The Bookseller - Spotlight - Older titles surge with a little help from BookTok

That is a significant jump on backlist-heavy 2021 (62%) and is in line with 2020's 67%, though both years are missing a significant amount of data owing to pandemic blackouts.

But the trend completely upends sales patterns for much of the past 20 frontlist-heavy years. Take 2007, which at £1.79bn was the previous official BookScan all-time high: in that year, 53% of sales came from titles published in 2006 or earlier.

And yes, even in those years, a majority of sales were still older titles-albeit a slim majority. The change is where the sales were coming from...