Transcript: Ready, set, go: Pre-fall sales trends and data-driven insights - Tech Forum 2025

Transcript: Ready, set, go: Pre-fall sales trends and data-driven insights - Tech Forum 2025

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  Lauren Stewart: Hello,everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's Tech Forum session. I'm Lauren Stewart from BookNet. Welcome to "Ready, set, go: Pre-fall sales trends and data-driven insights." Before we get started, BookNet Canada acknowledges that its operations are remote and our colleagues contribute their work from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi'kmaq, the Ojibwa of Fort William First Nation, the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, which includes the Ojibwa, the Odawa, and the Potawatomie, and the Métis, the original nations and peoples of the lands we now call Beeton, Brampton, Guelph, Halifax, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vaughan, and Windsor. We encourage you to visit the native-land.ca website to learn more about the peoples whose lands you're joining from today. Moreover, BookNet endorses the Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and supports an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to spacemaking in the book industry. The book industry has long been an industry of gatekeeping. Anyone who works at any stage of the book supply chain carries a responsibility to serve readers by publishing, promoting, and supplying works that represent the wide extent of human experiences and identities in all of that complicated intersectionality. We at BookNet are committed to working with our partners in the industry as we move towards a framework that supports spacemaking, which encourages and ensures that marginalised creators and professionals all have the opportunity to contribute, work, and lead. If during the presentation you have questions, please use the Q&A panel found in the bottom menu. Now, let me pass the mic over to my colleague, Lily Dwyer. Lily is the product manager of BookNet's SalesData and Library Data Project. With her background in Library and Information Studies, as well as content management in the digital book industry, her professional love has always been getting books into the hands and minds of readers. Over to you, Lily. Lily Dwyer: Thanks, Lauren. Hello, everyone. We're just going to start off today's presentation with a general overview of how books are performing so far in 2025, both in the retail space as well as in libraries. So, let's begin by looking at the retail space. Using SalesData, which is our national sales tracking service for the Canadian English language trade book market, we found that print unit sales for the first eight months of 2025 were up this year by 1.71% over the same period in 2024, according to our Comparable Stores panel. So, the graph here shows the monthly change in print unit sales in the Canadian English language trade market from January to August over the last two years using the Comparable Stores panel. You can see from here that January 2025 proved to be a strong start for book sales, and that has helped contribute to this year over year growth that we're seeing despite dips in sales in both June and August. So, it's very exciting to see that growth in sales, and we're hoping to see it continue to grow through the rest of Q3 as well as Q4.
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  In here youcan see how that growth plays out over each top level subject category. So, juvenile sales take up the largest market share across these subjects but are slightly down so far this year at 0.34%. YA has actually increased by 13.58% so far, which is the largest year over year growth that we're seeing across all subject categories. And when looking at juvenile and YA sales together, we can see that book sales in those categories are up 1.46% compared to the same period in 2024. So, together they account for 39% of all book sales in the first eight months of 2025. Then from there, fiction slides in second place with 30% of the market share, and sales are actually down by 1.04% so far. And finally, nonfiction is in a close third place, accounting for 29% of all units sold. Nonfiction has also seen some growth this year, with sales increasing by 6.43%. So, what books are helping to drive those sales? Well, here you can see which books have sold the most in each of the main subject categories so far in 2025. For fiction, we have Rebecca Yaros's "Onyx Storm." For nonfiction, we have "The Let Them Theory" by Mel and Sawyer Robbins. And then in juvenile books, we have "Big Jim Begins" from the Dog Man series. And finally in YA, we have "Sunrise on the Reaping" by Suzanne Collins. Now let's look at some library circulation data. So, for context, 84 public library systems across Canada reported their physical book circulation and holdings data to BNC Library Data in the first eight months of 2025. These reporting libraries encompassed over 772 branches and covered approximately 25% of the Canadian population. In the first half of 2025, libraries reported 24.9 million loans and 13.4 million renewals of physical books. In here you can see those loans broken down by our top-level subjects again. So, juvenile titles accounted for just over 51% of loans so far this year, with fiction titles accounting for 26%, and nonfiction titles accounting for about 20%, and YA titles accounting for 2%. And what's remarkable here is how little the loan share for these top-level subjects has changed between 2024 and 2025. So, while we saw some slight shifts in the market share of these subjects in the retail space, hardly any changes were seen in libraries. Now, if we want to take a look at the top circulating titles in libraries, we can see that there are some similarities to bookstores but mostly some changes. So, for fiction, we have "The Women" by Kristin Hannah. For nonfiction, we have the "Guinness World Record" series. In juvenile books, again, we have the Dog Man series. And in YA, we have the books from the Good Girl's Guide to Murder series. Many of you are probably wondering how Canadian titles are performing this year, especially in the wake of this year's efforts on behalf of Canadians to support the Buy Canadian movement. And we'll be going further into those details later in this presentation, but here is a glimpse into the top Canadian titles in both the retail and library spaces. So, starting with bookstores, here are some of the top-selling Canadian titles across all subject categories. So, you can see that there is a good mix of nonfiction with Greta Podlesky's "Every Salad Ever" and Mark Carney's "Value(s)." We also have everyone's favourite Canadian summer romances from Carley Fortune. We have some juvenile favourites, including Robert Munsch and "The Baby-Sitter's Club," and even some classics, as seen with "The Handmaid's Tale."
