The Year in Bestsellers: 2015

In 2015, an unusual event occurred in the world of bestsellers: a new category dominated the charts. For the first time, adult coloring books were the most successful players on the trade paperback lists. Four are among the longest-running bestsellers of the year, and 21 adult coloring books landed on the trade list in the course of 2015. The 21 coloring books spent a combined total of 175 weeks on the bestsellers lists; that accounts for 13.5% of the total positions on the trade paper bestseller lists for the year.

Adult coloring books are a long way from the subject matter of previous years’ bestsellers—erotic romance was hot in 2012 thanks to the 50 Shades trilogy, the Duck Dynasty titles by members of the Robertson clan loudly quacked their way onto the charts in 2013, and movie tie-in sales in 2014 were big winners. The latter continued to do well in 2015. Three of the five longest-running mass market top sellers—American Sniper, The Longest Ride, and The Martian—were movie tie-ins, spending a total of 63 weeks on the charts. American Sniper and The Martian also made impressive showings on the 2015 trade paper longest-running chart. The movie tie-in editions of Unbroken, Still Alice, and Wild were also on that trade list, along with the regular editions of Unbroken and The Martian. That group added up to 238 weeks on the trade paper list. If any publisher can figure out how to do a movie tie-in adult coloring book, it would be a surefire winner.

Conglomerates Rock

The number of publishing conglomerates keeps shrinking, and that is a direct result of consolidation. While conglomerate clout on the bestseller charts continues to be powerful, the group keeps getting smaller. Three years ago, in 2013, we calculated the Bestsellers by Corporation chart for nine companies; in 2014, it was seven companies, and the latest chart only has five. It is also the first year that we combined the bestsellers from all the divisions and imprints of HarperCollins and Harlequin, and that had a significant boost on HC’s paperback numbers. Adding the 2014 paperback totals for the two amounted to 126 titles and 549 weeks; the 2015 totals are 152 books and 543 weeks (the additional titles are due to the Harelquin acquisition).

In 2015, the Big Five owned 87.8% of all the hardcover bestseller positions available, and 80.1% in paperback. The group’s leader, Penguin Random House, controlled 40.1% of the hardcover slots and 34.2% of paperbacks in 2015. It is unlikely that PRH will lose its first-place standing in the coming years. As separate publishers, Penguin and Random House were generally the top two players on these charts. As we point out each year, the bestsellers that make the weekly and annual charts represent less than 1% of total annual title output. And despite the conglomerates’ dominance, there are 37 other hardcover publishers and 46 trade paperback houses that had titles on PW’s weekly bestseller lists. However, most of the titles on the mass market lists belong to the Big Five. Only 41 of the 291 books that landed on the mass market list in 2015 were from publishers that were not part of the Big Five, and Kensington published 39 of those titles. The only two other publishers to crack the mass market list were Merriam-Webster with The Merriam-Webster Official Scrabble Players Dictionary and Sourcebooks with I’ll Stand by You by Sharon Sala.

Tenure, Tenure, Tenure

The key to financial success is not just getting on the charts, but staying there. For example, Hachette had 61 hardcover bestsellers in 2015, much less than the 78 from HarperCollins—but Hachette’s titles stayed on the lists for a combined total of 308 weeks, while HC had a total of 269. The result was a higher percentage of bestseller positions for Hachette. In another example, PRH had 150 paperback bestsellers in 2015, two books fewer than the HC total of 152, but PRH’s titles racked up 889 weeks on the year’s charts, compared to 543 for HC. That resulted in a 34.2% market share for PRH versus a 21% share for HC. An explanation of the significant difference is tenure. A total of 48 book titles in the HC group were on the weekly charts for only one or two weeks (mostly Harlequin romances). PRH had only 22 titles with one- or two-week runs. PRH also enjoyed nine of 21 titles that stayed on the charts for a double-digit number of weeks, and HC had only three.

Trade paperbacks tended to stay on the bestseller lists longer than mass market titles in 2015. Forty-one trade paperbacks stayed on the trade paperback lists for at least 10 weeks, and another 77 bestsellers had runs of five or more weeks, totaling 38% of the 240 on the list. There were still plenty of trade paperbacks that hit the lists for only a few weeks last year, with 93 books on the list for one week and another 34 for two weeks.

Multiple Hits

Veteran authors of fiction continue to be abundant on these annual charts, but there were some lucky debut writers. Debut holdovers from 2014 included Andy Weir’s The Martian and Celeste Ng for Everything I Never Told You. Other debut novelists who arrived on the lists last year were David Duchovny with Holy Cow (FS&G), Stephanie Clifford with Everybody Rise (St. Martin’s), and Garth Risk Hallberg with City of Fire (Knopf).

There were 20 authors that scored four or more mass market bestsellers during 2015. They included William W. Johnstone (18), Debbie Macomber (16), Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb (15), and James Patterson and his cowriters (11). Collectively books by those 20 writers occupied a total of 473 positions on the mass market charts, an impressive 36.4% of that list.

Eclectic is a good word to describe the assortment of nonfiction high rollers, including the leader of the pack, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, a book on decluttering and organizing—very important while New Year resolutions are still on the to-do list. Finance, health and fitness, and religion and spirituality continue to be strong nonfiction topics, as are books by Bill O’Reilly. Religion writers are again blessed on these charts, including Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer, T.D. Jakes, Max Lucado, and Billy Graham. And with the 2016 elections looming and the presidential candidates causing a stir, there is no surprise to find many political books on the charts, including Ted Cruz’s A Time for Truth, Ben Carson’s A More Perfect Union, and Donald Trump’s Crippled America.

Gold Goal Getters

It’s hard to get to the top of the charts, and it’s even harder to stay there. Only four of the 82 books that had double-digit runs on the 2015 weekly charts stayed at #1 for more than 10 weeks. In hardcover fiction, The Girl on the Train stayed at #1 for 14 weeks. In hardcover nonfiction, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up was at the top of the charts for 12 weeks. And in trade paperback, the movie tie-in of America Sniper remained at #1 for 14 weeks, and Grey was there for 11 weeks. There were a total of 70 books with runs of one, two, or three weeks at #1. But even one week lets the author and publisher declare the book a chart topper.

Bestsellers by Corporation

How the Big Five fared on PW’s 2015 charts

*This figure represents the publisher’s share of the 2,600 hardcover and 2,600 paperback bestseller positions during 2015 (there are 25 positions on each of our four weekly bestseller lists).

**This is the first year that we combined Harlequin’s numbers with HarperCollins.

Bestsellers by Format

The above table indicates the number of titles that appeared on the bestseller lists in each format during the given year.

2013 was the first time that the numbers reflected the top 25 books for each list; previous calculations were based on the top 15.

PW’s 2015 Longest-running Bestsellers

Hardcover

Paperback

*These titles achieved the #1 spot at least once on PW’s weekly top-25 lists in 2015.

The number in parentheses indicates how many weeks the title spent on PW’s top-25 lists prior to 2015.

Ranking the Houses: How the Divisions and Imprints Competed in 2015

Note: Publishers of hardcovers and trade paperbacks that had a single title hit the lists for just one week are not included in the ranking.

Correction: The "Ranking the Houses" chart has been updated with data for Simon & Schuster imprints Atria, Emily Bestler, and 37 Ink.