Thanks to TV series on Leonardo, sales of books on the artist increase 156%.

Television is dragging books down: this is happening thanks to the TV series Leonardo, a highly fictionalized reduction of the biographical events of Leonardo da Vinci. TheItalian Publishers Association (AIE), which has been conducting research for some time now to understand how much television series influence the sales of book titles (it had already happened with successful screenplays such as Gomorrah, L’amica geniale, and The Throne of Swords), has been keeping track of titles about Leonardo da Vinci during the broadcast period of the series produced by Lux Vide and Sony Pictures Television in collaboration with Rai Fiction (the last episode will be broadcast tomorrow, Tuesday, April 12, 2021), and has discovered an interesting correlation: title sales on Leonardo increased 156% in the number of copies and 158% in total value. The figure refers to the period when the first episodes of the drama were broadcast (March 15-April 4) compared with the previous weeks.

The phenomenon is important and, above all, presents, according to the IEA, three important elements of novelty with respect to other series that preceded Leonardo: unlike those mentioned above, for example, Leonardo is not based on a book and consequently the episodes dragged the bibliography on Leonardo as a whole and not only the title related to the series (in fact, a novel on the subject was also produced). The data monitored by the IEA refer specifically to 368 titles on Leonardo da Vinci that have been sold in Italy in recent years. In fact, the second element is precisely the variety of genres: the increases in sales have involved fiction, popular and specialized non-fiction, art catalogs, illustrated books, and children’s books, thus placing themselves across the large and small niches that make up the market. However, the best-selling titles remain those that were successful even before the drama: in particular, the top ten titles dedicated to Leonardo (which covered about 45 percent of sales before the drama: specifically, 44.90 percent from January 11 to January 31, 45.50 percent from February 1 to February 21, and 44.70 percent from February 22 to March 14) covered 66.3 percent of demand during the period of the drama’s broadcast, a clear symptom of the fact that the generalist fiction audience is turning to titles that are easily accessible and widely distributed.

The third element is thebeneficial effect that the TV series had on lesser-selling books: although viewers focused in percentage terms more on wide-access titles, there were good sales even on titles that in the weeks before airing were no longer sold. In detail, an estimated 20 percent of titles that were poor sellers prior to the drama experienced triple-digit increases. Even as many as 24 out of Leonardo titles that had never sold a copy in 2021 (6.5 percent of the 368 books surveyed) were bought again in the weeks of the TV series. These are low values, but it is still a “prodigious” event according to the Aie, which already promises to repeat the study when the already announced second season of Leonardo is broadcast.

Pictured: a frame from the series.

Thanks to TV series on Leonardo, sales of books on the artist increase 156%.

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