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  Now, digging intofiction a bit further, our top-selling Canadian fiction titles were heavily dominated by Carley Fortune, Elsie Silver, and Brynne Weaver books. And in nonfiction, we're seeing a lot of Canadian cookbooks, including "The Essential Cottage Cookbook" by Andrea Buckett and "Meals That Heal Inflammation" by Julie Daniluk. We also have some new books from 2025, including "I Hope You Remember," "One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This," and "For the Love of a Son," as well as some familiar favourites from Malcolm Gladwell and Gabor Maté. And zeroing in on juvenile, we're seeing more Robert Munsch, "Impossible Creatures," "The New Girl," "The Squad," and "T is for Terry." Now, what about in libraries? So, it's interesting always to see what's trending in libraries versus what's trending in the retail space. And for 2025 so far, the top circulating Canadian titles across all subjects include the popular juvenile series like "The Baby-Sitters Club," "Scaredy's Nutty Adventures," "Paws," and the "Adventure Time" series. We have Louise Penny's "The Grey Wolf," Nita Prose's "The Maid" and "The Mystery Guest," and two titles we saw in our bestselling Canadian list, "This Summer Will Be Different" and "Revenge of the Tipping Point." Our top circulating fiction titles in 2025 are heavily dominated by authors Louise Penny, Nita Prose, Carley Fortune, and Shari Lapena. And then for Canadian nonfiction, we again have Malcolm Gladwell, Gabor Maté, and Mark Carney titles. But we also have others in there as well, like "Ducks" by Kate Beaton and Matthew Perry's "Friends, Lovers, and The Big Terrible Thing." And finally, for juvenile top titles, we have more Robert Munsch and other popular children's series such as "Sparks!" "Witches of Brooklyn," "Whatever After," and "The Lunch Club." Lauren: Thanks, Lily. It seems an appropriate place now to transition from talking about the top Canadian sales and circulation in the year-to-date update to revisiting a topic we have been investigating, the Buy Canadian movement. Earlier this year in June, we shared an update when we looked at the state of the nation in publishing. At that presentation, we confirmed that the industry's activities were colliding with an economic context of great uncertainty. Canadian consumers were and are grappling with a high cost of living, a tariff situation that has driven economic concerns, and rising unemployment. While the context has softened in the remaining weeks of Q2 and into Q3, there are still rocky shores ahead. According to the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations from the Bank of Canada for their second quarter results released in July, and to be updated with Q3's results in a few weeks, the trade conflict continues to affect consumer spending behaviour. For instance, more than half of consumers reported that they plan to reduce their spending on U.S. goods and vacations in the United States. This graph from the survey reports on the responses from Canadian consumers. Sixty percent of consumers plan to increase their spending on domestic i.e. Canadian-made goods, seen in the first column on the left, and about 63.5% of consumers plan to decrease their spending on goods made in the United States, seen in the third column from the left. These two columns are virtually opposite of each other and a strong indication that the Buy Canadian movement is continuing in earnest, shifting Canadians' purchasing decisions.
