Canelo / Arts Council England

Canelo / Arts Council England | 

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Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction

take half – so publisher, agent and author must make do with £15,000 

between them. Selling 3,000 to 4,000 books is not unrespectable. 

However, making a living as a writer at this level of sales is exceptionally 

difficult, to say the least. 

At the top, though, there is still a solid group of writers who are making 

good sales. The 100th bestselling book sold 55,000 copies in 2011, 

down to a still respectable 35,000 in 2015 (the most recent year for 

which data was available). The fall in value was more marked for the 

100th book, from £300k in 2011 (a good return) to £125k in 2015 (much 

less once the retailer and publisher have taken their cut). The 10th 

bestselling book did well on numbers but the same pattern was evident. 

In 2011 it sold over 200,000 copies at a value of £1m. In 2015 the same 

slot sold 75,000 copies fewer, with the value roughly halving. What is 

clear is that there is a major gulf between the bottom and the top, but 

the top sellers are also under greater pressure. Our expectation, and 

that of most of those we talked to, was that things would be fine at the 

top – but, relatively speaking, they are not. 

This isn’t to say that there aren’t books doing well. In the exclusive club 

of books to have sold over one million copies, literary works are still 

present. Examples include Atonement by Ian McEwan, The Kite Runner 

by Khaled Hosseini, The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, 

Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and A Short History 

of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka. Over the past 10 years the 

bestseller in Fiction General has never sold less than 300,000 copies. 

Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey was the bestselling ‘literary’ title 

of 2015, with 368,700 sales (the bestselling overall was E. L. James’ 

Fifty Shades of Grey with over a million)

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. Harper Lee’s Go Set a 

Watchman was next with 342,100 sales – this put them at positions 6 

and 7 in the overall list. Jessie Burton and David Nicholls also performed 

strongly. In the top 100 for 2015, other writers who could be seen as 

literary were Ian McEwan, Sarah Waters, Karen Joy Fowler and Nick 

Hornby, with some crossovers like John Green or Kate Mosse. But the 

picture in 2016 was bleaker for bestselling literary fiction. The bestseller 

was Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins, which sold 187,424 copies. 

Sebastian Faulks, William Boyd and the now-Nobel Laureate Kazuo 

Ishiguro were rare appearances for literary fiction in the top 100 sellers 

of 2016, but all sold fewer than 150,000 units. A bright spot was the 

inclusion of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (103,685 copies). 

It is striking that overall the books selling well are not literary – they 

may be fiction, but they tend to be either commercial genre fiction (Lee 

Child say, or Jojo Moyes) or children’s fiction (David Walliams or J.K. 

Rowling). And while each of the top-selling literary fiction titles did well 

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http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/24/bestselling-books-2015-analysis-fifty-shades-on-top 

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