We’re halfway through the year, so now’s the perfect time to check on how the Canadian English-language book market has performed in the first half of 2023, with the latest data from SalesData, LibraryData, and the Canadian Book Consumer survey.
Book sales
Using SalesData, our national sales tracking service for the Canadian English-language trade book market, we found that print unit sales for the first six months of 2023 were down 12% over the same period in 2022, according to our comparable stores panel.
The graph below shows the monthly change in print unit sales in the Canadian English-language trade market from January to June over the last five years using the comparable stores panel.
Over the entire market, the value sold in the first half of 2023 is down almost $10 million year over year. In the first six months of 2023, for the entire English-language Canadian trade print book market tracked by BNC SalesData, there were 21,032,315 units sold for a value of $459,644,006.
Which titles sold the most in the first half of 2023?
Bestselling Fiction title: It Starts With Us by Colleen Hoover
Bestselling Non-Fiction title: Spare by Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex
Bestselling Juvenile and Young Adult title: Dog Man: Twenty Thousand Fleas under the Sea (Dog Man #11) by Dav Pilkey
Bestselling title by a Canadian contributor: Meet Me at the Lake by Carley Fortune 🍁
Category trends during the first six months of 2023:
Juvenile and Young Adult titles continue to reign supreme at 40% of all English-language book sales so far in 2023.
Non-Fiction slides into second place with a 31% market share, down from 33% during the first half of 2022.
Fiction stays in third place at 28% of all units sold, up slightly from 26% sold in the first half of 2022.
Frontlist sales (sales for titles with a publication date within the year) accounted for 28% of all units sold in the first half of 2023, up from 24% in 2022.
Subjects with the most significant increases year over year include:
Romance is up 34%, and many of its sub-categories have seen significant increases so far this year, including Billionaires (up 253%), Clean & Wholesome (up 217%) and New Adult (up 216%).
The Biography & Autobiography category is also up considerably, with the Royalty sub-category increasing by 1,277% so far this year.
Fiction / Psychological is up 216%.
Canadian book consumers
The Canadian Book Consumer survey is conducted quarterly by BookNet Canada and queries Canadians about their book acquisition behaviour. The data below is a sneak peek at the results of the April and July 2023 fieldings that reached over 1,000 Canadian book buyers.
Canadian book buyers primarily purchased print books during the first and second quarters of 2023. Print books comprised 77% of all book purchases — 54% of those were paperback and 23% were hardcover, as shown in the graph below. Digital book purchases comprised a smaller percentage of book purchases during the first six months of 2023 than they did in the same period in 2022 — a 23% decrease from year to year.
According to our consumer survey, Canadian book buyers have shown a preference for Biographies or Memoirs, which make up 23% of their Non-Fiction purchases. Additionally, their interest in Romance novels has grown, with Romance now accounting for 15% of all Fiction purchases, up from 13% in 2022.
The graph below shows how the purchasing behaviour of Canadian book buyers continues a trend of shoppers returning to physical store shopping that began in the latter part of 2021.
Looking for more research into the Canadian book market, Canadian book consumers, and Canadian readers? Complete information on print book sales broken out by category and Canadian-owned firms for 2022 can be found in our annual publication, The Canadian Book Market 2022.
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