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  The study authorsnoted that although consumers want to prioritise spending on Canadian- made goods, price differences between domestic and foreign-made goods remain a key deciding factor for many consumers. Most consumers reported they would be willing to pay up to a maximum of 10% more for goods made in Canada than for similar goods made in the United States. One comment yielded from follow-up interviews is emblematic of the responses. We have all these various pressures now in our communities to buy Canadian, but ultimately I'm going to do what works for my wallet. So, whether that's a Canadian brand, whether that's an American brand, I buy what works for my budget. I flagged this, as it is in line with the survey results from our Canadian Book Consumer Study in our 2024 Annual Report. When deciding where to buy, the top financial motivators for purchasers responding to the BookNet survey were good price at 28%, cheap or free delivery at 19%, and loyalty card availability at 11%. The findings suggest that while convenience and loyalty incentives matter, price remains a priority when it comes to retail choice. That pragmatism is tracked in survey after survey, such as this statistic from Ipsos, where they note that just over half, 55%, of Canadians say they are willing to make personal sacrifices to support Canadian businesses, despite 4 in 10, 41%, agreeing that boycotting U.S. products is mostly symbolic and will have very little economic impact on the U.S. And this one from an August report from Palace Data's Economic Patriotism Index which revealed that 34% of Canadians have high economic patriotism, meaning they're willing to sacrifice prosperity for economic independence. So, let's return to those 60% of consumers who plan to increase their spending on domestic goods from the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations and dig a bit more deeply into the Buy Canadian movement. On this slide, you'll see some figures we shared earlier this summer when looking at the Buy Canadian movement. While we don't have 2025's Canadian Book Consumer Study results finalised yet, we can look to the 2024 report to see how Canadian book buyers searched for books. In 2024, Canadian book buyers continued to search for a wide variety of books, including books by Canadian authors and illustrators at 32% of respondents, books about Canada or regions within Canada at 27%, and books about a group or culture written by people from that group or culture at 22%. We're interested to see how or if the behaviours of book buyers and readers change in 2025, so stay tuned for that. Therefore, Canadian consumers were interested in books by Canadian authors and illustrators even before the Buy Canadian movement kicked up in earnest in early and mid-March of 2025, following discourse on social media. Looking back to 2012, BookNet published a study called "Canadians Reading Canadians," where we shared that. At the time, there had been a significant decline over the past decade in those who said they have read a Canadian author, from 41% in 2002 to 24% in 2012. We're happy to confirm that the aforementioned desire for books by Canadians is matched by the numbers we're seeing in other reports, such as in our Canadian Leisure and Reading Study. In 2024, just under a third of Canadians, 30%, had read a book by or about Canadians. That share of readers who did so has remained fairly steady since 2020. So, while things have improved since 2012, they have not gone back to 2002 levels.
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  Let's drill intoSalesData, shall we? You will see data from BNC SalesData across this presentation. SalesData collects weekly point-of-sale data from retail outlets across Canada and includes chain and independent bookstores, newsstands, general retailers, online retailers, library wholesalers, and more. Based on publisher feedback, we estimate that BNC SalesData represents 85% of book industry sales for English-language print trade books. Other markets, such as direct institutional sales to schools or college and university textbook sales, are not included. What you're seeing in the graph is a direct comparison of the number of print titles sold from December 30, 2024, to August 31, 2025, effectively calendar Q1 and Q2, and two-thirds... ASL interpreter: Hi there, Lauren. Sorry to interrupt. If you could just go a little slower, thank you. Lauren: Yes, sorry about that. Would you like me to restart from...? Man: No, you can just pick it up where you left off. That's fine. Thank you. Lauren: So, this is effectively calendar Q1 and Q2 and two-thirds of Q3 in the Canadian market as tracked by BNC SalesData. The blue line, total units, indicates all titles—titles by Canadian contributors as well as titles by contributors from other countries and regions. The purple line, which you'll see more clearly in a second graph to follow, shows exclusively the unit sales for titles by Canadian contributors over the same period of time. Year to date, the sales are up in our all markets approximately 1.62% year over year. In our Comparable Stores data set, as Lily shared, it's up approximately 1.71% year over year. A quick aside, when we do research at BookNet, we'll sometimes use what we call Comparable Stores data, as I mentioned, from SalesData. Comparable Stores are a fixed group of retailers that have reported sales consistently for a number of years. When we aggregate their sales, we provide a more accurate view of the year-over-year market and individual category fluctuations that are not skewed by the addition of any new reporting retailers. The Comparable Stores represent about 98% of the all markets through the complete 2024 year. And now, here is that closer look at the purple line, where it's easier to see the periods in which sales for titles by Canadian contributors peaked. Overall, when we look at the unit sales for titles by Canadian contributors, we can see an upward trend from January of this year to the end of August. The data suggests that there is an increased purchase activity in Canadian-authored books. As always, upticks in unit sales can be attributed to one or two high-performing titles, so it would be wise to keep an eye on this over time to see if the trend holds and of course, we will. So, let's look again at 2025 with some additional context. Here, we can see the complete year of sales for the 2024 year in blue and for titles by Canadian contributors in purple for that same period of time. We're going to look more closely at the purple line in a second graph to follow. And here is that closer look at the purple line, where it's easier to see the periods in which sales for titles by Canadian contributors peaked in 2024. When we overlay 2025, seen here in the blue and purple from before, with the 2024 sales now in yellow and grey, we're seeing very similar peaks and valleys in the period from January to the end of August. And
