It’s that time of year again, Happy Independent Bookshop Week! We love an opportunity to celebrate bookshops (and of course an excuse to buy more books from them), and making it even better, there’s plenty of interesting data to dig into. The first thing I like to do is compare the bestsellers through indies with the overall market bestsellers, which you can see below (excluding the £1 World Book Day titles). Only two books overlap this year: overall bestseller Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins appears at sixth for indie bookshops, and The Women by Kristin Hannah makes it to tenth, compared to sixth in the total UK market. That’s actually more than this time last year, covered in this post, when only one book appeared in both top tens.
A notable difference is the absence of popular ‘romantasy’ titles in the indie chart, as well as a difference in the leading Crime, Thriller & Adventure books, with Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson at the top of the category through indies, compared to We Solve Murders by Richard Osman for the overall market. Six of the indie top ten sit in General & Literary Fiction, plus two in Historical & Mythological Fiction, while the overall top ten has no books in the former category and one in the latter. The indie bestsellers feature two prominent prize-winners, with Booker winner Orbital by Samantha Harvey at the top and Pulitzer winner (and Booker shortlisted) James by Percival Everett at third.
One thing the two top tens do have in common is the dominance of fiction, with each list comprised of nine adult fiction and one young adult book. If we expand our view to the bestsellers for each broad sector, shown below, we can see some more similarities emerge, but for the most part, the lists remain distinct. Children’s has the most crossover titles, at half of the top ten, and three of those are Dog Man books by Dav Pilkey, including newer titles as well as the start of the series which has seen a boost from the film adaptation. The indie top ten adds one more Dog Man book to the ranks with The Unleashed and features two Bunny vs Monkey books by Jamie Smart, one of which, Bunny Bonanza, appears in the overall UK top ten as well. Outside of the graphic novels, the top Children’s Fiction title for indies is Hunt for the Golden Scarab by M.G. Leonard, compared to No Brainer by Jeff Kinney in the wider market. The offerings for younger children differ as well, with Gozzle by Julia Donaldson & Sara Ogilvie the bestselling title in Picture Books for independent bookshops, while The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle leads overall.
The adult bestsellers have two similarities in each the fiction and non-fiction lists: the aforementioned The Women as well as The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey for fiction and The Salt Path by Raynor Winn and The Trading Game by Gary Stevenson in non-fiction. We’ve already covered the fiction differences, so let’s look at the non-fiction spread now. Both lists lean into different angles of self-help and reflection, as well as personal stories, but a distinction for the indie list is the presence of nature writing, as six of the top ten deal with the natural world in some capacity.
The variety in titles featured even just at the top of the indie chart, and the differences to the overall market, highlight how important bookshops are in championing books beyond the overall bestsellers. So now it’s just a question of which book to choose when you go out to support your local indie!
Data extracted from the BookScan UK Total Consumer Market (TCM) to 7 June 2025.
