Canadian independent booksellers fared well over the holiday season, with stores across the country reporting increased sales of about five to 10 per cent compared to last December and more customer traffic.

On the West Coast, new titles by local authors were popular, with Nelson, B.C., chef Shelley Adams’ Whitewater Cooks with Passion (Sandhill Book Marketing) and Ian McAllister’s The Great Bear Wild: Dispatches from a Northern Rainforest (Greystone Books) topping sales lists at multiple outlets.

“Local author books, especially with local themes, do very well,” says Lee Trentadue, owner of Galiano Island Books, which noted high sales of other local titles The Practical Princess by Lea Mahberly and Shore to Shore: The Art of Ts’uts’umtl Luke Marston by Suzanne Fournier (Harbour Publishing). Trentadue says this success is spurred in part by author events over the holidays, which also helps account for similar patterns at other stores.

A self-published autobiography of local celebrity Rudy Johnson was the top holiday pick at The Open Book in Williams Lake, B.C., selling more than 300 copies after an in-store event.

Predictably, 2014’s big non-fiction releases    Chris Hadfield’s You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes (Random House Canada), Elizabeth May’s Who We Are: Reflections on My Life and Canada (Greystone Books), and Naomi Klein’s Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize  winning This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Knopf Canada)    did well coast to coast. Other political works, including The Comeback: How Aboriginals are Reclaiming Power and Influence by John Ralston Saul (Viking Canada) and Party of One: Stephen Harper and Canada’s Radical Makeover by Michael Harris (Viking Canada) were similarly successful. Martin Short’s biography, I Must Say: My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend (HarperCollins Canada) was an unexpectedly popular non-fiction work, said staff at Words Worth Books in Waterloo, Ontario, The Bookmark in Charlottetown and The Bookmark in Halifax.

Top sellers in fiction included buzz books and award-recognized titles, such as Thomas King‘s The Back of the Turtle (HarperCollins Canada), Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows (Knopf Canada), Michael Crummey’s Sweetland (Doubleday Canada), and Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Adult Onset (Knopf Canada).

Booksellers also noticed a revival of previous bestsellers and award winners, like Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (Little, Brown/Hachette), Joseph Boyden’s The Orenda (Hamish Hamilton Canada), Jonas Jonasson’s The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (HarperCollins Canada), and “anything [by] Louise Penny,” which “flew off the shelves” at Quebec’s Brome Lake Books, says store owner Danny McAuley.

Surprisingly, Sean Michaels’ 2014 Scotiabank Giller Award  winning title Us Conductors (Random House Canada) wasn’t a notable bestseller, though it saw success at BookLore in Orangeville, Ontario, and at Words Worth. Mike Hamm at Bookmark says he was disappointed by the store’s shipment of the trade reprint, which came “a little too late,” leading to lower than expected sales numbers.

New international celebrity releases, like Amy Poehler’s Yes Please (HarperCollins Canada), Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl (Doubleday Canada), and B.J. Novak’s The Book with No Pictures (Dial Books for Young Readers/Penguin), as well as Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Bond Street Books/Penguin), were also popular at Munro’s Books in Victoria, Different Drummer Books in Burlington, Ontario, and both Bookmark locations.

Aside from The Book with No Pictures, the most requested children’s titles varied from store to store, with Little Blue Truck Christmas  by Alice Schertle (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), A Visitor for Bear by Bonnie Becker (Candlewick Press), and Werner Zimmermann’s Christmas titles garnering notable mentions.

Though the season was up overall, several booksellers theorized that the weather may have been a factor in shaping shopping habits, with less-than-desirable conditions at the end of November precipitating a later start to the holiday shopping season at The Open Book and Galiano Island Books in B.C.

“It would have been nice if the weather had actually reflected the season, since I do believe a crisp, snowy white day engenders good holiday shopping,” says Hamm at Bookmark on the opposite coast. But Dan MacDonald at P.E.I.’s Bookmark said the lack of snow storms actually led to better holiday numbers than in previous years.

Yellowknife’s Book Cellar and Hooked on Books in Penticton, B.C., actually saw earlier and more consistent sales than usual from November onward.

“Prior to this year it seemed like people were waiting for Black Friday or Christmas advertising, but this year there was a good, steady roll out of new titles with accompanying publicity, and our customers were following along,” says Book Cellar manager Judith Drinnan. “Were there some bad moments? I know there were, but in an industry where there seems to be perpetual ‘bad news,’ I’d like to glory in the glow from a good season.”