Celebrating Canadian contributors on I Read Canadian Day 2022

Learn about the market share of Canadian contributors, their book sales, and more in this blog post by @BookNet_Canada.
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I Read Canadian Day — the national day of celebration for Canadian books for young readers — happened earlier this month. While we’re late to the party, it’s always a good time to champion Canadian authors, illustrators, translators, and editors.

Today, we’re doing a roundup of all the latest data we have on Canadian contributors — from our Canadian Book Consumer survey to SalesData and BiblioShare.

Let’s get started!

Tracking Canadian contributors

Using BiblioShare, the Canadian book supply chain’s quality-controlled data aggregation and distribution system, we can track the number of titles in the Canadian book market that have at least one Canadian contributor. The graph below shows the number of titles by Canadian contributors over three years from January 2020 to January 2022. This number is on the rise. Between 2020 and 2022, the number of these titles have increased 13%, up 8% alone from 2021 to 2022.

We also track the sales of titles by Canadian contributors through SalesData, the national sales tracking service for the Canadian English-language trade book market. Over the last three years, the sales of titles by Canadian contributors have been relatively steady. As shown in the graph below, the number of units sold dipped slightly by 8% between 2019 and 2020, to increase 6% between 2020 and 2021.

Reading Canadian contributors

But are Canadian book buyers looking for Canadian books? According to the Canadian Book Consumer survey, the answer is yes.

In the third quarter of 2022 alone, 25% of Canadian book buyers searched for books by Canadian contributors and 23% searched for books about Canada or regions within Canada. The graph below shows the quarterly results from this survey from 2021 to 2022. On average across both years, 24% of Canadian book buyers searched for titles by Canadian contributors and 21% searched for titles about Canada and Canadian regions.

Which titles by Canadian contributors are the most popular among Canadian book buyers? So far in 2022, these are the top 10 bestselling titles with a Canadian contributor:

1. Five Little Indians by Michelle Good 🍁

2. Every Summer After by Carley Fortune 🍁

3. Looking For Jane by Heather Marshall 🍁

4. The Maid by Nita Prose 🍁

5. 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson 🍁

6. The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan 🍁

7. The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté 🍁 with Daniel Maté 🍁

8. Scarborough by Catherine Hernandez 🍁

9. Love You Forever by Robert Munsch 🍁 illustrated by Sheila McGraw

10. Watch Out for Her by Samantha Bailey 🍁

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