With its dominant position in picture books, Penguin Random House once again ruled PW’s children’s bestseller lists in 2024. The company took 546 positions of the 1,300 bestseller spots on the picture book list, easily outpacing HarperCollins, which took 145 slots. (There are 25 positions on the picture book list each week, for a total of 1,300 slots per year.) PRH didn’t fare as well on the frontlist fiction bestseller list as its 141 positions last year placed it far behind leader Scholastic, which grabbed 375 slots.

PRH’s bestseller totals do not include books published by Sourcebooks, which, though majority-owned by PRH, remains structurally and operationally independent. Last year, Sourcebooks’s share of the fiction bestseller chart had a marked jump from 2023. It had 18 books hit the list for a total of 177 weeks led by Laura Nowlin’s If Only I Had Told Her, which was on the list for 45 weeks.

Other publishers that saw meaningful gains on the frontlist fiction list included Simon & Schuster, which had the year’s longest-running title with Powerless by Lauren Roberts staying on the charts for 47 weeks. Roberts also had long bestseller stays with Powerful (23 weeks) and Reckless (22 weeks). Abrams usually has one of children’s fiction long-running bestsellers in Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid series, and that was the case again in 2024 with No Brainer on the list for 44 weeks. It was joined high on the year-end chart by another Abrams title, Lightlark by Alex Aster, which ran for 41 weeks.

Though Scholastic’s number of fiction bestsellers fell from 2023, it still had a number of long-running hits. Among them were Dav Pilkey’s Influencers and The Scarlet Shredder, which were on the charts for 40 and 39 weeks, respectively. Macmillan had a nice uptick on the number of positions on the fiction list, led by Ruthless Vows by Rebecca Ross from Wednesday Books, which was on the list for 23 weeks.

In terms of picture books, HarperCollins trailed PRH with 26 bestsellers, which were on the charts for 145 weeks. Goodnight Moon was its longest-running bestseller, on the list for 34 weeks. The number of bestseller positions for Sourcebooks’s picture books fell slightly from 2023, but its titles still took 137 positions.

Printers Row, the publishing division of Readerlink, was one of the few non-New York publishers to have multiple titles on the list for long runs with the publisher posting 10 books on the list, taking 76 positions.

The longest-running bestseller picture book honors went to Macmillan’s Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, which was on the list for 52 week’s followed by The Very Hungry Caterpillar (PRH) at 51 weeks and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom (S&S) at 50 weeks.