Receiving the Goncourt award is the guarantee of seeing your sales explode. According to Gfk, between 2017 and 2021, winning the famous prize allows one winner to sell an average of more than 540,000 copies of her book. It is more than all the other prizes: obtaining the Renaudot prize means 248,000 copies sold on average, the Femina prize generates 171,000 sales, the Académie Française promises 57,000 copies and the Prix Médicis, 37,000.
However, according to data from Edistat, the 2022 Goncourt Prize -awarded this year to Brigitte Giraud for her autobiography Live fast (Editions Flammarion) – has sold “only” 187,203 copies as of December 30. Well below the average but above all, well below its predecessors. At the end of 2021, the Goncourt The most secret memory of men (Philippe Rey and Jimsaan editions) by Mohamed Mbouugar SARR had sold 375,000 copies. the anomaly (Gallimard), by Hervé Le Tellier, Prix Goncourt 2020 has broken records: more than a million copies sold in June 2022 and 480,000 copies by the end of 2020.
A true Goncourt effect
If in terms of sales the 2022 Goncourt is a small vintage, the Goncourt effect is still very real: when we look at the weekly sales that Edistat collects, we actually see an increase in sales after getting the price.
A traditional Christmas gift, Goncourt’s sales also increased considerably during this period. While sales of its release were confidential, it remains the 28th best-selling book in France this year according to Editis.
Source: BFM TV
