Transcript: Trendspotting: Book subjects on the move in the Canadian market
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Kalpna Patel: Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us for today’s Tech Forum session. I’m Kalpna Patel, Product Coordinator at BookNet, and I’m joined today by my colleague and product manager, Lily Dwyer. Welcome to our webinar, Trendspotting: Book subjects on the move in the Canadian market.
Before we get started, BookNet Canada acknowledges that its operations are remote and our colleagues contribute their work from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi’kmaq, the Ojibwa of Fort William First Nation, the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, which includes the Ojibwa, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi, the Métis, as well as the unceded and ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and the Tsleil-Waututh peoples, the original nations and peoples of the lands we now call Beaton, Brampton, Guelph, Halifax, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vancouver, Vaughan, and Windsor.
We encourage you to visit the native-land.ca website to learn more about the peoples whose land you are joining from today. Moreover, BookNet endorses the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and supports an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to spacemaking in the book industry.
If during the presentation you have questions, please use the Q&A panel found in the bottom menu. Over the next hour, we’ll take a look at some of the top-selling subjects and titles of 2025, as well as subjects that saw big sales increases compared to 2024. Subjects that may be on their way to being or have already become the next big thing in books. Our analysis is based on data collected from our SalesData retailer aggregation service.
The data shared in this presentation doesn’t reflect book sales for the whole market or our entire retail panel but sales from a group of comparable stores, so a fixed group of retailers that have reported sales consistently since 2023. This allows us to provide a more accurate view of the year-over-year market where individual category fluctuations won’t be skewed by the addition of new reporting retailers. So essentially, we’ll be looking at the sales of print books measured in units sold, comparing sales from 2023 to 2025.
The subject headings and categories we refer to today are based on BISAC subjects. Throughout the presentation, we’ll also take a look at new subjects introduced in recent BISAC code releases, since the release of new codes alerts us to developments in the publishing and book buying world. Code changes and additions are meant to not only meet the needs of the industry but to ultimately aid in the discoverability of books. They help retailers sell books, and more importantly, they help readers find books. So in many cases, a new code tells us that something interesting is going on in that subject, and that deserves our attention, and we look forward to exploring some of those with you today.
Okay, sorry about that. All right, now on to the data, starting with some not-so-spectacular news. Looking at a group of comparable stores over the last three years, we see that book sales have been declining, though sales in 2025 are only down by less than 1% from 2024. Nevertheless, this was still kind of disappointing because we had high hopes for 2025. The year started off strong with sales in the first half of the year exceeding those of the first half of 2024. Q1 and Q2 of 2025 saw sales up just over 4% and 3%, respectively, thanks to some major new releases in the first half of the year. Sales of the latest “Dog Man” and “The Let Them Theory”, both released at the end of December, remained strong well into 2025, along with January’s “Onyx Storm”, “Sunrise on the Reaping” in March, and April’s “Every Salad Ever”. And while 2025 might have been down in unit sales, sales were actually up a bit in terms of value sold, with the total value of sales increasing by just over 1%. Again, it was the first half of 2025 that saw higher value sold compared to 2024, thanks to the higher price point of some of the titles we just looked at, a hefty $43.99 for the special edition of “Onyx Storm”, and $44 for the Canadian Greta Podleski’s cookbook.
Last year also saw the rise of the Buy Canadian movement, which kicked off in March of last year in response to Trump’s talk of tariffs. To measure the impact of this movement on the book world, we tracked the sales of books by Canadian contributors, so that’s any book with at least one author, illustrator, translator, or editor, identified as Canadian in the book’s publisher-supplied metadata. So in this graph, the purple line shows the monthly unit sales of books by Canadian contributors, which we’re just going to refer to as Canadian books going forward, and we can see that sales do indeed start increasing as of March 2025. Overall, sales of Canadian titles were up 6% over 2024 and made up 13% of total sales for the year.
Here’s a look at the top 10 selling titles with a Canadian contributor in 2025. As you can see, many of these are front-list titles, such as the aforementioned “Every Salad Ever” cookbook, a newly revised edition of “The Wealthy Barber”, Louise Penny’s “The Black Wolf”, as well as a couple of back-list titles like Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and the perennial bestseller “Love You Forever”.
In addition to looking at top-selling titles, we’ll also look at the most borrowed titles in this presentation, so titles with the highest library loans as captured by our LibraryData service, which collects circulation data from over 80 public libraries across the country. Here you can see Canadian titles with the highest loan count in 2025, which is definitely higher on the fiction side, and includes two back-list titles by Nita Prose and both front-list and back-list titles by Carley Fortune.
