Percival Everett, whose 2024 novel James won both a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, was the bestselling Black author in 2025, according to a new list compiled by the African American Literature Book Club (AALBC) using Circana BookScan data.
Everett beat out Kamala Harris for the top spot on the 2025 BLK Bestsellers List, which was created by Troy Johnson, head of the AALBC. Rounding out the five bestselling authors of the year were Kimberly D. Moore, Octavia Butler, and Rachel Renee Russell.
Johnson took special note of Russell’s achievements, noting that with her Dork Diaries series, Russell had 13 of the bestselling books in the BLK children’s category in the month of December. “She is really killing it,” Johnson observed.
Johnson was also excited about prospects for Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell, which was published by Simon & Schuster in September 2024 and hit the the December BLK trade paperback fiction list in the 17th spot. Johnson called Campbell’s apocalyptic novel “a book to watch.”
Despite a number of big hits last year, print unit sales of books by Black authors fell 14% in 2025 compared to 2024. The sales figures are based on BookScan’s database that uses BISAC codes with the terms "African American and Black" and "African," plus any additional books identified by Johnson that were written by Black people. The data set included more than 100,000 titles.
Johnson acknowledged that the subset of titles of Black authors he compiled misses some books written by Black writers. Still, he said he is confident the sales figures are “indicative of the overall trend,” noting that the decline “mirrors the trend I've observed in my curated database of books.”
