From Yahoo Finance:
According to global information company The NPD Group, 67 percent of unit sales in the top 100 literary fiction books in 2019 came from books written by female authors. The top fiction title of the year was “Where the Crawdad’s Sing,” by Delia Owens, selling more than 1.2 million print copies.
“March is Women’s History Month, which makes it the perfect time to review the many contributions of women authors to the U.S. publishing industry,” said Kristen McLean, books industry analyst for NPD. “Women have increased their share of bestsellers in the last decade, particularly when it comes to fiction.”
Women authors’ influence in publishing varies by category
Women authors were responsible for 42 percent of unit sales for the top 100 books in the overall print book market in 2019—up from 30 percent in 2010. Last year 39 of the top 100 bestselling authors were women, up from 33 in 2010. In fact, over the 16 years NPD BookScan has been tracking the U.S. publishing market, the bestselling author is a woman. Total sales of all of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series exceeded 55 million copies, across more than 300 editions of her many titles for children and adults.
Combined unit sales of books with a focus on subjects about, and of interest to, women have enjoyed seven consecutive years of growth; and women-related subcategories have been responsible for overall growth of a wide variety of publishing areas. Women-related subcategories in comics and graphic novels, drama, history, poetry, and political and social science collectively increased 7 percent in 2019 over the previous year.
Link to the rest at Yahoo Finance
You had me worried — the actual title is “Where the Crawdads Sing”, not “Where the Crawdad’s Sing”.
The latter shook me this early in the morning, envisioning for a moment some bizarre chimera of a creepie-crawlie with my father’s face on it. Gack!