Looking at some non-fiction subjects, we see that Margaret Atwood’s “Book of Lives” was just one out of three Canadian titles that dominated the top five in the biography category, along with Alan Doyle’s “The Smiling Land” and Omar El Akkad’s “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This”. Three out of the top five best-selling books in 2025 were Canadian, with Greta Podleski at number one, followed by “The Essential Cottage Cookbook” and “Mrs. Brown’s Kitchen”. In the health and fitness category, three of the top five selling titles are Canadian, with Gabor Maté’s “When the Body Says No”, “Outlive,” and “Meals that Heal Inflammation.” And four of the top five selling history titles feature Canadian Adam Shoalts, with both “Vanished Beyond the Map” and “A History of Canada in Ten Maps”, Stephen Bown’s “The Company”, and Peter Kuitenbrouwer’s “Maple Syrup”, a short history of Canada’s sweetest obsession.
So that was just a quick snapshot of how books by Canadian contributors kind of dominated sales in a variety of categories in 2025. And now I’ll pass it over to Lily to show you how things are going so far this year.
Lily Dwyer: Thanks, Kalpna. In regards to how sales for titles with Canadian contributors have been performing so far in 2026, we’ve actually found that Canadian contributor unit sales in the first 11 weeks of this year have actually increased by 12% when compared with the same weeks in 2025. And you may not be surprised at all to find that much of this growth is largely driven by Rachel Reid’s book “Heated Rivalry”.
So for a little background in case you’re unfamiliar, the book “Heated Rivalry” was originally published in 2019 and a TV adaptation was made as well, which premiered this past fall on Crave on November 28th. And this series has really become a wildly successful pop culture moment as we’ve seen.
So if you look at the top-selling titles with Canadian contributors for 2026 so far, 6 out of the first 10 titles on the list are all of the 6 books in Rachel Reid’s Game Changer series, which is a book series which “Heated Rivalry” exists in. And likely due to the name of the TV show, the second book in the series, “Heated Rivalry”, is the title that’s taking the number one spot.
Now the graph on your screen here shows how sales for that title started growing at the end of November as the TV show premiered and then really took off in 2026 with sales peaking in early February. And that peak week of sales for “Heated Rivalry” in turn corresponds with the spike in Canadian contributor sales that we saw in that earlier slide.
We’re also seeing this popularity mirrored in library circulation. So, this graph here shows the number of loans, holds, and copies on order data for print copies of “Heated Rivalry” from all libraries across Canada that are currently reporting into LibraryData. And in this case, the number of holds started to increase after the premiere of the TV show and also peaked in February with some steady performance through March as well. And this graph here is really great because you can see how that on order data grew alongside holds in order for libraries to keep up with the growing demand from patrons. And as on orders started to drop, so that is as orders were fulfilled, then the loan count was able to increase. And holds is a really great indicator of the popularity of a book as it doesn’t have to be bound by the realities of the number of copies that are owned by the library. And besides the circulation data, we know that libraries have really embraced this title as well. At Toronto Public Library, for instance, we know that the library has made the audiobook version of “Heated Rivalry” available to patrons without any wait list, so they just need a library card and the Libby app in order to access it immediately. And all that is to say that it’s very exciting to see the popularity of this book in both bookstores and libraries, and we’re very intrigued to see if this series continues to drive Canadian book sales throughout the rest of 2026.
So that’s “Heated Rivalry”, but what about romance in general? Well, in this graph here, the purple line shows that unit sales of romance titles in 2025 peaked in Q1 of that year, declined in Q2 and Q3, and then increased again at Q4. And for 2026 so far, romance sales seem to be on the decline again. However, that grey dotted line shows the share of romance sales as a percentage of the total market. And while that percentage decreased throughout 2025, it has increased for Q1 of 2026 so far. So basically what we’re seeing for this quarter is that while romance sales are down in general, the quarterly share of romance sales as a percentage is up, making up about 9% of total sales.
Now we’re going to dig a bit more into the subcategories of romance. In last year’s presentation, we noted that the romance BISAC code with the most significant growth was sports. This year, we can see that growth continuing with sales up by 102%. And what’s of note for this is that sales for this subcategory don’t even include the books in the Game Changer series, as those books use a different BISAC code. So instead, we’re seeing that the top sports romance in both bookstores and libraries was “Deep End” by Ali Hazelwood. And while “Heated Rivalry” is not included here, this subcategory is still dominated heavily by hockey romance, as four out of the five top titles that we see here revolve around hockey players. And it’s also nice to see that Canadian authors are making up a large part of the subcategory as well.
Now the BISAC code that is assigned to those Game Changers books is gay within the LGBTQ+ subheading of romance. So here you can see that sales for titles with this BISAC code did increase by 14%. And in bookstores, the top titles for this BISAC code include “The Song of Achilles” by Madeline Miller. So that’s remaining popular since its publication in 2012. And then it’s no surprise to see the Game Changers books as well. And it’s particularly of note to see these titles taking two of the top three spots, since as we’ve seen, those sales really didn’t start to take off until the end of 2025.
