Fiction: Hoover’s sleeper hit finally claims top spot
Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us (S&S) has rocketed into the Official UK Top 50 number one spot, rising 57% week on week to swipe its first overall pole with 27,493 copies sold. The 2016-published title has become a force to be reckoned with in 2022, consistently notching up such high weekly sales that it’s currently far and away the bestselling book of the year, outselling Richard Osman’s The Man Who Died Twice (Penguin) by more than 80,000 units.
Prior to 2021, It Ends with Us had sold more than 200 copies in a single week only twice. The TikTok effect seems to have begun boosting book sales across the third national lockdown, in winter to spring of that year, when Nielsen BookScan was unable to report sales figures. Though It Ends with Us had begun regularly shifting three-figure weekly volumes by the time numbers returned to the chart in April, it entered its true golden period across the summer—and by the first week of December it was selling a whisker under 10,000 copies. Since November 2021, it hasn’t dropped below 9,000 copies sold in a single week. In total, it has shifted 579,788 copies since its 2016 release, with an eye-watering 98.8% of those sales coming since the end of Lockdown 3.0 in 2021.
Of course, even the most casual reader of The Bookseller’s charts pages will be sick of hearing about the TikTok boom by now. But the effect it’s had on the 2022 charts really has been astonishing. Adult Fiction is currently 8.4% up in volume on the non-lockdown periods of 2021, which were already very strong for the category, and a whopping 26% up on pre-pandemic 2019. While It Ends with Us is easily 2022’s number one, two of Hoover’s backlist titles—Ugly Love and Verity—claim seventh and 11th place in the annual chart, with six TikTok-boosted fiction titles in the top 20. That doesn’t include psychologist Dr Julie Smith’s Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?, in fifth place, or Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper series—the #HeartstopperNetflix hashtag has a mind-blowing 1.7bn results on the social media platform.
Ugly Love and Verity bounced upwards to join It Ends with Us in last week’s top 10, as the March re-released All Your Perfects entered the Top 50. Hoover’s total sales in 2022 have topped 1.18 million units, with just under £7m earned. And, let’s not forget, the long-awaited prequel It Starts with Us is out in October. At the very least, it should be knocking the third Osman title off the Original Fiction number one spot.
T M Logan’s The Curfew (Zaffre), Jo Nesbo’s The Jealousy Man (Vintage) and L J Ross’ The Creek (Dark Skies) débuted in the Mass-Market Fiction top 20, as Elly Griffiths’ The Locked Room (Quercus) soared upwards into the runner-up spot. The previous week’s number one, Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing (Corsair), slid to third, but its film tie-in edition made its début in 20th.
Florence Given’s Girlcrush (Brazen) thundered into the Original Fiction number one in its first week on sale, selling 4,531 copies. Given’s non-fiction title Women Don’t Owe You Pretty, released in June 2020, sold more than 170,000 copies across the lockdown-holed landscape of that year, and a further 27,397 copies in paperback. David Baldacci’s The 6.20 Man (Macmillan) bounced into second place.
