After a 2014 that saw books for kids – led by John Green and David Walliams novels – ruling the annual sales chart, 2015 was the year of the women. Female authors, including Harper Lee and Judith Kerr, took seven of the top 10 places, leaving room only for Guinness World Records and two of the three kings of Christmas, Walliams and Jeff Kinney, with the third, Jamie Oliver, just outside at number 11.
The last time this happened was in 2012, and then the distaff dominance was exaggerated by the fact that two of that year’s elite, EL James and Suzanne Collins, had produced trilogies and all three of their Fifty Shades and Hunger Games titles were highly placed. Here, in contrast, the works by women at the chart’s summit are one-offs and remarkably varied – BDSM porn, a colouring book, the resuscitation of a cat who passed away in 2002’s Goodbye, Mog, the return of an Alabama attorney and his daughter who last appeared 55 years ago, and the tales of a perma-sozzled unemployed commuter (The Girl on the Train), a narrator with dementia (Elizabeth Is Missing) and a fed-up wife in 17th-century Amsterdam (The Miniaturist).
Just as diverse are the authors who produced them, ranging as they do from Kerr and Lee, aged 92 and 89, respectively, to the award-winning debutants Emma Healey and Jessie Burton and Paula Hawkins, writing her first thriller after previously producing romcoms; and from EL James, who was placed 12th (with estimated annual earnings of $12m) in Forbes’s latest rankings of the world’s top-earning authors, even though these figures relate to a pre-Grey year in which she published nothing, to Millie Marotta, queen of colouring-in, who describes herself as a “freelance illustrator [with a] studio by the sea in a little corner of West Wales”, and a year ago was almost unknown.
Although male authors staged something of a comeback in the bottom half of the chart, overall, 45 women figured this year (compared with 47 men), a significant advance on the 31 in 2014. Their progress reflects the rise of genres whose leading exponents tend to be female: the psychological thrillers exemplified by The Girl on the Train and its model, Gone Girl (17); the adult (or all-age) colouring book phenomenon represented by Marotta and Johanna Basford (15, 16); and the healthy eating trend behind Ella Woodward’s emergence as the second most popular cookery writer with Deliciously Ella (18).
Conversely, categories of books that can be seen as male were in retreat, notably the Minecraft titles that took up four top 10 slots in 2014 (Minecraft Blockopedia, at number 96, is the only reminder of the videogame manuals’ short-lived glory) and were replaced by colouring-in as the fad that saved booksellers’ bacon. Oliver apart, cookery titles by men have vanished from the top 100, as the cult of the swaggering, bantering celebrity chef gives way to Ella-style gushing and sensible diets, and suggestions from TV home cooks, Mary Berry (24) and Nigella Lawson (84), whose subtitle, Feel Good Food, was cannily on-trend.
Also close to extinction is the actor, musician or comedian’s memoir, a genre where men traditionally predominate as they do in showbiz, with heavily promoted autumn offerings from the likes of Brian Blessed, Steve Coogan and Tom Jones nowhere to be found; although this clear-out means that the few, mostly sport-related conventional autobiographies that remain are liable to be more blokeish – Chris Kyle’s American Sniper (23), Guy Martin’s When You Dead, You Dead (35) and Steven Gerrard’s My Story (50). Only Penguin’s droll adult Ladybird books (65, 87), written by Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris, were something new and successful in 2015 driven by male authors.
Pulling together the marked lack of TV spin-off titles (where has the annual Great British Bake Off book gone?) and the feeble performance of memoirs by telly stars such as Coogan and Sue Perkins – and noting that only Mog’s Christmas Calamity in the top 10 owes its stonking numbers to big or small-screen exposure – you might wonder if cinema and television have suddenly lost much of their sales-boosting magic.
Only if the same unusual pattern is repeated next year will that begin to look plausible; what can be said is that online celebrity can now match the old-fashioned variety in getting books sold, particularly to younger buyers. Woodward owes her top 20 position to YouTube, not a BBC2 or Channel 4 series, Zoe Sugg (20, 34) and Alfie Deyes (39, 58) showed their high rankings last year were no ephemeral fluke, and newly arrived fellow vloggers Dan and Phil (70) beat heavy-hitters such as Jo Nesbø, Nick Hornby and Jodi Picoult.
If you’re puzzled by the almost complete disconnection between the top 100 and the titles that did well in the last month’s books of the year roundups, the reason for it is that the latter are mostly new 2015 publications, while the former (with the phenomenal exceptions of Go Set a Watchman and The Girl on the Train, the latter published in January and still in hardback) tend to be paperbacks of books that first appeared last year. That’s true of Healey and Burton’s novels, which did remarkably well to challenge James and Walliams, assisted respectively by Costa and Waterstones awards. Last year’s highest-placed lit fic, Life After Life by Kate Atkinson and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, only managed 11th and 14th.
Other literary or literary-commercial novels that kept publishers happy – by David Nicholls (14), Victoria Hislop (25), Ian McEwan (51), Sarah Waters (82), Karen Joy Fowler (85) and Anthony Doerr (99) – were from last year too, apart from Terry Pratchett’s valedictory The Shepherd’s Crown (36) and Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread (60), the sole 2015 Man Booker prize contender to make the list.
Serious non-fiction, another failing field where men are uppermost, receded further, with no history or (adult) popular science titles or full-blown biographies getting past the chart’s 95,000 copies threshold. Still, it was not all gloom: Bill Bryson’s travelogue (26) lived up to booksellers’ expectations, while the Guardian’s Owen Jones’s polemic (32) exceeded them, and Helen Macdonald (43) converted her Samuel Johnson-Costa book of the year double of 2014-15 into sales that nudged her just ahead of Alex Ferguson.