Another romance subcategory with continued growth is holiday romance, which increased by 81%. So in bookstores and libraries, “The Christmas Tree Farm” by Laurie Gilmore took the number one spot for both units sold and loan count. And as we can see from the covers displayed here, the top-selling holiday romance lists in both of these spaces are quite heavily dominated by Christmas-themed romance stories. But that being said, we did notice in 2025 that there were a number of newly published books that centred around another most wonderful time of year, or autumn, as there are many paperbacks that seem to celebrate sweater weather. So, with the exception of “The Pumpkin Spice Café” and other titles from Laurie Gilmore’s 2023 Dream Harbor series, this slide shows just a sampling of books that were published within the latter half of 2025. So these cosy autumnal covers imply that readers are interested in holiday-themed books that are suitable for seasons other than Christmas time and summer beach vacations.
And with that in mind, rest assured that the BISAC committee has added four new BISAC codes to help categorise these books. So those codes are “autumn”, “spring”, “summer”, and “winter”, all within the romance seasonal subcategory. And here at BookNet, we are very interested in keeping an eye on how books with those BISAC codes will perform in 2026 and beyond. And if you’re a SalesData subscriber, you can also track this trend yourself by finding the newly added codes in the BISAC subject tree of the report criteria pages as shown here.
Okay, so we’ve looked at continuing trends in romance. But what about new trends? So one trend we can’t ignore this year is dark romance, which is one of the latest trends to take BookTok by storm. According to ELLE Canada, there are 4.7 million videos on TikTok that have been tagged with the hashtag “dark romance”. And if you’re not sure what that is, author Brynne Weaver describes these books as including tropes like villains who love to the point of obsession, characters who bear the bloody wounds of their trauma, and lovers who will kill to protect what’s theirs.
But what about the data? Remarkably, books categorised with the dark romance BISAC code grew by over 100,000% in 2025, which is quite dramatic. And part of that growth is due to the fact that dark romance is a newer subject, as it was only added to the BISAC code list in 2024. That being said, it does seem like a variety of publishers are using this code to categorise these books. So when we pulled a list of the top-selling dark romance titles in 2025, the first 15 of all those titles were published in 2025. And the top three performing titles with these BISAC codes were the same in both libraries and bookstores, with “Bonds of Hercules” by Jasmine Mas being the top-selling title, and “Enigma” by RuNyx being the top borrowed title. So this is definitely something that we’ll want to keep an eye on for 2026. Will dark romance be the category that will finally overtake romantasy? We can’t wait to find out.
And on another darker note, another romance category with significant growth was mafia romance, which grew by over 1,000%. So the top-performing title with this BISAC code was “Ruthless Creatures” by J.T. Geissinger in both bookstores and libraries. So it seems the interest in obsessive villains is extending into mafia romance this year.
And finally, the last romance BISAC that we’re going to look at is romance science fiction. It seems that the genre is making room for science fiction as well, as sales for these titles are up by 236%. So this popularity is significantly driven by “Silver Elite”, which is by Canadian author Dani Francis. And that’s in both libraries and bookstores as well. So again, it will be really interesting to see if a wider variety of titles will contribute to this growth in 2026.
Kalpna: Even without a side of romance, sales of science fiction titles in general have been steadily increasing over the last three years, and we’re up 14% over 2024 with science fiction net making up 3% of total fiction sales for the year. And while that might not sound so impressive, we’ve seen two subgenres in particular do very well last year. Sales in the action and adventure category increased 111% thanks to “Project Hail Mary”, “Red Rising”, and the “Dungeon Crawler Carl” series, which were just as popular with library patrons. In fact, “Project Hail Mary” took the number one spot on the fiction bestseller list last week, coinciding with the premiere of the film. And it’s one of the rare instances that we see a backlist title like that take the top spot.
We noticed “Dungeon Crawler Carl” sales really begin to take off last fall, and with the series optioned for a TV adaptation by NBC, as well as a new line of collectible action figures launched at Comic-Con last summer, we think the craze is here to stay for another couple years. Sales in the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic subgenre also went up last year, increasing 42% over 2024. It’s interesting to note here that the best-selling and top borrowed titles in this category do skew a little in the direction of literary fiction. Shoppers browsing for these titles are more likely to find them in the fiction section rather than the sci-fi section of the bookstore, but this classification and the subsequent placement in stores may also turn more readers of literary fiction to science fiction if they are interested in similar subject matter.
Young adult sci-fi also saw an increase last year with sales up 17% thanks to the Canadian series “Iron Widow”. With sci-fi on the rise for both adults and teens, it’s interesting to consider the crossover potential. Would some of those sci-fi titles work in the young adult section? Both audiences seem to gravitate towards sprawling epics, and we’re curious to see if sales of YA sci-fi continues to grow as steadily as adult science fiction.
