Appetite for cookbooks remains hearty, but overall book sales dip

Australia’s robust appetite for cookbooks showed little sign of being sated last year as readers gobbled up more than 253,000 copies of Nagi Maehashi’s RecipeTin Eats: Dinner to make it the country’s bestselling title in 2023, according to figures from Nielsen BookScan.

The book by Maehashi (a contributor to this masthead) was originally published in October 2022. Last year it won the industry book of the year award and was more than 70,000 sales ahead of Rebecca Yarros’ adult fantasy novel Fourth Wing, the first in her Empyrean series. The second, Iron Flame, was published early in November, sold 109,000 and finished in 10th spot. James Clear’s self-help book Atomic Habits, originally published in 2018, finished third with sales of more than 154,000.

Nagi Maehashi had the top-selling book in Australia in 2023.Credit: James Brickwood

As with Colleen Hoover previously, Yarros received a boost from her popularity on BookTok. Hoover, who had four titles in the national bestseller lists for 2022 including the number one title, had two titles in the top 10 – It Ends With Us and It Starts With Us – with sales of 116,000 and 110,000 respectively. Hannah Grace’s self-described “fluffy comfort book” Icebreaker finished eighth overall, selling 123,500 copies.

However, a flat retail market and the soaring cost of living meant that the overall book market failed to match that of 2022 in which sales jumped more than 8 per cent to nearly 71 million units, with total value edging up by about 7 per cent to $1.3 billion. The data captures printed books only.

Last year, in a slight reversal of fortune, the volume of titles sold dipped by 1.7 per cent from 70.8 million to 69.8 million, representing a drop in value of about $30 million to just under $1.3 billion.

Prince Harry’s Spare sold well in three English-language markets.Credit: AP

Other English-language markets saw similar results. In the US, volume dropped 2.6 per cent from 788 million units sold to 767 million, while in the UK sales dropped 5 per cent to 198.6 million units but up in value by 1.3 per cent to £1.8 billion ($3.5 billion).

Prince Harry’s memoir Spare was a strong performer in all three markets, selling 143,000 in Australia, where it finished in fourth spot overall, 707,000 in Britain, where it proved to be the fastest selling non-fiction book ever, and 1.23 million in the US, where it was third-best selling book of last year behind Colleen Hoover’s aforementioned two novels.

The popularity of Bonnie Garmus’ first novel Lessons in Chemistry continued, boosted in part by a second, tie-in edition to the TV adaptation, and its 128,000 copies pushed it to fifth spot overall in Australia. It sold 522,000 copies in the UK and a tad over 1 million in the US.

The bestselling Australian novel was Pip Williams’ The Bookbinder of Jericho (124,000), her follow-up to The Dictionary of Lost Words, which also sold nearly 70,000 copies last year, followed closely by Trent Dalton’s Lola in the Mirror, which sold nearly 106,000 in the final three months of the year.

Pip Williams’second novel was the best-selling adult fiction in 2023.Credit: James Elsby

Scott Pape’s The Barefoot Investor, which was originally published in December 2016 and sold 438,000 copies the following year, still came in at number six in the top-10 adult books by Australian authors. Last year, Australians bought more than 63,000 copies in the hope of improving their finances.

In the year of the referendum on a Voice to parliament, Thomas Mayo and Kerry O’Brien’s Voice handbook sold more than 64,000 copies, while Anna Funder’s Wifedom, her account of George Orwell’s relationship with his first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy, sold more than 60,000.

As usual, the Christmas season was crucial. According to Nielsen, it can account for 14 per cent of annual revenue for the book industry. For booksellers, however, it can bring in as much as 25-30 per cent of annual revenue.

In early December, Nielsen reported that the value of book sales slipped by 3 per cent during 2023, and book-buying in the lead-up to the holidays mitigated some of that fall.

Robbie Egan, chief executive of BookPeople (formerly the Australian Booksellers Association) said all his members had had one or two bad months last year, but the market remained strong “despite everything”. Some bookshops had excellent Christmases – “off the charts” – but the season had been “by and large flat, and people have been positive and sanguine”.

However, he cautioned there would be a tough couple of years ahead unless the cost of living went down. “I am quietly confident. We were going to have low rates for a long time, and then they went up faster than ever. We just have to roll with the macro conditions.”

AUSTRALIA’S TOP 10

1. Recipe Tin Eats, Nagi Maehashi, 253,600
2. Fourth Wing, Rebecca Yarros, 172,200
3. Atomic Habits, James Clear, 154,100
4. Spare, Prince Harry, 143,100
5. Lessons in Chemistry (combined editions), Bonnie Garmus, 127,800
6. The Bookbinder of Jericho, Pip Williams, 123,900
7. Icebreaker, Hannah Grace, 123,500
8. It Ends With Us, Colleen Hoover, 116,100
9. It Starts With Us, Colleen Hoover, 110,400
10. Iron Flame, Rebecca Yarros, 109,400

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