In case you’re wondering, I made this image. In Paint. That’s why it’s so bad. But I didn’t steal it

Recently, I’ve been using book sales data from the Top Ten Fiction Bestseller lists published by the Sunday Times, in an attempt to illustrate book-buying behaviour.

I focused on UK data, because it’s such an important market and it carries a much bigger stick. But today I’d like to have a look at the Irish bestseller lists on their own, because some little trends and patterns emerged which may be useful to any author thinking of self-publishing. Ireland was often used as a ringfenced product test market (ask Cadbury’s), so trends can often become more apparent here than in a much bigger country.

That said, the Irish market can look quite different to the UK market, because we love our Irish authors here – almost slavishly so. When a popular Irish author…