Lily: So fiction fantasy is another group of BISACs that we’ve been keeping an eye on. This is a genre that we’ve seen gaining in popularity over the last few years, and 2025 was no different. As you can see here, in 2025 alone, books with fiction fantasy BISAC codes accounted for about 13% of all fiction sales, and in terms of growth, sales for these books increased by 8%. And of course, a lot of those sales can be attributed to romantasy books like the “Fourth Wing” series by Rebecca Yarros, as well as the different series in the Sarah J. Maas universe.
But is there anything else that’s driving those sales for 2025? Well, one thing that caught our eye was dark romance in the romance BISAC heading, dark fantasy within fantasy saw significant growth, increasing by 94%. And this is interesting because romance and fantasy are two areas that have a lot of crossover in readership, as we’ve seen with romantasy. And dark fantasy is similar to dark romance in that it blends traditional fantasy elements like magic and imaginary worlds with darker themes like horror, and can create sort of an unsettling, bleak, or macabre tone for the reader. And these books can often be rooted in gothic fiction, so think Dracula.
The top-selling title for dark fantasy was “Alchemised” by SenLinYu, which was wildly popular in the retail space, and in libraries Rachel Gillig’s “One Dark Window” had the most amount of loans. And as you can see from the covers on this slide, the books that were popular in this category have a sort of misty, gothic, and historical feel to them.
And speaking of historical, historical fantasy has also seen increases this year, with 66% growth in 2025. We saw that there was a lot of crossover between bookstores and libraries for this one, with the most popular books being “Katabasis” and “Babel”, both by R.F. Kuang, and also “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue” by V. E. Schwab. And these covers also seem to have sort of a darker feel to them, particularly from the academia themes of the R.F. Kuang books.
And there are also fantasy readers who maybe wanted a break from the gothic doom and gloom this year, and wanted the magic in their books to come with some lower stakes. So we’ve seen some steady growth in cosy fantasy books the past few years, and in 2025 that continued with 37% growth. The top-selling title in cosy fantasy last year was “A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping” by Sangu Mandanna, and in libraries the top title was “The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches,” also by Sangu Mandanna.
Okay, so now we’re going to shift to a different subject altogether, and that’s comics and graphic novels. So this is a subject that we usually take a look at every year, and we’ve noticed in recent years that books with these BISAC codes have been trending downwards. This year was a little different, however, as 2025 is the first year since 2022 that sales for these titles increased, which did so slightly by 5%. And this is a category that is heavily dominated by manga titles, but we can see that the top-selling title in comics and graphic novels in the retail space this year was “Always Remember” by Charlie Mackesy, which uses the literary comics and graphic novels BISAC code. And the top borrowed titles in libraries included the books in the “Demon Slayer” manga series.
Now we first noticed that this subject was increasing for the first time in years when we were putting the data together for our recent fall presentation, Pre-fall sales trends and data-driven insights back in September. And at that point, we were seeing an increase of 2% year over year growth, and we were interested in seeing how that growth will look at at the end of the year once those sales from the holiday season came through and the data. Would they increase? Would they remain the same? And as you can see in this graph, those Q4 holiday sales were significant, increasing by 36% between Q3 and Q4. So, here, you can really see how that final quarter gave those sales a really nice boost to reach that 5% year over year growth that we saw in the previous slide.
And as I mentioned previously, adult comics and graphic novels is heavily dominated by manga, but the top-selling book in this category this year had the comics and graphic novels literary code. And the pie graph here helps to provide the context for that. So you can see that literary comics and graphic novel book sales only made up 3% of all those sales. Manga BISAC codes, on the other hand, made up about 67%. And after manga, books with the superheroes BISAC code made up 36% of all sales.
Now digging into literary titles a bit more, here you can see that sales for books with this BISAC code did increase significantly in 2025 by 88%. And in libraries, “Ducks” by Canadian author Kate Beaton continues to be the favourite among library patrons for this category. And besides manga and literary comics and graphic novels, it seems that the classic superhero genre still seems to be contributing to those sales, as sales for these books increased by 35%. So the top-selling title here was “Absolute Batman” by Scott Snyder. And in libraries, the top borrowed titles were “The Amazing Spider-Man” series by Zeb Wells.
Now let’s take a look at cookbooks for 2025. In last year’s presentation, we noticed a lot of growth in cookbooks with more cosy-sounding BISAC codes like pasta and comfort food. In 2025, however, things look quite a bit different. Sales for pasta cookbooks actually decreased by 14%, while those for comfort food decreased by 32%. And the areas in which we saw a lot of growth this year actually lay in more dietary-focused cookbooks. So sales for cookbooks with health and healing cooking BISAC codes, for example, increased by 58%. And sales for cookbooks with the low carbohydrate BISAC, which is a subheading of health and healing, increased by 434%. So carbs seem to be unfortunately out for cookbook buyers this year.
