What do James Lovelock, Tim Smit, Christopher Booker and Al Gore have in common? They are the bestselling environmental authors in the UK over the last decade, according to Nielsen BookScan data published recently by The Bookseller.
Lovelock has amassed about £1.1m in sales from all his books (though his cut would be no more than 10% of that) and, like Gore, I'm not surprised at his high ranking: they are high profile people with striking ideas.
I am more surprised by Smit's success, impressive figure though he is: he tops the Nielsen list with Eden, his tale of the Cornish eco-project, and has total sales of £2.2m, though his book was published way back in 2001. Andre Breedt, Research and Development Analyst at Nielsen BookScan, suggests the reason for this success: the book is sold onsite at the Eden Project. Take note authors, and include the building of a major tourist attraction in your marketing strategy.
As for the sceptic Brooker, he has shifted 20,000 copies of The Real Global Warming Disaster, with a sales value of over £240,000. So his frequent suggestion that those who argue for action on climate change do so to line their own pockets cuts both ways.
Zoning in on the first three quarters of 2010, Lovelock tops the list again, with The Vanishing Face of Gaia, on copies sold. But Cambridge professor and government advisor David MacKay is top for sales income - £80,000 – for his arithmetic-based anti-polemic Sustainable Energy: very good going for an excellently geeky book (especially considering it can be had for free online).
I was surprised at the absence of Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, and Jared Diamond's Collapse. It may simply be those books weren't classified in Nielsen's Environment and Ecology category.
But the aspect which struck me the most is the relatively small sales. The top selling book in 2010 was The Vanishing Face of Gaia, selling 5,200 copies. That doesn't seem like that many to me, and 2009 (£1.53m total category sales) and 2010 are rebound years from a low in 2008 (£1.1m). Is that really the limit of the appetite for green books? We get millions of people each month on this website.
Breedt explains: "What most people don't know is that most books don't really sell that many copies. A lot of people buy books, but it's rare for lots of them to buy the same book." He says sales of 5,000 in 9 months is good. An arts colleague points out that one Booker Prize shortlisted novel sold just 300 copies.
He also points to sales in the separate academic category of Geography, environment and agriculture, which have risen by a third since 2006. That list, free from star authors who can dominate sales, or depress them by their absence, is a more robust predictor of interest, he argues.
My pick for green book of the year, and with potential conflict-of-interest fully acknowledged, is When a Billion Chinese Jump, written by Guardian journalist Jonathan Watts. It's a sensitive, startling and beautifully written account of the battle between the environment and the economy in China, the outcome of which will affect us all. ChinaDialogue has a good interview with him on our environment network.
But are books still where the battle for new green thinking is fought? Or is on on television, or more likely on the web? Is it – gulp – in the online comment threads and discussions?
