"What are the Juvenile perennial favourites for Easter?" you ask? Well, let's find out together. (Spoiler alert: There's a Robert Munsch book in there.)
What are perennial bestsellers?
Since BNC SalesData has tracked print book sales in Canada for more than 10 years, we have enough data to determine the long-standing bestsellers in each subject category. You may have seen our perennial bestseller study where we looked at the titles that had the most consistent sales from 2013 to 2017. It's important to know that these titles may not be the biggest sellers — they may never have even made it onto a bestseller list — but they consistently sell well and, in that sense, are tried and true. Perennial titles are a staple of any subject category.
For this post, we've put together a list of titles that tend to sell well leading up to Easter. And, not a joke, this year Easter Sunday falls on April Fools' Day. Also not a joke, we promise we're getting closer to finding which books made it into the top 15.
Our methodology
To find out what the Easter staples are, we started by looking at titles that had the most consistent sales from 2013 to 2017. Within that list, we searched for titles that ranked high in the Juvenile and Young Adult categories during the two weeks leading up to Easter every year from 2013 to 2017. Then, we sorted those titles by units sold in 2017 to ensure that the rankings reflected each title’s current relevance. We found a lot of titles that are perennial bestsellers throughout the year (we're looking at you Love You Forever), so we used a manual process to review the top titles to see which ones had a distinct spike over the 2017 Easter period.
The top 15 Juvenile perennial favourites for Easter
So let's get down to it. While we included both Juvenile and YA titles in our search, the titles that made the top 15 list all happen to be Juvenile. Of these, all but two are fiction and nine are board books.
The title at the top of the list is Five Bouncing Bunnies, which was published in 2013 and consistently sold the most copies every year between 2013 and 2017, followed by 1980's The Paper Bag Princess in the second spot. The two lone non-fiction titles? I Am a Fire Truck and 1000 Easter Stickers.
Guess How Much I Love You has two editions in the top 15; both are board books that were published three years apart with the same author and illustrator. The smaller format edition is ranked at number seven, one position ahead of the bigger format edition. For the purposes of this list, we gave the title one space, but we've included the ISBNs for both versions in our CataList catalogue and in the chart below.
Also of note, Pat the Bunny just missed the list by coming in at the 16th position.
The average current list price of the titles hovers at around $9, with titles ranging from $5 to $14.
See below for the top five titles from the list that have to do with Easter, followed by a chart with all the info you need to order or gift any of the titles in the top 15. We've also gathered all the titles together in our Perennial Bestsellers for Easter 2017 catalogue. Note: There are 16 books in the catalogue because we've included both editions of Guess How Much I Love You.
The top 5 Easter-related Juvenile perennial bestsellers
The top 15 Juvenile perennial bestsellers during Easter
- Five Bouncing Bunnies written by Lily Karr, illustrated by Jacqueline Rogers, Scholastic Canada, 9780545458252
- The Paper Bag Princess written by Robert Munsch 🇨🇦 , illustrated by Michael Martchenko 🇨🇦 , Annick Press, 9780920236161
- Goodnight, I Love You by Caroline Jayne Church, Scholastic Canada, 9780545392150
- Happy Easter, Curious George by Margret Rey and H.A. Rey, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 9780547048253
- God Gave Us Easter written by Lisa Tawn Bergren, illustrated by Laura J. Bryant, Crown Publishing Group, 9780307730725
- I Love You Because You're You written by Liza Baker, illustrated by David McPhail, Scholastic Canada, 9780545029315
- Guess How Much I Love You written by Sam McBratney, illustrated by Anita Jeram, Candlewick Press, 9780763642648 and 9780763649760
- A Cuddle for Little Duck written by Claire Freedman, illustrated by Caroline Pedler, Scholastic Canada, 9780545077972
- I Am a Fire Truck written by Josephine Page, illustrated by Paola Migliari, Scholastic Canada, 9780439916189
- Dora's Easter Bunny Adventure (Dora the Explorer) by Random House Staff, Random House Children's Books, 9780449814420
- I Am a Train written by Ace Landers, illustrated by Paola Migliari, Scholastic Canada, 9780545079624
- 1000 Easter Stickers by Charlotte Stratford and Sarah Vince, Make Believe Ideas, 9781782350804
- Sing a Song of Mother Goose by Barbara Reid 🇨🇦 , Scholastic Canada, 9780545997249
- Moo, Baa, la la La! by Sandra Boynton, Little Simon, 9780671449018
- The Going to Bed Book by Sandra Boynton, Little Simon, 9780671449025
See book descriptions in our Perennial Bestsellers for Easter 2017 catalogue.
Happy reading!