Also in cookbooks, I don’t know about you, but all I can hear in terms of food these days is how much protein I should be eating on a daily basis. And it seems I’m not the only one, as cookbooks with the high protein BISAC code were up quite a bit in 2025 with 323% growth. And alongside that, barbecue and grilling is also up by 41%. So take that in conjunction with the performance of vegetarian and vegan cookbooks this year, with vegetarian cookbooks down by 34% and vegan cookbooks down by 66%. So you’ve heard it here, vegetables are out and meat is in for 2025. So maybe we’re all trying to find more ways of getting protein and iron into our meals these days.
Kalpna: In other notable non-fiction news, books about baseball really took off last year, with sales increasing 232%. In fact, all baseball subcategories also increased: essays and writings by 6%, baseball history by 14%, and baseball statistics by 9%. With the Jays celebrating their 50th anniversary this year, we think it’s fair to say that commemorative titles about the team and baseball books in general will continue to sell well into this year.
And we can’t really talk about sports without mentioning the four-letter F-word that will be heard around the country this summer. According to the FIFA World Cup information page on the Government of Canada website, soccer is the largest participatory sport in Canada and is considered the fastest growing sport in the country, connecting people of all ages and backgrounds from local fields to the world stage. And if my 20 years of bookselling experience have taught me anything, it’s that soccer mania is not confined to sports bars or celebratory street parties. Every couple of years, whether it was FIFA or Euro Cup or any other major soccer match, the bookstore would be full of families every weekend looking for a soccer book fix. Books of essays and socio-political histories of the game for parents and anything soccer themed for the kids. For years, my go-tos as a soccer and basically sports-illiterate bookseller were “Soccernomics” and “How Soccer Explains the World”. If I was still a bookseller, I’d be relieved to see that both books have been expanded and revised for 2026 so that I could continue handselling them.
Pictured here in this slide are just some of the new adult soccer titles hitting the shelves this year, and you can bet we’ll be running the sports soccer BISAC through SalesData once the season’s over to see how that subject made out. They may only be popular for a few months, but we think the potential for easy sales here is huge.
And thinking about current-event-related books with a short but lucrative selling window got us thinking about seasonal books. We know that spring is officially here when “Little Blue Truck Springtime” takes a top spot in our weekly juvenile bestseller reports every March. Just take a look at that spring solstice spike in this chart if you don’t believe me. And seeing this board book from 2018 still flying off shelves inspired us to look at the sales activity for other categories of kids’ seasonal and holiday books. The juvenile holidays and celebrations BISAC code includes many subheadings such as Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween.
But in order to increase the discoverability of books about non-Western religious holidays and culturally specific celebrations, the BISG introduced a few new codes that went into effect in 2024. Now there are juvenile fiction and non-fiction subheadings for Day of the Dead, Diwali, Juneteenth, Lunar New Year, and Ramadan under the holidays and celebrations heading. And while these codes are quite new, we’re already seeing some promising sales activity. In particular, we’ve seen big increases in sales of Diwali, Lunar New Year, and Ramadan books for young readers. And while the total unit sales for each of these categories is still quite low, the desire for more diverse kids’ books paired with the easier discoverability due to these new codes suggests that we’ll continue to see growth in these subjects.
Last year, sales of Diwali books increased by 180%, Lunar New Year-themed titles increased by 121%, and Ramadan books increased by 84%. And since we’ve already observed, celebrated, and possibly shopped for both the Lunar New Year and Ramadan in 2026, we can dive even deeper into the sales activity for these subjects by going beyond 2025 and looking at year-to-date sales.
So far this year, sales in the Lunar New Year category have already surpassed the total sales in 2025 by 104%. Running the BISAC code through SalesData, we found 43 unique ISBNs currently being sold or stocked by bookstores in Canada. So for a subject with growing demand and not too many titles, there’s definitely an opportunity here for children’s book publishers to introduce similar works into the market. Pictured here are some of the top-selling and top borrowed titles from January to March 15th of this year, and though it may not be evident in the cover images, it’s interesting to note that half of these titles are in the board book format. In fact, looking at the overall distribution of formats across sales of Lunar New Year books, we found that 53% of total units sold were board books, 30% were hardcovers, and 17% were paperbacks. So not only is there space in the market for more Lunar New Year books, we can also say that Lunar New Year board books in particular are the way to go.
Year-to-date sales of Ramadan books for children also continued to increase this year, with sales 57% higher than they were this time last year. Running this BISAC code through SalesData, we found only 22 unique ISBNs with current sales or inventory data, once again suggesting that there’s opportunity here for children’s book publishers. And out of curiosity, we looked at formats for these titles as well.
