Fiction: Hoover returns record-breaking result

Colleen Hoover’s It Starts with Us (S&S) has cruised into a fourth week in the Official UK Top 50 number one spot, selling 19,470 copies through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market. The prequel’s four-week streak at the top makes it the longest-running Adult Fiction hardback at the top since Hilary Mantel’s immediately pre-pandemic The Mirror and the Light (Fourth Estate), across March 2020. It has now shifted more than 200,000 copies, falling just outside the 10 top-selling Fiction titles of the year to date.

Speaking of pre-pandemic, remember when Fiction was the book trade’s lame duck, limping along year after year while Trade Non-fiction took great leaps and bounds? How times have changed. Currently, the Adult Fiction is up 8.2% in volume on the period of 2021 for which data was available, with value soaring 13%. In sharp contrast, Trade Non-fiction has dropped 10% in volume and 6.6% in value. As a whole, the market is down just 0.8% in volume and 0.2% in value against 2021, and it’s possible 2022’s Christmas gift-buying season could be back to the schedule of 2016 to 2019, in which a string of sluggish autumn weeks gave way to a record-breaking spike in the week leading up to 25th December. The pandemic years saw book buyers start their Christmas shopping earlier, with sales high from early November onwards. This year could still nudge into growth if the cost-of-living crisis doesn’t completely hamper the December bounce.