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Fiction: Hoover cleans up ahead of prequel release
Sep 1, 2022by Former Member
Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us (S&S) has boomeranged back to the Official UK Top 50 number one spot, selling 19,945 copies through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market. Though this was a 20% drop in volume week on week, It Ends with Us only topped 17,000 copies sold in a single week for the first time at the start of August, and despite being published in 2016, has shifted a whisker under 90,000 units in the past four weeks alone. Hoover has been having a moment over the whole of 2022, with It Ends with Us near-untouchable as the annual bestselling title to date. But the phenomenon seems to have been kicked into another gear over the past month.
It Ends with Us is just one of Hoover’s backlist titles jockeying for position in the Top 50, with Verity (Sphere), Ugly Love, November 9 and All Your Perfects (all S&S) joining it. Combined, Hoover’s books shifted 72,000 copies through the TCM last week alone, for just under £400,000. With just six weeks now before the release of It Ends with Us’ prequel It Starts with Us, surely the Hoover hype will only grow.
The BookTok phenomenon is now well-known as a driver of book sales, but the combined effect of the school summer holi-days and the heatwave—and let’s not forget, the first true summer exodus abroad since 2019—seems to have pushed the social media site’s penchant for light romantic reads into the stratosphere. Though former number one Bella Mackie’s How to Kill Your Family (The Borough Press) also rebounded up the chart, claiming the runner-up spot, Ali Hazelwood’s Love on the Brain (Sphere) débuted in third in a photo finish, losing out to Mackie’s thriller by fewer than 250 copies. Love on the Brain is Hazelwood’s first title since The Love Hypothesis took TikTok by storm, shifting 177,578 copies since its paperback publication in October 2021. Despite its stunning sales, its follow-up trounced its highest weekly sale upon launch, beating its March 2022 high by 4,307 units.
The power of the smartphone screen may be obvious in these charts, but the quainter medium of television also wielded its influence last week. With “Game of Thrones” spin-off “House of the Dragon” launching to a reported 20 million viewers worldwide, George R R Martin’s 2020-published paperback and source material Fire and Blood (HarperVoyager) blazed a trail into 24th place, easily achieving its biggest weekly volume to date. The title is up 1,830% for the past fortnight of sales against the two weeks before.
Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry (Doubleday) returned to the Original Fiction top spot for the first time since May, leapfrogging the previous week’s number one, Chris Carter’s Genesis (S&S). Garmus’ début is still the bestselling hardback fiction title of 2022 to date, though with several big beasts gearing up for September—Robert Galbraith, Richard Osman, Kate Atkinson—the chart could look very different in a month’s time. A G Riddle’s Lost in Time (Head of Zeus) was the highest new entry in Original Fiction, clocking in at fifth place.
