It is not easy for frontlist titles published by Canadian-owned publishers to break through to the bestseller lists. The top-selling Canadian authors at indie bookstores have remained surprisingly consistent over the course of 2024 – with multiple titles appearing year after year.

Only three of the 25 top sellers of Canadian-authored titles published by Canadian-owned publishers have changed since Quill & Quire reported the sales recorded through Bookmanager for the first half of 2024. The titles have simply shifted positions, with Waubgeshig Rice’s 2018 novel Moon of the Crusted Snow (ECW Press) moving into first place, displacing Daniel Innes and Christina Wong’s Denison Avenue (ECW).

The top six titles in this list are among the top-selling 25 Canadian authors from all publishers sold through indies.

Canada Reads titles still dominate top spots, illustrating that the CBC competition, at this time, pulls far more weight than any prize shortlisting or win. Books by authors Cherie Dimaline, Iona Whishaw, Bob Joseph, Richard Wagamese, and Robert Munsch remain evergreen. The consistency for Kate Hilton and Elizabeth Renzetti’s Bury the Lead (a spring 2024 release) bodes well for their second instalment of the Quill & Packet series from House of Anansi’s Spiderline imprint, due in the spring of 2025.

Of the 25 titles, only eight are 2024 releases, and only one of those, Ian Williams’s 2024 Massey Lecture What I Mean to Say: Remaking Conversation in Our Time (House of Anansi Press, Oct.), which debuts in the final spot on the list, was published this fall.

With What I Mean to Say, two Massey Lectures place among the top sellers, as the new book in the series joins Astra Taylor’s 2023 The Age of Insecurity (#19). The other two new titles on the list in December are Untold Tales of Old British Columbia by Daniel Marshall (Ronsdale Press, Apr.) at #24, and Lesley Crewe’s debut on the list with her novel, Death and Other Inconveniences (Vagrant Press/Nimbus Publishing, June) at #22.

The Paper Bag Princess Tote Bag, the same non-book item that made the June list, came in at #18, but is disqualified.

The number of stores reporting to Bookmanager has slightly increased from the spring to 260 independent booksellers across Canada.

There is significantly more change between June and December among the top-selling Canadian authors when titles from multinational publishers are included.

Most notably, the perennially popular Louise Penny shoots to the number-two position with her latest (beautifully jacketed) Inspector Gamache novel, The Grey Wolf (the 19th book in the series), published at the end of October by Minotaur/Macmillan. New at #6 is the middle-grade Babysitters Club graphic novel released by Scholastic at the very end of 2023, Claudia and the Bad Joke by Arley Nopra. (This is joined by another Scholastic graphic novel, The New Girl by Cassandra Calin, published in June, that rounds off the list at #25.)

Although the rest of the top 10 are familiar from the June list (Waubgeshig Rice twice, Carley Fortune, Catherine Leroux, Wade Davis, and John Vaillant among them), a number of nonfiction fall releases start making an appearance at #11, where Malcom Gladwell revisits his much debated debut work with Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering (Little, Brown and Company/Hachette Book Group, Oct.).

CBC journalist Carol Off’s At a Loss for Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage, (Random House of Canada, Sept.) comes in at #12 and Tanya Talaga’s The Knowing (HarperCollins, Aug.) sits at #13. Off’s and Talaga’s are also among Q&Q’s best books of the year. At #19 is the late Murray Sinclair’s Who We Are: Four Questions For a Life and a Nation (McClelland & Stewart/PRHC, Sept.).

Nahlah Ayed’s The War We Won Apart: The Untold Story of Two Elite Agents Who Became One of the Most Decorated Couples of WWII (Viking/Penguin Random House Canada, May) debuts at #18.