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  here, with theyellow and grey lines for 2024 extended to the end of December 2024, we can see 2024's upward slope in Q4 for all units sold, including the Canadian-authored books. And some of you will remember these statistics—total sales for Canadian contributors and the percentage of their market share of all units sold in the year. The bar graph contains data from SalesData with the 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 years completed. As of today, we have only completed 38 weeks of our 2025 year and have a lot of ground to cover until the end of the year, including the award and holiday sales in the final months. Therefore, I haven't included the total unit sales for 2025, but I have included a percentage of the total market that Canadian contributors represent to date. Looking at the total sales for the year to date, Canadian contributors have captured approximately 11.46% of total sales in the market, holding steady from the last time we shared this figure in June at 11.86% of all sales. Looking at units sold, we're actually up 7.29% in Canadian contributors' books sold in 2025 versus 2024. While we're investigating, we thought it would be worthy to look into the performance of Canadian-specific subjects to see if any have seen significant year-over-year gains while the Buy Canadian movement has been in the news and on the minds of consumers. On this slide, you can see a list of top-level BISAC subjects with a specifically Canadian connection. Some of these top-level subjects do have subcategories, such as how Fiction/World Literature/Canada includes subcodes for Colonial and 19th Century, 20th Century, and 21st Century, and the History and Travel categories have detailed provincial categorisation. On this slide, I've listed the top five categories with significant percentage changes in sales in 2025 when compared to the same period in 2024. Juvenile Nonfiction/Places/Canada is up 103.58%. Juvenile Fiction/Places/Canada is up 63.23%. Fiction/World Literature/Canada is up 343.51%. Juvenile Nonfiction/History/Canada is up 53.89%. Young Adult Fiction/Historical/Canada is up 81.63%. And Juvenile Fiction/Biographical/Canada is up 625.27%. I'll note here the same cautions as before when doing subject analysis at this granular level that a major title can meaningfully shift a smaller category to numbers this high, which is the case for several of the top titles in these categories. The top titles in each of these categories are "T is for Terry" by Denise Dias, "Carson Crosses Canada" by Linda Bailey, "Held" by Anne Michaels, "The Kids Book of Black History" by Rosemary Sadler, "Into the Bright Open: A Secret Garden Remix" by Cherie Dimaline, and "Howdy, I'm Sing Hari" by Kelly Carr. Now I'm going to hand it back to Lily to look at what has changed from 2024's trends in 2025 so far. Back to you, Lily. Lily: Thanks, Lauren. So, now we're going to switch gears and take a look at some of the subject trends that we're seeing so far this year. So, in our March Tech Forum presentation, On the rise: Book subjects on the move in the Canadian market, we examined how subjects were trending in the year 2024. And we looked at everything from travel to Japanese world literature to romantasy to Taylor Swift. So, lots of interesting stuff there. Feel free to check out that presentation after today's session. So, before we get into new trends for 2025, we're going to look at how some of those 2024 trends are carrying over to this year.
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  So, let's startwith travel. In 2024, we saw that sales in the nonfiction travel category remained flat across 2024 and 2023. We were particularly interested in the big increases that we were seeing in the special interest and Asia subcategories, with special interest rising by 26% and Asia travel books rising by 30%. This graph here looks at how subjects within the travel category are performing year to date compared to the same period of time last year, or last year to date. In 2025, we're seeing that the special interest subcategory taking a bit of a dive by 35.69%, and Asia travel books have increased ever so slightly by 3.68%. But going into this, we were particularly interested to see how travel books were performing in the Canada and United States subcategories. And as you can see, while Canada travel books have only increased slightly by 1.12%, it seems that Canadians are buying way less U.S. travel books this year. Those sales have decreased by a staggering 48.14%. Now, if you'd like a sense of where Canadians are travelling in 2025, here are some of the top-selling travel books. So, as you can see, Japan and Portugal both seem to be popular travel destinations for Canadians, but we're seeing a lot of Canadian travel books dominating those bestsellers, particularly Atlantic Canada. In 2024, we also took a look at romantasy, so specifically books that are categorised by the Fiction/Fantasy/Romance, Fiction/Romance/Fantasy, and the YA/Fiction/Fantasy/Romance BISAC codes. Last year, we were stunned by how those subject categories were increasing, and so we definitely wanted to see how those subjects had been performing in 2025. As you can see, those sales are indeed still increasing, with Fantasy/Romance increasing by 8%, and YA/Fantasy/Romance increasing by 6%. Romance/Fantasy has had the biggest increase at 83%. Here are the top titles that are performing across all three of those BISAC codes. We're seeing a lot of the same series that have been performing well over the past couple of years, so Rebecca Yarros' "Fourth Wing" series and Sarah J. Maas' "A Court of Thorns and Roses" series, as an example. But what else is going on in the world of romance? So, romance is always interesting to look at each year because, while it's always popular, the trending subcategories within romance can shift from year to year. In 2024, we noticed that the subjects with the highest sales increases within romance were New Adult, Paranormal, Holiday, Workplace, and Sports Romances, and this chart shows you how those subjects are performing in 2025. While New Adult, Paranormal, and Workplace have all decreased so far in 2025, both Holiday and Sports Romances continue to grow. And in particular, we can see that Sports Romances have increased by almost 128% so far this year. And here are our top-selling Sports Romance titles. One of the main titles driving these sales is Ali Hazelwood's "Deep End," but some other titles of note are books from Bal Khabra's "Off the Ice" series, as well as the "Jacksonville Rays" series by Emily Rath. So, yes, it seems that Sports Romance titles are still on the move in 2025, and in particular, the hockey romance seems to be grabbing readers' attention. Next, let's look at comics and graphic novels. So, this is a subject that we have historically always looked at in our previous Subject Trends presentations. Last year, we noted that while
