We match editorial strength with a strong focus on marketing and distribution and a shrewd understanding of our customers in all sectors. Our top 10 sellers alone accounted for the sale of over one million books over the year in the UK, while the two month period to Christmas was the most successful ever with sales up 14% year-on-year.

This year saw a strong range of best-selling titles including Delia’s How to Cook: Book Three, The Blue Planet,Simon Schama’s A History of Britain Volume II, and Walking with Beasts: A Prehistoric Safari. We continued to achieve strong sales with cookery books by popular BBC chefs like Rick Stein and Gary Rhodes, while Alan Titchmarsh’s How to be a Gardener became BBC Worldwide’s fastest-selling gardening hardback ever, going straight into the bestseller list and selling 100,000 copies within nine weeks of publication.

This year, we also added further titles to our newly-developed range of celebrity biographies and autobiographies, with Sir Clement Freud’s Freud Ego, Bob Harris’s The Whispering Years and Gerry Anderson’s What Made Thunderbirds Go!