Fiction: Second week running on top for Osman
Richard Osman’s The Bullet that Missed (Viking) reigned for a second week in the Official UK Top 50 number one spot, selling 62,029 copies in its first full week on the shelves. After a record-breaking first week, the hardback is already on a whisker under 190,000 copies sold in total, making it the 13th-bestselling book of the year to date. It also notched up Osman’s 25th week in the overall number one spot, and the author’s 47th in the Original Fiction pole. Just two years on from the publication of his début title, Osman could be approaching a full year spent in the category chart top spot—barring an interruption by Colleen Hoover’s long-awaited It Starts with Us (S&S), out in a fortnight.
Speaking of Hoover, her blockbuster It Ends with Us is still the bestselling book of the year, on just under half a million copies sold. While The Bullet that Missed is still a way off It Ends with Us’ chart-topping volume, it could soon overtake the paperback title’s value sales— last week the third Thursday Murder Club book became only the second fiction title to surpass £2m earned this year, with a scant £516,000 now between Hoover’s romance title and the cosy crime novel.
With Hoover’s backlist dominating the Top 50 over the long, hot summer, the autumnal cold snap has seen Osman’s previous two novels breeze back into the top 10 to join their newest sequel. The battle to be 2022’s bestselling fiction author is suddenly becoming competitive—though Osman is around £2m below Hoover for annual value so far, the Christmas gift-buying season is very much his territory, after claiming 2020’s Christmas Number One and reigning for the week after Christmas in 2021. While Hoover has an ace up her sleeve with the imminent arrival of It Starts with Us, she is untested in hardback on this side of the Atlantic. Yet no one with an eye on the print market in the past two years would now doubt the power of TikTok. To think, just a handful of years ago Hoover was virtually unknown in the UK and Osman was known only as the guy behind the desk on “Pointless”.
It Ends with Us took second place in Mass Market Fiction for a second week, with Claire Douglas’ The Girls Who Disappeared (Penguin) topping the category chart once again. James Patterson’s The Girl in the Castle and Lisa Gardner’s One Step Too Far (both Penguin) débuted in Mass-Market Fiction, in 17th and 19th place respectively.