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  adult comics andgraphic novels have had huge growth over 2020, 2021, and 2022, 2023 and 2024 both saw a decline in sales for titles in that category. Here you can see that in 2025, it seems that there is indeed a slight increase in adult comics and graphic novels by about 3%. So, the question we're asking ourselves is, will 2025 be the first year since 2022 in which we actually see upward trends for adult comics and graphic novels? It will be interesting to see how the holiday sales will have an impact on that subject in particular. And if you want to know which titles you might want to keep an eye on for the rest of 2025, here are the top-selling adult comics and graphic novels. So, these seem to be heavily dominated by manga and Manhwa titles. For instance, we have titles from the "Jujutsu Kaisen" series, the "Solo Leveling" series, and the "Chainsaw Man" series. Okay, now that spooky season is just around the corner, let's talk about horror. In 2024, we saw significant increases in horror fiction, increasing by 16% in both the adult fiction horror and the juvenile fiction horror BISAC subject categories. In this year, 2025 has already seen an increase in horror fiction across all age groups. So, the sales are up by 10% in adult horror, they're up by 19% in juvenile horror, and they're up by 5% in YA horror. If you're looking for some scary reads to get you Halloween ready, here are some of the top- selling titles in adult horror this year. We have some 2025 newbies, including "Witchcraft for Wayward Girls" by Grady Hendrix and "Killer on the Road" by Stephen Graham Jones. We also have some familiar backlist titles, like Stephen King's "The Shining" and "Cujo." And in regard to our top-selling juvenile horror titles, you can see that there are tons of "Goosebumps" titles being read this year, which definitely makes me feel nostalgic. And, finally, in our 2024 presentation, we saw that there were some comforting things going on in the world of cookbooks, with a lot of readers buying comfort food books. We also saw that people were buying Matty Matheson's cookbooks, which we referred to as the Bear Effect, as seen in the growth in the individual chefs and restaurants BISAC code. And in 2025, it definitely seems like readers are still looking to cookbooks for comfort, perhaps even more so. So, comfort food has increased by 37%, bread has increased by 26%, pasta has increased by 35%, and individual chefs and restaurants have increased by 49%. Our top-selling titles across those BISAC codes—so, comfort food, bread, pasta, and individual chefs and restaurants—include these titles that you're seeing on your screen, all of which make me extremely excited for fall cooking. Now, I'd like to pass it over to my colleague Kalpna to offer a further look at subject trends in 2025 to date. Kalpna Patel has over 20 years of independent bookselling and retail experience. After half a lifetime spent buying, managing, merchandising, and marketing books, her focus now is to empower retailers and booksellers to make smart decisions, improve inventory performance, and to identify and take advantage of easy and exciting opportunities for growth as product coordinator for the SalesData and Library Data project. So, over to you, Kalpna. Kalpna: Thanks, Lily, and hi, everyone. So, we've seen how some of the subjects we reported on in 2024 are faring so far this year, and now we're going to take a look at what's
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  popped up andcaught our attention over the last eight months. Looking at year-to-date subject sales, so that's data from January to the end of this August, we're already seeing some interesting increases, with sales in some categories far exceeding what we'd expect based on data from the same time last year. It'll be interesting to see how these subjects perform over the upcoming holiday season and to revisit them with you next spring. But for now, let's look at recent sales spikes in adult fantasy, graphic novels, games and activities, and young adult fiction. First up is adult fiction fantasy, where it seems as though romantasy isn't the only subgenre in town this year. So far, we are seeing sales in cozy fantasy and dark fantasy surpass last year's levels. Compared to this time last year, sales in cozy fantasy have already increased by 48%, with folklore and witch-themed novels driving the subject's sales. Sales in dark fantasy have increased by 46%, mostly due to the popularity of Rachel Gillig's "Shepherd King" and "Stonewater Kingdom" series. And if you've spent any time at all exploring the branches growing off the comics and graphic novels portion of the BISAC tree, you'll have noticed that there's a lot more there than just manga now. In 2023, a new code for Manhua or Chinese comics, was introduced. And in 2021, we got a new code for Manhwa, Korean comics. We know that new BISAC codes are a direct response to increased interest and demand, and in this case, for more granularity and representation in the world of Asian-style comics. We also know that new BISAC codes take some time to be adopted, and that a sudden increase in sales in the new subject might indicate the classification being assigned to several titles all at once. But it is interesting to see that three years after the introduction of this code, year-to-date sales in Manhwa have already increased by 105% over the same period last year. As Lily mentioned earlier, titles in the "Solo Leveling" series are trailing very close behind best-selling manga series like "Jujutsu Kaisen" and "Chainsaw Man," pushing Manhwa to make up 4% of total East Asian-style comics so far, compared to the 1% of sales they made up in 2023 and 2024. The manga explosion was just the beginning of the increase in books coming out of and about Japan that we discussed earlier this year, and now it seems that the latest K-pop boom might be informing trends in the book world as well. In Euny Hong's newly expanded version of her 2014 book, "The Birth of Korean Cool," she recounts how South Korea vaulted itself into the 21st century, becoming a global leader in business, technology, and education. And over the last decade, with their Ministry of Culture committed to producing movies, TV dramas, pop bands, and video games, the country has become the world's number one pop culture exporter. So, similar to our exploration of the interest in Japan-related subjects like travel and world lit earlier this year, we're also seeing trends in Korean subcategories. So far this year, we've seen Korean cookbook sales increase by 136% over the same time last year. Sales in Korean language study books have increased by 9%. And while sales of travel guides to Korea are quite low overall, 2025 has seen an increase of 40%. With Korea's lead entry into the healing fiction genre with 2024's "Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop" and Korean author Han Kang's Nobel Prize win last year, we'll be paying close attention to trends in Korean fiction as well.
