It is a commonly accepted truth that being nominated for the Booker Prize has a significant impact on the sales profile of a title, winning it even more so.
This year’s winner David Szalay’s Flesh jumped from selling 163 copies a week to 653 once the shortlist was revealed – in the week since its victory it has catapulted even further to 7,906 copies, a boost of 1,441% according to NielsenIQ BookData, as publisher Jonathan Cape raced to restock bookshops.
When Samantha Harvey’s Orbital nabbed the prize in 2024, it saw its sales receive a boost of 818% – adding nearly 10,000 copies to its weekly sales and taking it to the top of the charts, perhaps aided by it already being in mass-market paperback.
The “Booker bounce” is bigger than any associated with any other prize – in volume terms at least. Helen Garner’s How to End a Story saw its weekly sales rise 1,288% from 54 to 750 copies in the week immediately following its Baillie Gifford win, while the paperback edition of Rachel Clarke’s The Story of a Heart saw a 256.4% jump in its second week on sale when it was revealed as winner of the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction in June of this year.
There was no such jump for the Women’s Prize for Fiction winner The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden as the paperback was released on the very day its win was announced – still, it will have contributed to the 6,178 copies it sold in its first week.
But what impact, if any, does winning the Booker have on an author’s ongoing career?
So far this century, the prize has been awarded 26 times, to 25 different authors – Margaret Atwood (2000 and 2019) and Hilary Mantel (2009 and 2012) have won it twice in that period, with Atwood sharing the prize with Bernardine Evaristo in 2019. Some of those authors, including the aforementioned Atwood, and the previously thrice-nominated Julian Barnes (he won the prize in 2011), were already established behemoths of the literary scene – while others such as DBC Pierre (2003) and Douglas Stuart (2020) won with their debut novels.
The ‘Booker bounce’ is bigger than any associated with any other prize – in volume terms at least.
In between those two poles is a list of authors who have seen sales of their backlist eclipsed by those of their winning title – 80% of the 452,053 books sold by Harvey, for example, are accounted to the Wiltshire-based author’s fifth – and latest – novelOrbital.
The most recent winner to have published a post-award novel is Stuart, whose prize-winning Shuggie Bain was followed by Young Mungo in 2022. It is perhaps no surprise to learn that sales of the former outstrip the latter by nearly four to one – but first week sales of Stuart’s second novel equalled 11,865 copies – more than 11,000 on top of the 489 copies that Shuggie Bain sold in its first week, the same week that the longlist for that year’s prize was announced.
Before Stuart, we have to travel back to 2015’s Marlon James, to find another Booker winner who has published subsequent novels following their win. For James, it is the title preceding his Booker win that is his second-biggest hit. Up to the end of 2014, James’ second outing The Book of Night Women had sold 16,904 copies across all editions (his first, John Crow’s Devil, was not widely available in the UK until late-2015).
On its release in 2019, Black Leopard, Red Wolf sold 11,522 hardback units – in total across all editions it has sold 28,240 copies, lagging a little behind The Book of Night Women’s 34,414 – but far ahead of the 7,138 units sold by 2022’s Moon Witch, Spider King.
Richard Flanagan’s two novels following his 2013 win for The Narrow Road to the Deep North have sold an average of 4,564 copies – down on his pre-win average of 14,617 copies. That number is skewed somewhat by Flanagan’s hit 2001 book, Gould’s Book of Fish; but even excluding that, the average comes in more than 1,000 copies higher than his post-Booker win performance.
A mixed bag of results show no conclusive proof either way of guaranteed success following a Booker win – though perhaps it does indicate that Booker Prize champs are more inclined to be a not-so-prolific bunch. All eyes will be on 2026 when 2017’s winner George Saunders releases his first full-length Booker follow-up, Vigil.