Scholastic claims the fiction bestsellers crown
BY JIM MILLIOT
Scholastic 33 252 19.3% 7.3%
Penguin Random House 36 226 17.4% 19.8%
Disney 25 202 15.5% 9.4%
HarperCollins 26 168 12.9% 18.0%
Simon & Schuster 23 133 10.2% 8.0%
Hachette Book Group 18 87 6.7% 11.4%
Abrams 3 59 4.5% 8.1%
Quirk 3 65 5.0% 4.2%
Macmillan 18 46 3.5% 4.0%
Frontlist Fiction
Penguin Random House 60 450 34.6% 45.9%
Macmillan 10 158 12.1% 11.2%
HarperCollins 26 151 11.6% 10.0%
Simon & Schuster 13 105 8.1% 7.4%
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 8 80 6.1% 5.8%
Scholastic 11 83 6.4% 4.5%
Disney 13 57 4.4% –
Firefly 1 45 3.5% –
TigerTales 4 31 2.4% –
Candlewick 4 37 2.8% 2.8%
Picture Books
SOURCE: PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This figure represents the publisher’s share of the 1,300 bestseller
positions on the list in question during the year indicated. (There are 25
positions on each weekly list.)
Note: Our children’s bestsellers-by-house rankings are determined using
data from our two weekly children’s bestseller lists: Frontlist Fiction and
Picture Books. These lists are based on print unit sales at outlets that
report to NPD BookScan, which tracks roughly 85% of the print market.
The Year in
Children’s
Bestsellers
Scholastic’s newly illustrated edition of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and Claudia and Mean Janine were on PW’s Children’s Frontlist Fiction bestseller list for a combined 93 weeks in 2016, helping the publisher edge out Penguin Random House for the top spot in our
annual ranking of children’s publishers by bestsellers. Scholastic
had a total of 33 books on the fiction charts in 2016, up from
21 in 2015. Other Scholastic titles that had healthy runs on the
list were Harry Potter and the Cursed Child ( 20 weeks), Kristy’s
Great Idea ( 16 weeks), and The Truth About Stacey ( 15 weeks)—
the latter two, like Claudia and Mean Janine, are from the Baby-Sitters Club Graphix line. In all, Scholastic’s titles occupied 252
slots on the lists last year, representing a 19.3% of the total
1,300 Children’s Frontlist positions. In 2015, Scholastic had
only a 7.3% share.
PRH placed more titles on the fiction bestseller list than
Scholastic in 2016, but its books didn’t have the same staying
power. PRH’s two longest-running bestsellers came from its
Speak imprint and were written by Rick Yancey. The Infinite Sea
was on the list for 37 weeks, and the movie tie-in to The Fifth
Wave was a bestseller for 24 weeks. PRH’s share of bestseller
slots on the fiction list fell to 17.4% last year from 19.8% in
2015, when it had 39 books reach the list.
Disney is another publisher that had an exceptionally good
year on PW’s Children’s Frontlist Fiction list. It had 25 titles
reach the list, up from 18 in 2015, and its share of total bestseller slots increased to 15.5% from 9.4%. The Hidden Oracle,
which was on the list for 32 weeks, had the longest run among
Disney titles, and six new Star Wars books reached the list for
a combined 31 weeks. (Hidden Oracle author Rick Riordan had
six books on the bestseller list last year).
With Disney’s rise, HarperCollins slipped in 2016 compared
to the prior year. The number of HC bestsellers rose by one, to
26, but their combined length of stay dropped from 234 weeks
in 2015 to 168 weeks last year, giving the publisher 12.9% of
all slots.
PRH maintained a commanding lead in the publisher
ranking for PW’s Picture Book bestseller list, thanks in large
part to the perennially popular Dr. Seuss, but even here it lost
some ground to its competitors. PRH had 60 picture books hit
the list last year, down two from 2015. More significantly, its
share of all available slots fell from 45.9% in 2015 to 34.6% in
2016. The company had two of the top- 10 longest-running
bestsellers, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which was on the chart
for 50 weeks, and Dr. Seuss’s ABC, which ran for 42 weeks.
No publisher had a dramatic increase in the number of pic-
ture books on our bestseller list last year, but all publishers
other than PRH gained in their shares of the list positions.
Macmillan stayed in second place in terms of its share of best-
seller slots on the strength of three long-running bestsellers:
First 100 Words was on the list every week in 2016; Brown Bear,
Brown Bear, What Do You See? was only absent for three weeks;
and On the Night You Were Born spent 34 weeks on the list.
