Fiction: Fiction flies as Hoover cleans up
Colleen Hoover reigns once again, as It Starts with Us (S&S) took the Official UK Top 50 number one for a second week. Selling 40,897 copies, the title dropped 80,000 copies in a week, after its blistering seven-day launch volume. Of course, 2016’s It Ends with Us has only occasionally dipped below a five-figure weekly volume since early December 2021, so its prequel’s pre-order volume has been building for months. It Starts with Us’ second-week volume is still a hefty sales figure, outselling every weekly Original Fiction number one title from January to August 2022.
Lee and Andrew Child’s new Jack Reacher title No Plan B (Bantam) thundered into third place overall, selling 36,857 copies in its first week. Last week’s top four all sold within 8,748 copies of each other, despite the eye-watering sales spikes we have seen so far this autumn. However, No Plan B dropped 8,084 copies on the launch of 2021’s Better Off Dead. The annual Jack Reacher title’s publication date move from September to November in 2016 saw its first-week sales rocket, with Night School shifting 17,000 copies more than 2015’s Make Me. No Plan B marks the first time since then that a new Reacher hardback has sold fewer than 40,000 units upon launch.
Bob Mortimer’s fiction début The Satsuma Complex (S&S) was just behind No Plan B in both the Top 50 and the Original Fiction top 20. Mortimer’s memoir And Away... was one of the standout sellers of the Christmas 2021 season, shifting 359,354 copies in hardback in total and a further 113,189 for its May-published paperback. Olivie Blake’s The Atlas Paradox (Tor) also débuted in the top five. The sequel to Blake’s The Atlas Six, which topped the Original Fiction chart in early March this year, sold 7,003 copies in its launch week.
Hoover’s It Ends with Us spent a second week in the Mass-Market Fiction number one, once again gifting Hoover two fiction poles for the week.
It wasn’t just the Pre-school chart that was decking the halls with boughs of holly, as the end of October heralded the start of the Christmas romance season. Previously an e-book trend that has now gravitated over to the paperback charts, Sarah Morgan’s Snowed in for Christmas (HQ) (s)led the way, débuting in second place, followed by Katie Flynn’s The Winter Rose (Penguin), Karen Swan’s The Christmas Postcards (Pan) and Jenny Colgan’s The Christmas Bookshop (Little,Brown) filing into the Mass-Market Fiction top 20.
