The best stocking-filler present I received last year was the bumper Christmas edition of The Spectator. But it wasn’t the only erudite reading matter crammed into a moth-eaten ski sock. Nestled under a mouldy tangerine and some chocolate money destined to be stolen by my children were: How it Works: The Dad (Ladybird for Grown-Ups); You Do Have the Authority Here!: #What Would Jackie Weaver Do?; and The Best of Matt, 2021.
They now jostle for space in a downstairs loo sprinkled with other half-read stocking fillers chronicling the past two decades: Schott’s Original Miscellany; The Curious Incident of the WMD in Iraq; Does Anything Eat Wasps?; Crap Towns; Fifty Sheds of Grey; Five on Brexit Island; and half a dozen more Ladybird spoofs, a series that has sold 5.5 million copies since 2014, taking £30 million through bookshop tills according to Nielsen BookScan.
I’ve spent the past few months touring bookshops and putting copies of my book on top of piles of the Private Eye Annual
The Christmas gift book humour market is hugely lucrative, but it’s also very crowded. ‘There’s so much crap out there,’ says Andrew Franklin, the publisher of Profile Books. Whereas perennial favourites such as the Private Eye Annual, Viz and Ripley’s Believe It or Not! regularly sell more than 100,000 copies, there are a lot of competitors jostling for position on the lower rungs of the charts.
‘Publishers won’t take a risk with a debut novelist at Christmas,’ says Scott Pack, an author and publisher who was head of buying at Waterstones between 2001 and 2006. ‘But most will take a punt on a small humour hardback, ideally with a cover and a title where the customer gets the joke immediately. But the honest answer is that no one has a clue what will sell.’
This uncertainty is compounded by long lead times in an industry that Pack describes as ‘incredibly antiquated’. Decisions about Christmas ‘tillpoint’ books, the impulse buys made while standing in the queue, are normally taken by retailers back in the spring.
This can put huge pressure on authors to deliver at breakneck speed. After Penguin’s success with the Ladybird series, Hachette, a rival publisher, cashed in on its ownership of the Enid Blyton estate by commissioning a series of Famous Five spoofs. Starting in May 2016, Bruno Vincent wrote five books in time for Christmas 2016, another for Mother’s Day 2017, another for Father’s Day, another for the summer (Five Get Beach Body Ready) and five more for Christmas 2017. The series has now sold more than 1.2 million copies.
‘I suspect they would have sold the same amount if they had been blank notebooks,’ says Vincent, modestly. ‘The Christmas humour market is dead. I killed it.’
Personally, I’m hoping that the market is merely resting. After a decade of editing Am I Alone in Thinking…?, a series of unpublished Telegraph letters that still sells well at Christmas, I have written my own stocking filler this year. Boris Johnson: The Neverending Tory lets the reader Take Back Control by guiding the former/future prime minister through a multiple-choice quest to fulfil his childhood ambition of becoming World King.
I’ve spent the past few months touring bookshops and putting copies of my book on top of piles of the Private Eye Annual. The humour section, banished to an unloved corner between January and September before returning to the main tables in October, is still positively groaning.
‘If you get 30 copies of a book with a funny cartoon on the front, it will fly off the shelves,’ says Tom Rowley who recently opened Backstory, a bookshop in Balham, South London.
‘Puzzle books, quizzes and joke books never go out of fashion,’ agrees Angie Crawford, who buys humour and gift titles for Waterstones. The online world has had a considerable impact in this market recently, she says, whether spin-off Wordle books or titles such as The Very Best of Fesshole, which collates outrageous anonymous confessions on Twitter. ‘The market this year is also fuelled by the political turbulence, with a focus on parody,’ she adds, reassuringly.
Andreas Campomar, publisher at Constable, is not so sure. ‘I think the humour and parody market has gone for now,’ he says. ‘It will come back at some point, but it’s squarely celebrity right now – a minefield of great gains and huge losses.’
Big titles this year include Matthew Perry’s Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, as well as a book about knitting by Tom Daley. Less favoured memoirs include Matt Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries, whose photoshopped cover has caused almost as much mirth as his appearance on I’m a Celebrity. All are likely to be overshadowed by Prince Harry’s Spare, which was in the top five on Amazon in November, two months before it was published.
And even bankable celebrity has to compete with other popular festive categories such as cookery and ‘Richard Osman’, whose first two Thursday Murder Club novels sold more than half a million copies in the last two months of 2021.
‘Ultimately, it’s a gifting market,’ explains Campomar. ‘You’re hoping that for the person who buys only one or two titles a year, this is their book.’
Popular titles near Rowley’s till include An Opinionated Guide to London Pubs and Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book 2023. ‘Anything with booze in the title becomes more attractive as Christmas approaches,’ he says. ‘We also have a couple of doorstopper train books which are surprisingly popular. Personally, if I unwrapped that on Christmas Day, I’d be rather affronted, but for the right person…’
‘Train-spotters lurk out there in some numbers,’ explains Andrew Franklin. ‘You don’t need to have a number one bestseller to make money. Sell 5,000 to 10,000 copies and you’ve got a happy author.’
And happy readers too? ‘The vast majority of gift books are never read,’ says Pack, who has his own book, Literary Cats, out this Christmas. ‘They just give the impression that you’ve given the present some thought.’ Or as a friend of mine puts it: ‘I’m going to give your book to my uncle on Christmas Day, so I don’t need to speak to him until Boxing Day.’
Boris Johnson: The Neverending Tory is published by Transworld (£9.99).
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