quarterly data-driven insights into a specific corner of the Canadian book market.
In our previous post, we looked at the sales and library circulation data of Juvenile and YA books. For this new instalment, we’re focusing on the Fiction / Romance and Fiction / Erotica subject categories.
One of the questions we asked as part of our Canadian Leisure & Reading Study (a free report that looks at how Canadians are spending their leisure time and their reading behaviour in 2020) was which adult sub-genres had respondents read. For research purposes, we divided their responses according to the respondents' preferred reading format, in this case, the options were print books or ebooks. For print book readers, Romance ranked #6 in popularity among all the other chosen subject categories (25%), and for ebook readers, Romance ranked #4 tied with Fantasy (27%).
Now, before we dive into the data we pulled from our SalesData and LibraryData services, we want to remind you that the data we’re sharing here today is only from the sales and library circulation of print books.
Romance subject category
From sexy reading lists to the Bridgerton series becoming an overnight hit thanks to the Netflix show, Romance titles have seen some notable changes lately. For instance, there was a 65% increase in print book sales between May and June 2021 and a 44% increase in sales in June year-over-year. May sales were very similar both years, but April sales in 2021 performed better than in 2020 — there was a 14% increase year-over-year.
What about the library — the place where books are borrowed and romances flourish? As you can see in the graph below, even though the number of loans and renewals of Romance books seems to be trending downwards, it’s clear that the months of April, May, and June in 2021 were much better for the circulation of these titles compared to the same months in 2020, this is likely due to the COVID-related library closures that were taking place at the time across Canada.
On the other hand, April 2021 was a great month for Romance books at the library. There was a 320% increase in loans compared to April 2020. And while loans decreased in May by 24%, they went back up in June by 14%.
Even though the renewals of Romance books in 2021 are much higher than in 2020, they’ve been trending downwards. From April to May renewals decreased by 27%, and from May to June by 12%.
Here are the three top selling Romance books for this quarter in 2021:
People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry
Freed by E. L. James
One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
And these are the most-loaned Romance books for the same months:
The Return by Nicholas Sparks
The Last Garden in England by Julia Kelly
The Duke and I by Julia Quinn
Erotica subject category
In the Erotica world, print book sales were much higher in 2020 for the months of April and May — April 2021 sales were 47% lower compared to the same month in 2020. But, even though book sales increased by 25% from April to May 2021, it was not until June 2021, a month in which sales increased by 41% over the previous month, and by 13% year-over-year, that book sales surpassed 2020 numbers.
At the library, Erotica book loans are trending downwards. In 2021, from April to May book loans decreased by 18%, and from May to June by 12%. This slowly decreasing behaviour is similar to what we see in the data from 2020 — the change from April to May was down 17% and from May to June, down 2%. There is, however, a fairly significant increase in loans year-over-year. Book loans in April 2021 were 27% higher compared to 2020, the same is true for May (25%), and for June (12%).
When it comes to renewals, in 2020 they were mostly flat with the exception of a small increase in June. In 2021, there was a 20% decrease from April to May and a 4% decrease from May to June.
Here are the three top selling Erotica books for this quarter:
Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin
The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels edited by Maxim Jakubowski and Michael Hemmington
S. E. C. R. E. T by L. Marie Adeline 🍁
And these are the most-loaned Erotica books for the same months:
Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James
Grey by E. L. James
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
Stay tuned for future instalments of this series or sign up to our eNews for more digestible data on the Canadian book market.
Until next time!
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