Canelo / Arts Council England

1. Data analysis

What is often missing from discussions of literary fiction is hard data. 

Working with Nielsen BookScan, who are thanked for their generous 

contribution to this research, we have analysed 16 years of sales data. 

As mentioned above, there is no specific category for literary fiction, but 

this was overcome by looking at ‘General Fiction’, the closest category 

in the Nielsen data, and then drilling down to specific writers, events 

(such as prizes) and other categories (such as translations). We look 

at General Fiction against, for example, Genre Fiction, another Nielsen 

category, and for both hardbacks and paperbacks. The overall category 

of Fiction encompasses both General Fiction and Genre Fiction and 

so looking at General Fiction is the nearest approximation for looking 

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