Similar to Lunar New Year books, we’re seeing sales of board books far exceeding that of hardcovers and paperbacks. Board books here made up 65% of sales, hardcovers made up 33%, and paperbacks only 3%. So for now there appears to be a demand for culturally specific holiday books geared toward toddlers and preschoolers, which luckily is a market that’s always growing.
And now of course we can’t talk formats without mentioning all of the recent lamentations over the so-called demise of the mass market paperback. Earlier this year, American papers and online news sources claimed to hear the death rattle of the pocket paperback, explaining that one of the largest distributors in the U.S. had decided to stop carrying the format and no longer supplying retailers like airport bookstores, pharmacies, or big box stores with them.
In a New York Times article from last month, Elizabeth Harris says that after almost a century in wide circulation, the mass market paperback is shuffling toward extinction. Sales have dropped for years, peeled away by ebooks, digital audiobooks, and even more expensive formats like hardcovers and trade paperbacks. While this may just seem like a distribution issue in the States, obviously we here in the north will feel that ripple effect, and you’ve likely noticed the steady decline and disappearance of mass markets here as well.
And just in case you haven’t, here it is. This graph shows the total unit sales of mass market and tall rack paperbacks year over year for the past 10 years. Sales today are less than half of what they used to be in 2016, and since this format has traditionally seen success with genre fiction, it’s also worth taking a look at mass market sales in the romance and fantasy categories.
This graph shows the yearly total unit sales of mass market romances over the last five years. In 2020, mass markets made up 66% of romance sales, which saw a steep decline in 2022 and finally dwindled down to just 11% last year. You might be wondering what happened there in 2023 when sales started to pick up. To find out, we ran a bestseller report filtered by subject for romance and by format for mass market to find out which books were selling that year. And it turns out that it’s a mass market edition of Carley Fortune’s “Every Summer After” that made up a lot of those sales. It retailed for $12.99 compared to the $24.95 trade edition. Similarly in 2024, the mass market edition of Fortune’s “Meet Me at the Lake” accounted for a significant chunk of sales and shared that same $12.99 price point.
Sadly in 2025, the mass market edition of “This Summer Will Be Different”, also by Carley Fortune, which sold for $13.50, didn’t sell as well. Maybe it’s that 51-cent price increase that’s to blame, with a $12.99 edition that basically feels like half price, and that $13 suddenly gives you a bit of sticker shock.
Mass market fantasy sales took a big dip in 2023 and have been declining ever since. In 2020, mass markets made up 25% of total fantasy sales and last year they made up only 5%. If mass market sales are declining so steeply and steadily for these genres, surely other formats are taking their place, as we’ve just seen that sales in both categories continue to go up year after year. Looking at fantasy sales again, we mapped hardcover sales over mass markets and saw almost a complete mirror image. As mass market sales slowed down in 2023, this graph shows that hardcover sales shot up at the same time and continued to rise, making up 36% of total fantasy sales last year. We saw a similar situation for romances where hardcover sales really started to climb in 2023 and shot right up last year. As Elizabeth Harris explained in that New York Times article, mass market sales really are being crushed by more expensive hardcovers, especially in genres like fantasy and romance where, of course, deluxe editions have begun taking up major shelf space.
After pulling the data for romance hardcover sales in 2025, we ran a bestseller report to find out where those sales were coming from. In this slide we see the top 10 best-selling romance hardcovers from last year. Half of the titles shown here are deluxe editions, indicated with a gold star, with the top seller being the deluxe edition of “Onyx Storm”, which costs $4 more than the original, with the unsprayed edges. And while we can’t filter for deluxe editions in SalesData, looking at hardcover sales is one way to capture the sales activity for these editions, and it’s clear that the spike in hardcover sales over the last two years consists largely of them.
The deluxe, special, sprayed-edge, exclusive, slipcased, collector’s, be-ribboned edition is by far the biggest book trend since the emergence of French-flap trade paperbacks in the ’90s. Heavily driven by social media where readers can post pictures of their collections—spines turned inwards, obviously—these editions are more about display and Instagrammability, as well as showcasing one’s enthusiasm and devotion to an author or series by “triple dipping”, that’s purchasing, and of course posting paperback, hardcover, and deluxe editions of the same title.
It’s certainly a bit ironic that in this age of digital media, physical books, pretty ones in particular, are being reimagined as valuable keepsakes to be treasured but also shown off on those same digital social media platforms. And while costs may be prohibitive for some, there are still others who consider ownership of these editions an investment, the higher quality and aesthetic features justifying the extra dollars.
