New Day dawns for Sylvia’s fourth straight number one

Sylvia Day has stormed into the Official Top 50 number one spot, as One with You (Penguin) outsold previous chart-topper Lee Child’s Make Me (Bantam) by over 17,116 copies. The fifth title in Day’s Crossfire series, and her fourth book in a row to go to number one, sold 41,911 copies for £166,473, according to Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market.

Day is the first female author under the age of 80 to hit the number one spot in 24 weeks, the last being Zoe “Zoella” Sugg with Girl Online: On Tour (Penguin) in October 2015. Her Crossfire series is the second-bestselling Romance & Saga series of all time, behind E L James’ Fifty Shades of Grey quartet (Arrow), with a combined 1.4 million copies sold.

Make Me slipped to second in both the Top 50 and the Mass Market Fiction chart, selling 24,795 copies. In under three weeks, the 20th Jack Reacher novel has sold just a whisker under 100,000 copies.

Though Joe Wicks’ Lean in 15 (Bluebird) dropped to third, it pulled in £174,366, more than the top two titles, making it the third week running Wicks has been the most valuable author in the Top 50. Lean in 15 has now surpassed 600,000 copies sold and leapfrogs John Gray’s Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (Thornsons) to become the 48th bestselling non-fiction title of all time. It’s now just over 4,000 copies away from overtaking 2015 mega-hit The Girl on the Train (Doubleday).

Last week saw a plethora of new paperback releases hit the chart, with Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling (Black Swan) charting fourth, after shifting just under 300,000 copies in hardback. The paperback sold 20,008 copies in its first three days on sale. David Lagercrantz’s Millennium trilogy reboot The Girl in the Spider’s Web (Maclehose Press) sold 18,199 copies to take fifth, after its hardback sold 100,000 copies from August last year.

Not to make this all about us, but it was a healthy week for British Book Industry-shortlisted titles; aside from The Road to Little Dribbling, David Solomons’ My Brother is a Superhero (Nosy Crow) took the Children’s number one from David Walliams and Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney (John Murray_ sold 4,024 copies in its first week in paperback, entering the Top 50 for the first time. Other nominees such as Lean in 15, Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins (Black Swan) and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (Picador) continued to rack up multiple weeks in the Top 50, and Mary Beard’s SPQR (Profile), also a recent paperback release, jumped 29 places to seventh.