Summer Shuffles Book Sales Charts

The school-holiday reading lists change lists, as tourism and social media savvy shapes sales.

Many Chinese tourists favor Lugu Lake as a summer destination, an alpine lake at 8,809 feet on the border between Yunnan Province’s Ninglang County and Sichuan Province’s Yanyuan County. Image – Getty: Yunpeng Li

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson

Another ‘Cat’ Enters the Nonfiction Charts

Lasting long past their proverbial nine lives, the influence of those “If History Were a Group of Cats” books from Fei Zhi  and Guangdong Tourism Publishing House have prowled all over the bestseller lists again, purring their cartoon-cute versions of Chinese history into almost half of the spots on the June nonfiction charts.

‘If History Were a Group of Cats: The Ming Dynasty’

The newest release in the series, The Late Ming Dynasty and the Early Qing Dynasty, became the only new title to enter last month’s nonfiction Top 30, at No. 20.

In children’s listings—where the annual school-holiday reading lists were beginning to have their usual impact in June—comics continued to sell well, including what our Beijing associates at OpenBook say are five new entries to the list focused on Murphy’s Law. One of these went all the way to the No. 2 spot on its entry into the list: Murphy’s Law: A Comic Book That Children Love to Read by Yu Liangli from Knowledge Publishing House clearly has early traction, having been released just four months earlier.

And in this first summer month’s listing, the fiction market seems to hang on clever usage of the market’s media axis of short-video channels, film, and television.

The Tale of Rose

The Tale of Rose by Yi Shu from Hunan Literature & Art Press was boosted June 16 with the opening of a new television show by that name.

And Moments We Shared by Zhang Jiajia from Hunan Literature & Art Press rose from No. 11 to No. 3 largely on the energy of a film adaptation released on June 22.

Still seeing a strong dynamic in the short-video channels of social, our associates point to the author, journalist, and magazine editor Cai Chongda, who went to his “live broadcast room”—every author, it seems, needs a live broadcast room—and mounted a production called Literature and Hometown  during which some of his work (No More Than Skins and Destiny from before and his new collection of short stories, Grassman).

This resulted in healthy sales on the e-commerce platform that’s bundled with his broadcasting.

As many in the “independent author” community will tell you, the dream for many has been the ability to self-market their work.  Month after month, we’re seeing many experiments and successes in the digitally connected Chinese readership. Some formula of online outreach is coming together for those willing to engage in their own promotion and deploy those components of distribution and exhibition they can operate, themselves.

Cai Chongda

We’re watching to see if any of Cai’s works show up in the next monthly update for July’s charts, another chance to see just how far a familiar talent can go in propelling her or his own intellectual property through China’s book market on the ether of one’s own social-media savvy.

And under the pressure of those holiday reading lists, you’ll see a familiar Western title jumping onto the list in June at No. 19, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird from in a 2017 edition from Yilin Press.

Lots of cats, one famous bird.

Below, then, are OpenBook’s overall lists from June 2024 of bestsellers in fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books, followed by its lists of bestselling fiction and nonfiction in China by authors from outside the country. At the end of our article, as always, you’ll find notes on how the lists are constructed.

OpenBook’s Fiction Bestsellers, June 2024

OpenBook’s Nonfiction Bestsellers, June 2024

OpenBook’s Children’s Bestsellers, June 2024

Foreign Author Fiction Bestsellers, June 2024

Foreign Author Nonfiction Bestsellers, June 2024

Notes on the Charts

OpenBook is a privately owned industry-data research firm based in Beijing. It functions somewhat as Nielsen and NDP do from the West, and Nielsen Book Research International has worked with OpenBook in Asian operations. With authoritative data and information resources, OpenBook is able to deliver consulting service to partners who would like to explore the Chinese book market and identify suitable partners.

At last report, OpenBook monitored more than 18,000 online and offline bookstores.

The online channel includes digital retailers such as large self-operated online stores, platform stores, and small- and medium-sized stores. The offline channels include more than 4,800 bookstores. Coverage includes most of the state-owned and influential privately owned bookstores in 30 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Tibet are not included in OpenBook’s system.

In 2022, OpenBook tracked around 76.21 billion RMB in sales (US$10.62 billion).

Retail outlets include:

• Traditional bookstores
• Supermarkets
• Campus bookstores
• “Professional” stores, said to be small stores with a specific industrial or trade focus
• Airport stores

In addition, OpenBook is drawing data from online bookstores of three main types:

• The “Tmall” stores of Alibaba (Tmall is described as a marketplace of companies that create storefronts online to sell products including books)
• The “JingDong” Stores of JD.com (similar to Tmall as a marketplace of both individual companies and bookstores operated by JD.com)
• Ten independent online bookselling retailers

China has 500 or more publishers in operation today. Most of them are government-owned. Private publishers are required to generate ISBNs for their titles from a publishing company that is government-owned—which, in other words, creates a system in which all ISBNs are registered through government channels. The government approves each book published in China.

More China bestseller reports from Publishing Perspectives are here, and more on the Chinese book publishing market is here.