In a recent article in The Globe and Mail, manager of King’s Co-op Bookstore in Halifax, Paul MacKay, explains that even in cases where the store has cheaper editions of the same title, he finds customers gravitate to the more expensive ones. “Smaller books aren’t what customers are looking for these days,” he says. That article, published just a couple of weeks ago, provides a fresh perspective on the mass market problem in Canada by looking at Indigo’s latest programme to reintroduce cheaper formats of Canadian non-fiction titles in the market. Since last year, Indigo has partnered with a handful of Canadian publishers to put out non-fiction paperbacks in a smaller edition at less than $20 a copy. Full disclosure, we did provide The Globe and Mail with mass market sales data for this article, data that I just shared with you in a previous slide.
And though it’s unlikely that mass markets will see a major resurgence, the article goes on to explain that Indigo’s programme is an opportunity to put non-fiction, particularly by Canadian authors, in front of new readers, especially as larger, splashier trade paperbacks tend to retail in the $25 range. Many readers already longingly recall that as the price point for hardcovers, while hardcover editions can now surge past $40.
And here is where I think we can get optimistic about mass markets. While we know that price poses no problem for some book buyers, the rest of us remember the good old days where paying $25 or more for a paperback in this economy is starting to hurt. I recently shelled out $28 and even $30 for two paperbacks at my local indie this month, which certainly had me feeling nostalgic for prices from the 2010s. Much like the 2016 hashtag recently trending on social media, where people post images of themselves from 10 years ago or express a desire to revive the unserious internet culture of 2016, I too want to #BringBack2016 when the trade paperback fiction title cost only $18.99.
Combing through past publications of “The Canadian Book Market”, our annual comprehensive guide to the Canadian market, we were able to pull the median list price for trade paperback fiction books going back to 2010. With book prices just over 20% higher than they were 10 years ago, I think Indigo might be onto something by providing a more affordable alternative for book buyers trying to reconcile the higher cost of living with their love of books. Now more than ever, affordability and accessibility should be top of mind for Canadian publishers who want to get their books into the hands of readers or revive their backlist.
Lower price points aside, I believe there’s an even greater reason to think mass markets might make a comeback, and that’s because suddenly the ’90s are cool. The ’80s are also cool but not as cool as the ’90s. And maybe neither of them are cool, but certainly aspirational for both Millennial parents and their Gen Z children. In an article in The Guardian from last summer, columnist Rhiannon Cosslett writes about the recent phenomenon of nostalgic Millennial parents becoming increasingly keen to replicate their own childhoods. “I’ve noticed a huge upswing of interest in ’90s parenting,” she says, “and this year the trend seems to have exploded. Former ’90s kids are in the thick of it trying to work out how to parent our own children.” Cosslett speaks to a woman who was an actual parent in the ’90s who recalls when shops used to be closed on Sundays and the simple joy of that being a day for family. “Today’s parents are craving that simplicity in family time,” she says.
This nostalgia, compared with current Gen Z curiosity, has led to another social media trend making the rounds that asks, “Mum or dad, what were you like in the ’90s?” prompting Gen Xers to post photo montages of a time when they were cool and free, unworried and unconnected. It’s no wonder that such lighthearted posts have Gen Z feeling they’ve missed out on a golden age of analogue freedom.
In yet another Guardian article, Emma Beddington shares that in 2023 a survey found 60% of American Gen Z adults wish they could return to a time before everyone was plugged in. She goes on to cite social psychologist Dr Clay Routledge, who suggests that Gen Z are productively focusing their nostalgia on a technological era before they were alive, citing research that indicated they were mining the past to enrich their present lives, especially by fostering a greater appreciation for offline living.
And could there be any more iconic relics of that technological era than cassettes, CDs, or VHS tapes, and perhaps mass market paperbacks? Cassette tapes, which were the most popular way to listen to music in the ’80s, are now making a revival, as are CDs. And it makes sense that Gen Z would be amused and intrigued by these tangible media objects, especially since they never experienced the pain of having to extract a jammed cassette from the tape deck and painstakingly winding that tape back in with the nub of a pencil, or how your Discman skipped every three seconds while riding a bumpy city bus or while on your morning run.
This current fascination with old-school formats does make me wonder, though, what’s next? While it’s unlikely that floppy disks or pagers will ever be useful again, it does seem possible that mass markets, perhaps with clever throwback design elements, might be next in line for a retro revival. Maybe the industry would benefit by reimagining the mass market paperback as an object of endearment, curiosity, or collectible to take advantage of this time of intense nostalgia and the desire for physical manifestations of music, art, and ideas. With an affordable price point attractive to the 30-plus crowd, an appealing collectability factor for all the fans, and the novelty of old formats for these new Gen Z book buyers, we think there’s hope and opportunity for the humble mass market. Either way, the data will keep us informed, and maybe for Trendspotting 2020 we’ll have a new story to tell. Or, sorry, I guess I mean 2030, because this is already 2024. Yes, Trendspotting 2030.
