Fiction: Critical Maas in the charts as fantasy sales soar

Sarah J Maas’ House of Sky and Breath (Bloomsbury) has flown directly into the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, selling 23,637 copies in its first week on sale. Not only is this Maas’ first week in the overall top spot, House of Sky and Breath’s first-week volume dwarfs any of her previous titles’ weekly sales, clocking in at a whisker under 10,000 units more than the biggest week for 2018’s Kingdom of Ash. The author’s fantasy titles have previously notched up four weeks for her in the Children’s number one, as they’ve been coded as Young Adult Fiction, but House of Sky and Breath has soared straight to her first Original Fiction pole, leapfrogging fellow fantasy title Rebecca Ross’ A River Enchanted (HarperVoyager) to swipe the category chart top spot. 

Fantasy does seem to be having a moment, with both TikTok and subscriptions services such as Illumicrate boosting the sales of the recent fantasy releases such as Tahereh Mafi’s This Woven Kingdom (Electric Monkey), Freya Marske’s A Marvellous Light (Tor) and Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Becomes the Sun (Mantle). The Science Fiction and Fantasy category was up 73% in volume last week against 2020, as Nielsen were unable to report sales figures in the equivalent week during 2021 due to lockdown. But even this eye-popping number could only be part of the story, as many of the new fantasy titles are coded as Children’s books. With the US’ Young Adult market considerably more “crossover” than in the UK, and with a dedicated New York Times Young Adult Fiction bestseller chart, American fantasy authors are getting split between Original Fiction and the kids’ top spot in the UK.  

Fiction saw a flurry of new entries, with Marian Keyes’ sequel Again, Rachel (Michael Joseph) debuting in second in Original Fiction, as Dilly Court’s Runaway Widow scored the Mass Market Fiction number one (and effectively fired the starting gun on the Mother’s Day book-buying season).