Publishers are tearing their hair out, as romance, new, dark or fantasy, takes possession of our fiction charts. Finally, not all publishers, since some such as Hugo Publishing, now a subsidiary of Glénat, or even HLab, a subsidiary of Hachette, are doing better than ever. The week of February 26 to March 3, the romance was indeed taking off. possession of 12 of the top 30 places. Rebelote this week from March 4 to 10. To spot them, just look at their titles, most of the time in English; moreover, generally being part of a series, they rarely arrive alone, and volumes 1, 2, 3 follow one another at breakneck speed. Another specificity, their preferred sales network, the GSS, (i.e. the specialized supermarkets, Fnac, Cultura, etc.) which sell between 60 and 70% of works of the genre _ compared to 35 to 38% of more traditional books like those by Thomas Schlesser, Jean-Christophe Rufin, David Foenkinos and Sylvain Tesson.
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To realize the scale of the wave, you just need to look at the figures (from Edistat). Thus the Algerian novelist Sarah Rivens, present three times in our list of the 30 best sellers, which displays 155,000 copies sold Lakestone 1 (published January 12 by HLab), 410,000 Captive T.1 (published in August 2022) and 250,000 Captive T.2 (dating from January 2023). The American Ana Huang is not to be outdone with 90,000 copies sold of Twisted Love Volume 1 (Hugo Roman) since October 2023 and 22,000 of volume III published this February 7. Another serial seller, the Frenchwoman Morgane Moncomble with her series Seasons (still Hugo Roman), whose first volume has sold some 150,000 copies since September 2023 while volume II published in January 2024 has already attracted 80,000 readers.
We should also mention the Nantaise Joyce Kitten, present with her two volumes of Borderlinepublished by the serial publisher, Hugo Roman, but also the American HD Carlton and its volume 1 Adeline’s Shadow (Roncière), the Frenchwoman Laura Swan and her Troublemaker T1 (HLab), credited with 77,000 copies since November 2023, the American Rebecca Yarros (Fourth Wing T 1, Hugo Roman) or Anita Rigins (Beautiful Sinner, Addictive). So many authors whose sales figures are enough to make many novelists pale.
But, but, but, the thriller is resisting. The Swiss Joël Dicker took the second step of the podium with A savage animal (Rosie & Wolfe), Guillaume Musso arrives on the heights with Someone else (Calmann-Lévy) and Stephen King holds the ramp with holy (Albin Michel) in 4th place, while in a radically different register, Paul Auster, who published with Baumgartner (Actes Sud/Léméac) a half-fictional, half-autobiographical novel about pain and memory, applauded by the press, infiltrates 14th place in the list.
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