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  Moving over toadult games and activities, just when you thought everyone's coloured pencils had gotten dull, colouring books have driven the games and activities category once again with a bigger-than-ever comeback last year, with sales increasing 129% over 2023. We remain fairly confident that there will be many colouring books found wrapped and waiting beneath Christmas trees in a few months, as sales are already 170% higher so far than they were this time last year. What's especially interesting about this resurgence is how the look of top-selling colouring books have changed in the last year. The excruciatingly detailed worlds of Johanna Basford and trippy mandalas have gone the way of dried-out markers in this new era of cozy, cute, kawaii insanity. Perhaps this aesthetic change has also been informed by the aforementioned influence of contemporary Asian culture and design, where cuteness reigns above all. We're going to take a closer look at holiday-specific trends in a moment, but while we're talking about colouring books, I just want to mention that over the last three years, the market share of colouring books has increased by an average of 23% in the fourth quarter of each year. So, not only do they perform well all year round, they do especially well around the holidays. Also of note, the puzzles that were so popular during pandemic days also continue to sell well throughout the year but seem to be less popular in Q4, with the market share decreasing by an average of 12%. Another subcategory driving the sales of adult games and activities are sticker books. Here you can see the explosion of this category in 2024, and they show no signs of stopping in 2025. Year-to-date sales are already 192% higher than this time last year. While patches and enamel pins used to be the adornment of choice for jackets and backpacks, these days it's all about plastering laptops and water bottles with stickers. Covered in brand logos, band merch, and decorative motifs, a laptop suddenly becomes a social billboard, a passive form of self- expression where an individual broadcasts what she's into and what she stands for to anyone who spares a glance at her hardware in a coffee shop or library. In fact, a 2022 study by the University of Florida, published in the Journal of Research and Personality, shows that people can reliably pick up on aspects of someone's personality solely based off the stickers on their laptops. Researchers took approximately 140 photos of student laptops that had three or more stickers on them. They had the owners of the laptops fill out a personality questionnaire and then had eight raters review the pictures and guess that person's traits just based on the photos. What the researchers found, above chance levels, was that people could reliably detect the other person's extraversion and also their openness to new experiences based solely on viewing their laptop stickers. So, there you have it. Stickers aren't just for collecting in albums or trading with friends anymore. And I think the biggest takeaway from all of this is that promotional stickers should very much be part of your marketing plan for all titles geared towards anyone over the age of 16. And speaking of 16-year-olds, let's turn now to young adult fiction, where we're seeing some activity in the sci-fi world. Sales in young adult science fiction have been declining over the past two years. Sales were down 15% in 2024 over 2023, but year-to-date sales are up 60% over the same period last year. A number of top-selling series are driving these sales, like the wildly popular "Iron Widow" and Neal Shusterman's "Arc of a Scythe." And while it doesn't
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  appear that sci-fiwill hit YA, fantasy, or romance sales levels, it'll be interesting to monitor its growth with future instalments in these series. Finally, one more look at romance. As Lily mentioned, romance holiday titles continue to sell in 2025, with year-to-date numbers already exceeding last year's, and they'll only continue to grow in this year's holiday season. Over the past three years, romance holiday titles consistently made up 5.5% of the market share of romance books sold during the fourth quarter and over the holiday season, as books in this subcategory are almost exclusively Christmas-themed. Lately, however, we are noticing a number of books centred around another most wonderful time of the year. If lakeside resorts and golden summers are not your thing, there appear to be a plethora of new paperbacks for fans of sweater weather. With the exception of "The Pumpkin Spice Café" and other titles from Laurie Gilmore's 2023 "Dream Harbor" series, this slide shows just a sampling of books published within the last three weeks, including a few forthcoming titles due at the end of the month. Like the healing fiction trend we discussed earlier this year, which consisted of bookstore, or library, or coffee shop, or cat-themed novels out of Korea and Japan, there is no BISAC for this collection, with subjects ranging from romantic comedy, workplace romance, to small town and rural romance. This means we don't have the specific data to what appears to be a legitimate subgenre, but it's worth exploring nonetheless. Would romance benefit from a cozy subcategory like mysteries and fantasy titles