What Australians read in 2025 – and the one book that ruled them all

2 months ago 27

Australian readers embraced the “let them” ethos in 2025, making a self-help guide to boundaries the country’s biggest-selling title of the year, while craft, recipes and genre fiction also filled book bags.

Viral pop-psychology book The Let Them Theory by American podcaster Mel Robbins finished the year well ahead of every other title, selling 373,450 copies since it was published in January, according to figures from NielsenIQ BookScan.

The rulebook for emotional restraint dominated the charts for much of 2025, spending 16 weeks as Australia’s overall number one and holding the top spot in non-fiction for most of the year. The success was mirrored globally, with the title reportedly clocking more than 8 million sales worldwide.

Mel Robbins, Nagi Maehashi, Suzanne Collins and Jane Harper.

If readers were setting boundaries, they were also colouring inside them. Colouring books emerged as a surprise force in the top 10, with Vietnamese artists’ collective Coco Wyo’s Cozy Corner (no. 4) and Cozy Cuties (no. 6) selling a combined 329,220 copies. Cosy Calm by Cherry Lam added a local shade to the trend, selling more than 50,000 copies.

The Brisbane artist said many young people were actively trying to carve out screen-free moments in their day.

“Colouring is an accessible hobby that forces us to concentrate on one thing only, it serves as a cute and cosy pastime as well as a brain exercise. It trains us to focus on choosing your own colour palette for the page and honing your fine motor skills, without much artistic experience needed,” Lam said.

Penguin Random House Australia product director Kate Hoy said the colouring books comeback looked set to continue into 2026.

“This highlights the public’s strong craving for creativity, desire to slow down and a break from the constant news cycle. The audience for colouring books has broadened too, now including not just children but also those who consider themselves ‘young at heart’,” she said.

Blockbuster genre titles led the fiction field, with the romantasy fire still burning bright. Rebecca Yarros’ dragon-riding fantasy Onyx Storm breathed the hottest flames, finishing the year as the highest-selling novel and placing second overall with 240,150 copies sold. It was followed by Suzanne Collins’ Sunrise on the Reaping – a new instalment in The Hunger Games series – which moved 190,600 books.

Freida McFadden’s 2023 thriller The Housemaid returned to the top 10 for a second consecutive year, placing seventh (130,950 copies), buoyed by a screen adaptation starring Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney. Crowd-pleasing Richard Osman’s The Impossible Fortune reliably rounded out the top 10 (88,480 copies).

The highest-selling Australian author was once again RecipeTin Eats creator Nagi Maehashi, cementing her status as a titan of local publishing. Maehashi extended her reign for a third consecutive year on the strength of her late-2024 release and the remarkably long shelf life of her previous bestseller. Tonight was the top-selling Australian book of 2025, moving 149,310 copies to finish fifth overall. Meanwhile, Dinner – first published in 2022 – remained the No.2 local title and placed eighth overall with 128,250 copies sold.

Trust proved more reliable than novelty in 2025. After Maehashi, the only local writer to crack the top 10 was crime writer Jane Harper, whose Last One Out placed ninth, selling 111,870 copies in less than three months after proving a strong Christmas performer.

Reader affection for familiar faces – often working with crime and thriller elements – remained a powerful force. Trent Dalton ranked as the second-highest-selling Australian fiction author of the year, with Gravity Let Me Go selling 74,530 copies. He was followed by Sally Hepworth with Mad Mabel, Dervla McTiernan’s The Unquiet Grave and Matthew Reilly’s The Detective.

In non-fiction, Australian-American Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s posthumous Nobody’s Girl – detailing her experiences as a survivor of sexual abuse at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell – was the year’s best-selling memoir, despite a late October release (68,200 copies).

Former prime minister Tony Abbott also made a notable showing with his book Australia finishing the year at number 12 on the list of top-selling local titles.

The figures are based on sales recorded during the calendar year, rather than how long individual titles have been on shop shelves, and do not include e-books or audiobooks, both of which continue to grow. Despite ongoing cost-of-living pressures, the Australian book market proved resilient, with 69.9 million books sold – up 1.4 per cent on 2024 – to a total value of $1.33 billion, an increase of 3.2 per cent year-on-year.

One sign of that stability was the continued strength of the backlist, with almost 30 per cent of the overall top-selling titles published in previous years. Long-running favourites such as Ikigai (2017), Atomic Habits (2018) and The Barefoot Investor (2016) continued to sell tens of thousands of copies.

At the same time, the gap between the very biggest hits and the rest of the market remained stark. The Let Them Theory (No.1) sold more than five times as many copies as Nobody’s Girl (No.20), highlighting a concentrated market in which a handful of mega-sellers did much of the heavy lifting in 2025.

Australian Publishers Association chief executive Patrizia Di Biase-Dyson said Australia’s diverse mix of independent bookstores, national chains and discount retailers gave the local market an edge, helping readers discover both homegrown and international authors.

“It was an encouraging 2025, with an uptick in the total print market and continued growth in digital formats, carrying strong momentum into 2026 – even amidst a tough retail landscape,” she said.

“The charts continue to reinforce that, despite the global nature of the English-language market, Australian readers actively choose books by Australian authors. This isn’t accidental, but reflects publishers making deliberate investments in local voices.”

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