Though unit sales of print books rose by less than 1% in 2024 over 2023, it was the first annual increase in three years at outlets that report to Circana BookScan. Unit sales totaled 782.7 million in the year ended Dec. 28, 2024, compared to 778.3 million in 2023. While 2024 sales were down from the 839.7 million units sold in the peak year of 2021, the figure was higher than the 759.6 million print copies sold in 2020, the first year of the pandemic.
In 2024, sales gradually improved over the course of the year and saw a 1.6% increase in the fourth quarter. For the full year, the sales performance followed a familiar path, as adult fiction was once again the driver, with units rising 4.8%. Fantasy had the biggest increase in the adult segment, up 35.8%. Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros were the queens of romantasy in the year, with each landing two books among the year’s top sellers. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses and A Court of Mist and Fury moved about 1.3 million and 791,000 copies, respectively, while sales of Yarros’s Iron Flame and Fourth Wing sold nearly 1.7 million copies combined last year.
On the romance side of the romantasy equation, Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us and It Starts with Us sold a total of more than 1.6 million copies. The bestselling book of the year was The Women by Kristin Hannah, which sold nearly 1.5 million copies. Overall, sales of romance books rose almost 9% in 2024. Graphic novels had a second consecutive year of declines, with sales falling 11.5%. Even so, with 24.4 million copies sold, graphic novels was the fifth largest of adult fiction’s 12 subcategories.
Sales in the biggest category, adult nonfiction, fell 0.5% in the year. Of the five titles to sell more than one million copies last year, only one was nonfiction: The Eras Tour Book, self-published by Taylor Swift, sold more than 1.2 million copies. (It was ineligible to be included on bestseller lists due to its being sold exclusively through Target.) James Clear’s Atomic Habits finished another year as the category’s most popular book, selling 982,000 copies. Nonfiction also had the year’s biggest surprise bestseller when J.D. Vance’s backlist book, Hillbilly Elegy, jumped on the bestseller list after he was named Donald Trump’s running mate, going on to sell more than 700,000 copies.
Among the adult nonfiction subcategories, religion books had the biggest increase, with sales up 11.5%, selling more than 64 million units.
The top children’s book in 2024 was Dav Pilkey’s The Scarlet Shedder, the 12th volume in Pilkey’s Dog Man series, which sold nearly 1.3 million copies. Another popular series, Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid, produced a hit with Hot Mess, which sold more than 748,000 copies. Despite the two powerhouses, total juvenile fiction sales slipped 1.3% overall.
The top-selling young adult fiction title last year was If He Had Been with Me, which sold more than 711,000 copies. YA fiction sales have softened each year after peaking in 2021, when 31.2 million copies were sold. Last year, sales in the category were just under 30.2 million copies, down 4.3% from 2023.
