Commission colouring books with images from books and comics you want to sell. Get those colourers excited about reading. It works at my school!

Okay, forgive a headline worthy of The Bookseller, but seriously, many reports are raving about Portugal’s 7.6% book sales boom without noting that it is colouring books painting the picture.

Structural growth or seasonal splash?

The Portuguese trade closed 2025 with sales up 7.6 % to €217.5 million and units up 6.9 % to 14.8 million, according to GfK panel data released by APEL.

Yet the headline deserves a red-pencil note: “A relevant part of this result stems from a specific consumption phenomenon, which does not automatically translate into an increase in reading or literacy,” warns president Miguel Pauseiro.

Translation: the surge is largely pigment, not print.

No, wait, too many Bookseller-style puns and TNPS readers will think I’ve jumped ship. So let’s call a spade a spade, and a colouring book a colouring book.

Painting By Numbers

Publishers privately estimate that adult and junior colouring titles contributed 3–4% of the extra value. Strip them out and like-for-like growth falls to roughly 3% – still positive, but in line with 2024’s real-terms gain of 6.25% after inflation.

The category now represents close to one in ten units sold at large non-specialist chains, a share triple that of 2022.

Price discipline under pressure

Average cover price edged up only 0.6% to €14.66, well below the 2.3 % inflation rate. Publishers absorbed paper, energy and freight hikes worth ~4% of turnover, squeezing margins to keep books within impulse-buy territory. Not philanthropy, of course, just good business sense.

Channel mix stays stubbornly analogue

Physical bookshops and other specialist outlets still command 78.5 % of consumer spend, a figure unchanged since 2021 despite a national e-commerce spend that topped €11 billion in 2025. Online book sales grow, yet remain a single-digit slice of the pie.

Reading more, buying less

Parallel APEL research shows 76% of Portuguese adults read at least one book in 2025, up from 73% in 2023, but only 58% actually purchased one.

The average books-per-reader slipped to 5.3, confirming that market expansion is driven by heavy buyers, not new converts.

The View From The Beach

The 2025 figures are welcome cash-flow, not proof of habit change. Without colouring books the market would still be in the black, but momentum would halve. The real task – turning cyclical pigment into structural print (sorry! Last time, I promise!) – rests, as Pauseiro insists, with schools, families and pricing discipline.

Let me add here a final note to say that colouring books are great! Essential for children, great fund for adults, and publishers are in the business to make money. Good luck to them.

But why not take full advantage. Commission colouring books with images from books and comics you want to sell. Get those colourers excited about reading. It works at my school!

This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn newsfeed.