That wraps up our presentation for today. Before we take your questions, we’d just like to take a minute to share some upcoming research and resources that will be soon available for you. At BookNet, our goal is to help you understand the market, make informed business decisions, and identify trends and growth opportunities, and what better resource for insightful data than our annual report, “The Canadian Book Market”. The latest edition will be released within the next few days and it includes top-level consumer data from BookNet’s Canadian Book Consumer Survey panel, including insights about book buying, discoverability, and purchasing behaviour, insights into the sales of books by Canadian contributors and Canadian-owned publishing houses, English Canadian trade book market sales data, and the most circulated titles in Canadian libraries as reported on LibraryData.
In addition to “The Canadian Book Market”, we’ll soon be releasing two additional reports on consumer data: the “Canadian Leisure and Reading Study 2025” and the “Canadian Book Consumer Study 2025”. If you want to be among the first to get notified about these releases, sign up for our weekly newsletter, and we’ll drop the link in the chat for that right now.
And with that I guess we’re ready to take some questions that have come in from attendees. If you haven’t already, please feel free to put your question in the Q&A panel. If you’ll give us a second, we will just queue up those questions and Lily’s back with me to help answer some of these. All right, okay, some of these questions have already been answered in the chat so I’m just going to quickly go through and see. Okay, so here’s a good question. Lily, maybe you can take this one. Can these changes be attributed to several titles or many titles?
Lily: Sure, so that’s a great question, and that’s something that we take into consideration when we pull this data. So we always see what subjects had a lot of growth and then we’ll pull a bestseller report with that subject for the year to see what the top titles were. And you can always see if there was one or two bestsellers that contributed to that growth, which usually there are one or two. But then you can see if there are more than those two titles to contribute to that growth, and it’s sort of a mixed bag of results, I would say.
So for instance, we talked about dark romance and we saw that there were a lot of titles that were contributing to that growth for 2025. And then for romance science fiction, it was really that one title, “Silver Elite”, that really contributed to that. So for things like that, we’re really interested to see if in 2026 there are more titles that will contribute to that growth.
Kalpna: Good stuff. Another question, and I actually remember this question coming up last year, so we’re going to definitely answer it now. Anything of note going on with thrillers this year? I have to admit thrillers is a subject that we tend to kind of skip over for this presentation, and that’s because sales are always great. Thrillers are always selling. It’s always one of the biggest fiction categories. We did take a look at the data. Unfortunately for time constraints we didn’t dive into it this year. But having reviewed the data, I can see that thrillers make up probably about 18% of total fiction sales in a year. And even though it is one of the highest-selling categories, we did notice that sales dipped a tiny bit in 2025 over 2024. And interestingly, all of the subcategory thrillers, so things like domestic thrillers, political thrillers, all of those subcategories declined with the exception of just two. Medical and psychological thrillers are the only thriller subcategories that increased over the last year. And when we looked at the titles for those, it was almost entirely Freida McFadden. So Freida McFadden is the thriller writer of the moment. But again because it’s such a strongly performing category, it’s not one that we spend a ton of time on, but I’m glad that somebody asked again.
I think we still have time for one or two questions. Okay, how can non-BookNet users get access to all this information? Is this type of data available to publishers and booksellers?
Lily: I can take that.
Kalpna: You want to take that?
Lily: Yeah, sure. Let me know if I’m missing anything, but yes, there’s lots of different ways non-SalesData subscribers can access this. There’s always our blog, so the BookNet Canada blog. Our research and our marketing team, they do a quarterly subject spotlight review. So, they will take a particular BISAC subject and see how it’s performing for the most recent quarter, and you can access that on booknetcanada.ca. Other things you can access. So, there’s our “Canadian Book Market Report”, or CBM, and that is available for purchase. That is put together by our research team and takes sort of a more in-depth look at category data. It looks at over 50 subject categories, I believe. And the 2025 edition will be available, I believe, at the end of March this year. And then also, if you are a publisher or library retailer who is participating in SalesData, you also get access to LibraryData. So, as a publisher or retailer, you can always pull LibraryData reports to see what’s doing well in libraries. But then also, vice versa, if you’re a library that’s participating in LibraryData, then you can also have access to any of the SalesData reports that we have in SalesData.
Kalpna: Thank you. And we are just at 3 p.m., but we’re going to try and squeeze in one last question. What happens if a book has more than one BISAC code? How do you decide which one to refer to for this kind of analysis?
Lily: So, in SalesData, we only display one BISAC code. So, when we’re pulling these reports, it’s taking only one BISAC code into consideration, which is important to know. If you have a book that has multiple BISAC codes, you’re going to want to make sure that you’re using the primary BISAC code in your metadata so that that growth is being tracked properly in the reports.
Kalpna: Great. I think that about wraps things up. Thank you all for joining. To be kept in the loop for upcoming research and presentations, do sign up for our newsletter. The link is in the chat. Thanks again. Have a great day.