do, or perhaps something like a Fiction/Romance/Pumpkin Spice category would better help readers find these books? These seasonal romances occupy that liminal space between holiday books and beach reads, and even without a BISAC code to guide us, we'll continue keeping an eye on this romance underdog. Now that we're properly intrigued by all these new potential trends and interesting sales spikes, and with only 94 shopping days left until Christmas, let's look at holiday book shopping. Based on the results from BookNet's Canadian Book Consumer Survey last year, we found that 14% of all books purchased in 2024 were purchased as gifts. And while many book subjects are popular year-round and most categories see increases in sales over the holidays, we wanted to find out if some subjects are more in demand during the holiday season. To do this, we've looked at data from the last three holiday seasons, paying particular attention to average Q4 increases and decreases in a subject's market share to determine if they do in fact perform better than others. Let's start with the top-level subjects. This graph shows the average quarterly market share for fiction, nonfiction, juvenile, and young adult titles from 2022 to 2024. Focusing on that fourth quarter, the market share for nonfiction and juvenile subjects saw average increases of 12% and 13%, respectively. By contrast, the fiction market share decreased an average of 21%, and the young adult market share was down 23% on average over the same holiday shopping period. This means that on average, more nonfiction and juvenile books are purchased during the last three months of the year, and contrary to what most of us probably thought, fiction takes a hit over the holidays.
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  But even so,there are some fiction subcategories that do particularly well in those last three months of the year. On average, fantasy sales increase by 31%, historical fiction increases by 47%, and classics increase by 282% in the fourth quarter. The books featured in this slide and in the upcoming slides are the top-selling titles from each of the categories mentioned based on their sales in Q4 of last year. Zooming in further on that increase in fantasy sales, we see that over the past three years, titles in the epic fantasy category have performed exceptionally well in the fourth quarter, increasing by 10% and making up 39% of the total fiction fantasy market share. Contemporary fantasy sales also increase an average of 6% in the fourth quarter, making up 7% of the total fantasy market share. Now on to nonfiction, a top-level subject that we saw increase its market share overall in Q4. Here we see biography and autobiography, cooking, and games and activities really shine, and we think it's safe to say that books in these categories are extremely popular with holiday shoppers. The market share of biography and autobiography increases by 56%, cookbooks by 64%, and games and activities by 50% on average in Q4. We'll zoom in now on biography and autobiography, as it's a huge subject with many subcategories, and we want to dive in a little deeper to see exactly what kinds of biographies sell during the holiday season. Based on the last three years of data, titles in memoir, sports, and entertainment and performing arts are most popular. The market share of memoirs increased an average of 37% in the fourth quarter, sports by 38%, and entertainment and performing arts by a whopping 131%. Keep in mind that biography is a tricky subject though, since it all depends on how publishers choose to classify these titles. For instance, the best-selling title in the memoir category in 2024 was Mats Sundin's "Home and Away," which could just as easily have been assigned a biography sports category and further driven that subcategory's sales. And finally, we come to kids' books. As I mentioned earlier, 14% of 2024's book purchases were gifts, and 60% of those gift purchases were books for children. Twenty percent of those gifts purchased for children were for kids aged 8 to 12, according to our Canadian Book Consumer Survey taken last year. It should come as no surprise then that the juvenile fiction humorous stories category shows a 36% increase in Q4 and includes titles in the "Wimpy Kid," "Bad Guys," and "Dork Diaries" series, all of which are geared towards kids in that 8 to 12 age group. Similarly, the comics and graphic novels humorous category sees a 21% increase, which includes series like "Dog Man," "Cat Kid," "Big Nate," and "Pizza and Taco," all of which are no-brainers for people shopping for middle-grade children. While all of these subjects perform well throughout the year, the overall increase in their market share during the last few months of the year shows that there is indeed an increased demand for the subjects we've just looked at, and the data provides us with some indication of the types of books people tend to buy, particularly during the gift-giving season. Lauren: Thank you, Kalpna. That was so interesting. Saw some love in the Q&A and the chat for your wonderful meme choices. And we're just going to take a look at the Q&A from the audience and hopefully gain some insights there and flesh out the conversation. I'm going to start with one for you, Lily, if you wouldn't mind. The question was, where is this data from? Can publishers have access to it?
