“Readers continue to clamour for greater diversity of characters.”

As with most things in 2020, it’s impossible to draw any firm conclusions about patterns in children’s and YA publishing. The Bookseller reported that, as of September, only one week in 2020 had fallen behind 2019 numbers: indeed, during most of the lockdown, Children’s titles represented a third of the market, with YA getting a post-lockdown boost. Non-fiction continues to perform well, particularly wellbeing, education and activity books, which rocketed during lockdown due to home-schooling.

In YA, a small number of big bestsellers continue to be the mainstay – this year, the Hunger Games prequel and One of Us Is Lying sequel, both by US authors, who continue to dominate. More online and fewer in-store sales mean less impulse buying, giving authors with existing namerecognition an even bigger market-share.

Looking ahead to 2021, contemporary is likely to remain eclipsed by fantasy, with sci-fi/horror and verse novels still cautiously on the up. Crime-thrillers continue to punch above their weight compared with number published. Overall, acquisitions in YA are still slow, while the MG boom (particularly for fantasy series) continues to slow.

However, there is major growth, across the board, in acquisitions from authors of colour. In 2019, 19+% of authors were people of colour, representing 20+% of titles (compared with ~14% of the UK population), a big jump from 2016. Although 10+% were American authors, this is the pattern across children’s and YA: more remains to be done to promote diversity of homegrown talent. Independent publishing continues to lead the way here, but this too is shifting. The main change readers continue to clamour for – and which will hopefully be a feature of 2021 and beyond – is greater diversity of characters in stories where this diversity is incidental to the story rather than the point of it.

One big positive in 2020 is that reading for pleasure is up among kids, teens and adults – as is reading together, with most families planning to continue the habit.