Top of the (Publishing) Pops
Wonderbly’s unique, customer centred publishing model has made us the 8th largest publisher of children’s picture books in the UK in 2017 — and the number one publisher of debut talent.
In 2017 we completed our transition from a company associated with a single product, Lost My Name, to become Wonderbly, a direct to consumer, independent publishing brand.
Central to this was our ambitious publishing plan — in 2017 we published five new personalised picture books, nearly tripling our range and taking us to seven products in total. There’s a picture of them below.
Our books don’t appear in the ‘charts’ of normal books because they don’t pass through the retail network and don’t have ISBN numbers, so it’s difficult to assess how well they do compared to their peers in traditional children’s publishing.
This year we thought we’d have a look at where we’d sit if we did report our sales via Nielson bookscan into category Y1.3 ‘children’s picture books’.
Before we get started, this data only reflects UK sales of our books, which is around 15% of our total. We sold over £23million worth of books world wide in 2017, of which the UK was around £3.5million. Unfortunately global sales data is much harder to find and compare.
So taking a look at individual title sales, how did we do in the UK? Here’s the top ten children’s picture books sold in the UK in 2017, by value.
As you can see, we took the number one and the number three slot by value — and Lost My Name is the leader by a big margin at nearly three times the value of the number two book.
The rest of our list also charts well in the UK with every title in the top 100 by value — 39th (The Journey Home), 49th (The Christmas Snowflake), 51st (Kingdom of You), 62nd (A Letter for the Littlest Bear) and 71st (The Birthday Thief).
What this means in aggregate is that in 2017 Wonderbly was the 8th largest publisher of children’s picture books, by value, in the UK.
What’s particularly striking about this is that it shows very clearly that our editorial and distribution model is better at creating successful products than traditional publishing methods.
- Our list is five times younger than the average of our peers — 3 years old vs an average of 14
- Our list is three times smaller than the average of our peers — 7 books vs an average of 24
- Our company is much, much younger than our competitors — only really four years old
This high hit rate is, we believe, the result of our radically different approach to publishing that is focused around building close relationships with customers.
Here’s some of the key differences between us and the majority of our competitors.
- Instead of commissioning solo creators we work as a single, multi-disciplinary team.
- Instead of relying solely on professional opinions we use structured customer feedback during the design stage.
- Instead of making passive products we actively involve customers and children in all kinds of novel ways in story creation and the reading experience.
- Instead of relying on others to explain and sell our books we communicate directly with customers and ship to their front door.
One final piece of analysis — it turns out that our collaborative, multi-disciplinary model is also really great for new creative talent.
As part of our analysis we asked Nielson Book Research to filter the 2017 list down to ‘debut talent’ — we defined this as ‘authors who have not previously sold more than 250 books in the children’s picture book category between 2006–2016.’
Using this definition, all of our titles we published in 2017 are ‘debuts’ — although we concede that the definition of the ‘author’ is a little tricky for our products.
What we can clearly say is that although all these books had close involvement and support from our creative directors David and Pedro (who themselves have never appeared in the book scan lists but did create Lost My Name in 2013 and The Journey Home in 2015), they also all had very strong, central contributions from authors, illustrators, designers and producers that have never previously published a picture book.
Here’s the top ten picture books, by value, of debut talent in the UK in 2017
And here’s the top ten publishers of debut picture book talent in the UK in 2017 — Wonderbly is number 1! By our analysis, our debut picture books made up a third of the value of all the debut picture books published in the UK in 2017.
So that’s how we did in 2017 in the UK. We’re super pleased with these early results and we can’t wait to see what our model delivers in 2018 — we’ve got our best ever slate of new picture books, with several exciting ‘firsts’, and we’re hoping to double the number of titles we ship in the year … and if this way of going about publishing excited you, please have a look at our open roles. Thanks for reading!