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  Lily: Yeah, Ican take that question. So, as Lauren mentioned, all of the data that we pulled in today's presentation is actually pulled directly from SalesData. This is data that we can pull ourselves using the market share report. And then using that, we compared sales in the all book markets, so that's all retailers reporting into SalesData for the 2025 year-to-date, as well as the 2024 year-to-date. And we did tweak those reporting periods, depending on what it is we were looking for. Sometimes we weren't interested in year-to-date, but we were looking at monthly data or quarterly data instead. The market share report is great for that, identifying those subject trends. And then once we identified our trends, then we could go into our bestseller report and pull a year-to-date bestseller using those identified BISAC subject codes. And then look at the list and see if the sales we were seeing were coming from one particular title in particular that was pushing those sales, or if it was distributed across multiple titles just to get a better sense of how those titles were performing. So, yeah, all of that is to say that we use SalesData. All of this is data that subscribers have access to themselves. And if anyone would like some help with pulling that data, you can absolutely reach out to us and we can help you figure that out. Lauren: Thanks, Lily. I love that. That it's not just something that we at BookNet have access to behind the curtain. This is available and an analysis that you can do using the UI as well as, of course, can't forget our spreadsheet software. The next question I have is for you, Kalpna. And I'm wondering from the chat if there are any other subjects or trends that you're keeping an eye on, given that you've been looking really intensely at the emerging trends. Kalpna: Yeah, one thing that I noticed while I was doing this research was that there's been a huge increase of all topics in dystopian fiction, not just among adults but also with young adults. And so obviously, it's sales of "The Handmaid's Tale" in 1984 for adults and the revival of "The Hunger Games" for teenagers. Those have kind of taken over. And a lot of the other bestselling titles, at least in the adult dystopian fiction, were backlist titles, which I thought was very interesting. And I think the potential there for crossover between audiences, I mean, Handmaid's Tale and 1984 are books that you read in high school. And with high schoolers reading so much of "The Hunger Games" now, I wonder if there will be a revival and kind of more young adults reading some of these adult dystopian classics. And if there's even an opportunity to repackage some of those books to gear more particularly to young adults. So, that's something that really stood out to me, and that would be interesting to keep an eye on. Lauren: Thank you. I have another one for Lily looking at Library Data. The question is, what about subject trends in library circulation? Lily: Yeah, we love Library Data. In this presentation, we sort of decided to focus more on the trends we were seeing in the retail market specifically so that we could help publishers and retailers prepare for the holiday season. But in our March presentation that we do every year looking at subject trends over the past year, this one that we just did was the first one where we looked specifically at how those same subjects were performing within circulation data. And it was very interesting. Sometimes there'll be things that are not performing as well in the retail space that are actually performing well in the library space. So, it's interesting to see how readers are making their decisions that way.
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  And so wedefinitely want to do that again in our March presentation coming up. And then also in the meantime, we do our lovely marketing team does a subject spotlight blog series where they will focus on a specific subject each month, I believe, and they'll see how it's performing in the retail space versus the library space. Lauren: Thank you so much, Lily. I have another one for Kalpna. The question from the audience is, can a big seller double sales in a category? Kalpna: I would say definitely yes. Going just back to that dystopian fiction example I mentioned, when I looked at those huge sales spikes and then investigated further to see what the books were and they very much were Handmaid's Tale and Hunger Games, which ultimately drove that entire subject sales. So, yes, I think one big seller could definitely tip the scale and double, if not even triple the sales of a particular category. Another example from much further back in 2016 was Rupi Kaur's poetry books, which essentially doubled poetry sales year over year when those came out. So, definitely one big title can make a huge, huge impact. Lauren: Yeah, fair enough. I think that we've seen that, that that's a trend, particularly as you get further down into the smaller subject categories. I'm just going to wrap up the Q&A now and welcome everyone to hang on for a few more minutes as we wrap up. Before we go, we'd love it if you could provide feedback on this session. We will drop a link in the survey in the chat and we'd love if you could just take a few minutes to fill it out. We'll also email you a link to the recording of the session as soon as it's available. And to our attendees, we invite you to join upcoming sessions on "Embedding sustainability: Tips for ebook and print production" and "The partnership effect: Libraries and publishers on collaborating and thriving." And you can find information about all of these upcoming events and recordings of previous sessions on our website at bnctechforum.ca. And if you like what you saw today, as alluded to, sign up to our Tech Forum mailing list to attend Lily and Kalpna's next session in March of 2026, "Trending up: Book subjects on the move in the Canadian market." Lastly, we'd like to thank the Department of Canadian Heritage for their support through the Canada Book Fund, and of course to all of you for attending. Have a wonderful day and we'll hope to see you again soon. Thank you.