20 years of Canadian book sales, tracked!

SalesData turns 20 this year! We’ve been tracking the sales of print books in Canada since the week ending October 17, 2005. And since then, SalesData has grown to collect weekly point-of-sales data from roughly 85% of the Canadian trade print book market.

A trip down memory lane brings us the top five books that sold in that first year (October 2005 to October 2006):

1. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

2. A Million Little Pieces by James Frey

3. Angels and Demons by Dan Brown

4. Guinness World Records 2006 by the Guinness World Records Editors

5. The Broker by John Grisham

Since that first year, SalesData released version two in 2009 and version three came along in 2015. And we continue to update our features, reports, and data insights to better serve the book industry.

Let’s take a look at the top books in Fiction, Non Fiction, and Juvenile and Young Adult categories as well as the top Canadian titles sold in Canada from October 2005 to the most recent week of data (as of writing this), November 30, 2025.

Top 5 Fiction titles

1. Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James

2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

3. Fifty Shades Darker by E. L. James

4. Fifty Shades Freed by E. L. James

5. It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover

1. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson

2. The Secret by Rhonda Byrne

3. A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle 🍁

4. Atomic Habits by James Clear

5. Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

1. Love You Forever by Robert Munsch,🍁 illustrated by Sheila McGraw 🍁

2. Oh, the Places You'll Go! by Dr. Seuss

3. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

4. Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer

5. Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer

Top 5 titles by Canadian contributors

1. Love You Forever by Robert Munsch,🍁 illustrated by Sheila McGraw 🍁

2. A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle 🍁

3. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle 🍁

4. The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill 🍁

5. 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson 🍁

You can find all of the top titles that are still in circulation in this CataList catalogue.

Notable facts from the top 100

We pulled the top 100 print book ISBNs that have sold in the Canadian trade market since SalesData launched (from October 17, 2005 to November 30, 2025). Here are some notable stats for the list.

• If we look at the years that these ISBNs were published, 2007 was the most popular with 9 of the top 100 published that year.

• The oldest book in the top 100 was from 1957 — Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (9780394800790).

• The most recent book in the top 100 was 2024’s The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins and Sawyer Robbins.

• In terms of price, the most common price point was $19.99 — six books in the top 100 were listed at that price point. The lowest price was $6.95 and the highest was $111.00. The average price was $25.22 which was just above the median price of $23.00.

• The category breakdown for the top 100 titles shook out this way:

  • 33 were Non-Fiction titles

  • 28 were Fiction

  • 28 were Juvenile Fiction titles

  • 10 were Young Adult Fiction

  • 1 was Juvenile Non-Fiction

• The most popular subjects within the categories were Biography & Autobiography at 9 titles, Fiction / General at 8 titles, and Juvenile Fiction / Humorous Stories at 7 of the 100 top titles

• The authors who showed up the most each had four books on the list:

  • Suzanne Collins

  • Jeff Kinney

  • Stephanie Meyer

  • Robert Munsch

  • J.K. Rowling

• Canadian contributors made up 16 titles on the list.

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