Fiction: It Starts with a bang for Hoover's prequel
Colleen Hoover’s It Starts with Us (S&S) has thundered into the Official UK Top 50 number one spot in its first week on sale, selling 120,997 copies. It may have only been a month since Richard Osman’s The Bullet that Missed (Viking) débuted with a 127,743-unit volume, but that shouldn’t take away from Hoover’s incredible achievement. It Starts with Us becomes just the seventh Adult Fiction book since records began to surpass 120,000 copies sold in its launch week, with Hoover the sixth author to achieve this milestone.
Mirroring Osman’s recent double across the fiction category charts, when The Man Who Died Twice boomeranged back to the Mass-Market Fiction pole as its sequel reigned atop Original Fiction, It Starts with Us’ predecessor, It Ends with Us, bounced back to the Mass-Market Fiction top spot—the title has now topped that list eight times. The originally 2016-published paperback is currently far and away the bestselling book of the year, staring down the barrel of 550,000 copies sold. While it’s around 140,000 copies ahead of the newest Osman paperback, we are now entering the Christmas-gift-buying season, when everyone forgets paperback fiction exists and hardback titles can notch up six-figure volumes across multiple weeks. But its prequel’s release could help boost It Ends with Us to a glorious end-of-year finish—and make it the second paperback fiction annual bestseller in a row, after The Thursday Murder Club last year.
Hoover’s 2022 is currently going exactly the opposite of Liz Truss’. The author’s backlist has been a regular feature in the Mass-Market Fiction chart since January, with new editions of older titles flooding in as quickly as Simon & Schuster can re-package them. It Starts with Us’ first week on the shelves has pushed Hoover’s total sales for the year to just under 1.9 million copies sold and £11.2m earned. This is an eye-watering change from the author’s sales across the last full year of available data, the pre-TikTok boom 2019: she is 65,769% up in volume and 47,458% up in value on her 2019 return.
It Starts with Us cut short The Bullet that Missed’s five-week streak as the Original Fiction number one, with Ian Rankin’s A Heart Full of Headstones (Orion) claiming third place. Of course, it’s October, so the chart saw its latest flurry of new hardbacks, with John Grisham’s The Boys from Biloxi (Hodder) and Veronica Roth’s Poster Girl (Hodder) soaring into the top five. The trade paperback of It Starts with Us hit sixth, a sure sign of strong sales in train station W H Smith branches across the land.
Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Sort of) phased into seventh place following its Booker win, rising 769% week on week. Its volume of 4,069 copies last week is just 300 copies off the total volume it registered from its publication in August to the week prior to its triumph.
