Walliams' Midnight Gang surpasses 400k as the Ladybirds fly up the chart

David Walliams’ The Midnight Gang (HarperCollins Children's) has struck (number) one for a fifth consecutive week, shifting 80,968 copies for £466,987, according to Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market. Fewer than 250 copies off its total volume a week ago, the title has now sold in excess of 400,000 copies for £2.28m, in under five weeks.

The comedian-turned-author has now eclipsed his 2015 value of £10.9m, with four weeks still to go to the end of the year. He made £2.6m in December 2015, nearly a quarter of his yearly total, and The Midnight Gang is currently a mammoth 62% up in volume over last year’s smash hit Grandpa’s Great Escape in its first five weeks on the shelves. However, J K Rowling has already pulled in nearly £24m over 2016, so Walliams is likely to be (a very distant) runner-up for bestselling author of the year.  

But The Midnight Gang has decisively beaten Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Little, Brown), with the play script declining 20% on volume week on week, to a (still colossal) 57,560 units, and holding second place. That other 2016 Rowling playscript, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Little, Brown), seems to have benefited from the Fantastic Beasts film’s release, or maybe clever booksellers are running two-for-one deals: it jumped 18% in volume on the week before.

Astronaut Tim Peake’s Hello, is this Planet Earth? (Century) rocketed into third place, jumping a stellar 136% in volume on the week before, and swiping the Hardback Non-Fiction number one back from Guinness World Records 2017, in the week in which he was honoured by the Queen at Windsor Castle with a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George.

Jamie Oliver’s Christmas Cookbook (Michael Joseph) made a late surge in the race for Christmas number one, jingling 25 places all way up the chart into 11th place and growing 105% in volume on the week before.

Oliver’s appearance on the Graham Norton show last Friday (2nd December) may have helped boost the cookbook, but another title getting free publicity in absolute spades, due to its subject matter being headline news literally every day, is Five on Brexit Island (Quercus), which leapt 44% in volume on the week before and climbed to fifth place. The Famous Five spoof had yet another sterling week, outselling the biggest-selling title of the rival Ladybird Books for Grown Up series (How it Works: The Grandparent) by almost double.

However, Ladybird authors Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris have no need to drown their sorrows in lashings of ginger beer, as last week saw 10 of their tongue-in-cheek series chart inside the Top 50. Rather like the Christmas jumper or the Starbucks red cups, the spoof stocking filler series seems to have almost instantly become a modern Christmas staple. Five of the new series charted, along with three of the 2015 series and both How it Works: The Mum and How it Works: The Dad. Together, they shifted 140,765 copies. The Famous Five series also had an excellent collective week, scoring a clean sweep—the entire quintet hit the Top 50, with a combined volume of 95,424 units shifted.

Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent (Serpent's Tail) has had a very successful fortnight, having been both shortlisted for a Costa Award and named Waterstones’ Book of the Year. In total, its volume has jumped 1,076% over the last two weeks, though it was the Waterstones’ nod that has really sent it into the stratosphere—it took the Fiction Heatseekers number one with a record volume for 2016 (of 7,920) and shot up to third in the Original Fiction chart.

Remember 2015? A more innocent time, when people got annoyed about not Trump nor Brexit but the fact that adult colouring books were suddenly incredibly popular? The trend had a mini-resurgence last week after Kate Middleton was revealed to be a fan of Johanna Basford’s Secret Garden (Laurence King). Rather like Tim Peake, the royal seal of approval propelled sales upwards to the point that the colouring book bounced back into its once-familiar haunt, the Paperback Non-Fiction top 20, with a volume increase of 379% week on week, to 4,700 copies sold.

In total, 6.4 million books were sold last week, for a whopping £53m, up 16.3% on the week before. Volume and value for the year are now just 21.3m units and less than £150m off 2015's 52-week total.