Beauty and the Best: two Disney titles top the chart

A tale as old as time has topped the chart, with the Disney Beauty and the Beast Book of the Film (Parragon) swooping in to take the UK Official Top 50 number one spot from John Grisham’s The Whistler (Hodder). It sold 55,092 copies according to Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market, the highest first-week volume for a title since David Walliams’ The World’s Worst Children 2 (HarperCollins Children's) in May. The Disney Beauty and the Beast Movie Storybook (Egmont) finished in second place, with 38,721 copies shifted.

Both have benefitted from the release of the live-action "Beauty and the Beast" on DVD last week. It has been an unusually fertile year for DVD tie-ins, with both Ian Nathan’s Inside the Magic (a "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" companion) and Matt Forbeck’s Star Wars: Rogue One swiping the number one spot in April.

The Whistler dropped two places but jumped 36% in volume week on week, selling 28,469 copies. Sophie Kinsella’s My Not So Perfect Life (Black Swan) also improved in its second week, shifting an extra 11,330 copies week on week. David Baldacci’s No Man’s Land (Pan) made a shallower jump in volume, by 32%, but held fifth place as Martina Cole’s Betrayal (Headline) dropped down to ninth.

Off the back of a very different film hitting cinemas, Joshua Levine’s Dunkirk (William Collins) claimed the Paperback Non-Fiction number one from Alfie Deyes’ The Pointless Book 3 (Blink) and shot into seventh place, selling 11,974 copies. Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography (Elliot & Thompson) charted in the Paperback Non-Fiction top 20 for a 52nd week, an entire year after it was chosen as Waterstones’ Non-Fiction Book of the Month for August 2016. Its paperback has now sold a whisker outside of 200,000 copies.

Santa Montefiore's The Last Secret of the Deverills (S&S) held the Original Fiction number one for a second week, selling 5,207 copies—nearly 1,500 more than second-placed The Good Daughter by Karin Slaughter.

Nadiya Hussain's Nadiya’s British Food Adventure (Michael Joseph) whipped the Hardback Non-Fiction number one away from Joe Wicks’ Cooking for Family and Friends (Bluebird). This is the Great British Bake Off winner’s first ever category number one, and she is the first contestant from the show to top any of the charts—though Linda Collister has racked up 12 weeks in the top spot with her tie-in cookery books to the series, and former judge Mary Berry has scored a gateau-sized 36 number ones.

Elsewhere in the Children’s charts, Fiona Watt and Rachel Wells’ That’s Not My Unicorn (Usborne) jousted into the Children’s Pre-School number one spot, galloping into the overall Top 50 in 33rd place. Greg James and Chris Smith’s Kid Normal (Bloomsbury Children's) zipped upwards into fourth place in the Children’s Fiction and YA top 20, while both Karen McManus’ One of Us is Lying (Penguin) and David Solomons’ My Evil Twin is a Supervillian (Nosy Crow) made gains.

After six months of the market’s volume lagging behind its value, things could be about to change. Last week, volume rose 2.9% against a drop in value of 1.8% compared to the week before, with average selling price taking its second-biggest dive of the year so far (the biggest drop taking place during World Book Day week). But year on year, the figures looked rosy—volume was up 10.6% and value up 11.1% on the same week in 2016. Don’t get used to it though—there’s only a fortnight to go before 2017 faces up against last year’s release of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.